Oanda offers odd lot sizes. Instead of buying 1 microlot (1,000) or one minilot (10,000) you can buy 1.253 microlots (1,253) or some other odd size. Are there many brokers offering odd lots out there? How about yours? I’d like to know. Thanks.
-Adrian
Hallo Adrian. I trade with ironfx and I dont think you can trade 1.253 micro lots with them. The smallest is 1 full microlot then 2 micro lot and it goes like this. You can trade odd size for big volume. you can trade 11,12,13 mini lot if you want but not odd size micro lot like the one you say. why you want odd size like this?
Granularity!
I recently discovered the special offering Oanda has brought to market. From their site: “[I]OANDA fxTrade allows you to trade the specific amount you want without having to round to a “lot.” You can trade $1, $250, $87,342, $1million, $10 million or anything in between. Risk as little as you like or trade precisely the amount you require.[/I]”
This allows traders to take more precise positions and not have to round as much.
For example:
You have a USD account that is valued at $5,673. You want to trade EUR/USD with a 351 pip stop loss and risk 1% of your account ($56.73) in the potential move from entry to stop. The EUR/USD pair has a pip cost of 10 cents per 1,000 units (.10 per microlot). If you trade 1 microlot you will risk only $35.10 (351*.101). That is less than your 1% risk target (it is only 0.66%). If you trade two microlots you will risk $70.20 (351.10*2). That is more than your 1% risk target (it is 1.237%). Safer traders would round down and trade 1 microlot and risk only 0.66% on the trade but also win less than they wish if the trade profits.
Oanda will allow you to trade an odd lot size of 1,616 units (1.616 microlots). That will put your risk at $56.72 (351*.10*1.616). That is almost precisely the 1% risk you are targeting.
This feature not only allows you to hit your risk targets more precisely, but it prevents you from passing on trades that you would have not taken because your risk budget prevented you from taking a position as large as the minimum lot size.
As far as I can tell so far, they are the only dealer available to U.S. traders that offers this capability.
-Adrian