Help with basic orders

Beginner Questions
1

I’m trying Forex High Street Networking (cannot put links, but it’s forexhsn.com)'s mobile platform and I set a buy order below current market with a stop a bit below that and a limit a way above. After some time I go back to the graphs and I realize the prices have gone by my order price, but my order hasn’t been executed.

Am I getting something wrong? I think maybe my graph is on the ask price, not the bid, and where I see it passing my order is by less than the spread?

Also, the spread in this broker is pretty much a steady 5 pips for major currency pairs, is that about avg, or is it too much?

thanks

2

For the majors 5pips is high, over double what you would expect actually - however dependent on country of residence.

And yes, if the bid/ask spread exceeds the distance from your buy order then the order will not have been executed.

3

5 pips is really, really bad. For instance in some of the ECN brokers its about 0.4 pips avg on EURUSD. They do charge you commission however but that is better than having no idea where the market is.

4

How does commission show you where the market is, now im curious :wink:

5

Sorry i dont think i was clear in my explanation. I meant that i dont exactly like a commission style model (mine you pay 0.7 pips on EURUSD for a round trip) but if the market is only 0.4 pips wide you have a better understanding of where true fair value is. If the market is 5 pips wide you dont really have any clue when you get stoped out if you put the stop in the wrong place or if you got stung by the broker manipulating their mid prices.

6

Yeah, from then I opened ouanda account and I saw spreads are somewhere between 1.2 and 0.6 pips for majors

It has a lot less options, thought, and I liked the other one’s interface better (you could move take profit and stop loss level at the graph itself)

7

Yeah, i can half understand that but at the end of the day you should trade in the market that gives you the tightest spreads and most stable price. If you want features then its worth looking into using MT4/ninja/tradestation and EAs.

8

Do people know if brokers charging 5 pips on majors happens a lot? I had an account with one place which was 3 pips and i though that was criminal. I am basically concidering opening up a brokerage if this is the case.