have been using an alpari demo account for the last few months but have recently found that the spreads I am getting aren’t going to be the same as I will get if I open a standard account, they are from the pro account. so I have started to look at OandA as an alternative, still not sure yet, I’m not that keen on the OandA charts at the mo.
What’s really confused me is the margin requirements, I have set the margin to 50:1 on each account and the starting balance to the same (1000). Please see attached screenshot, OandA needs 10x more margin! Am I looking at it wrong or missing something?
I trade on Oanda and that is the account with the correct margin. As far as the Alpari goes, your using a fraction of the 50:1 margin. I don’t know how they handle their margin requirements for their demo accounts, but $16 is closer to 500:1. I don’t know what Alpari’s max leverage is on live but if your opening an account in the states, your leverage will max at 50:1.
I trade “live” with O. and like them very much. Besides setting leverage I go to User Preferences and set the amount of margin I want to use; 5%, 10%, whatever. You can do this as default for all pairs you trade or you can individualize each pair. Getting use to O. Java’s platform takes some time as it is quite different from MT4 - but I love the spreads.
Yeah there are some parts of it that I really like, like being able to visually drag your stoploss and take profit - and like you say setting default stoploss and takeprofit levels, that works really well. I think just the fact that it’s different will take some getting used to, for example I haven’t been able to find a way to ‘measure’ things like in MT4 where you can drag the cross hair and measure pips and price and time all at once. I’ve got them setup side by side on two monitors at the moment, still using mt4 for charting and then OandA takes over to enter a trade.
Ha! just missed a 50 pip drop on EUR/USD when typing this! That would have done me alright for this morning.
