Hi, I’m relatively new to Forex trading and I have a basic question to ask. Today I opened a sell position in Oanda in the USD/Currency pair. I never saw the actual open position in my dashboard. Instead, I saw that Oanda closed the position pretty much automatically, making me lose the spread (also, I would have made money on that short sell…). Any thoughts on why this happened? At the same time I had an open long position, could this have something to do with Oanda closing the short position automatically? My activity feed shows the time I introduced the order into the system and the time Oanda closed the position, with the exact same time…
Is it possible that the short position and the open long position were close enough together that
the bid and ask were hit almost simultaneously?
I know with Oanda (don’t know with others?) that I get taken out/put into positions that don’t even appear on my charts till I flip to bid or ask and that high/low can cover a whole lot of pips.
Not really, I was long at 19.24 and opened the short position at 19.15. The short position closed instantly after opening it (thus losing the spread) and the long position remains open. I already sent an email to customer service, but I’m wondering if I did something wrong…
I didn’t think oanda U.S. allowed you to be short and long at the same time.
Perhaps that’s why you are short was closed immediately
KC
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Interesting question.
From a bit of Googling, I believe a US-regulated broker is not permitted to allow customers to be both long and short on the same instrument simultaneously. If you have really good reasons to have opposing positions you would need to open a second account with another firm. However, this too appears to be potentially illegal, so you’d have to be concerned about getting caught and finding you’re in breach of T&C and subject to prosecution.
Not sure I understood why there would be such regulation but it seems to be real enough.
Being in Canada, I can confirm Oanda does not let you have both a long and short positions simultaneously on the same instrument in this country. However, that does not seem to be the problem since @carloilsuperbo’s long position remained open.
Another thing that might have happened though, and that one took me a while to find, is that Oanda’s trading platforms (both web and desktop I believe) allow you to have charts for the current BID, ASK, and MID prices (that silly button you may not have noticed at the top right). By default it’s set to MID, and if you’re not careful setting your stop losses on the right charts, they could get triggered unbeknownst to you.
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thats correct oanda US dont allow hedging. thats what you did. you cant open a sell and buy at the same time
Yes. They don’t allow hedging. Make sure you read the TNC before doing business with the broker.
Thank you for your answers, everything makes sense now. Oanda should then just block these trades, not allow them to happen and profit from the spread by closing them automatically. Hopefully I’ll get this money back.
I hope you do. It is very poor customer service if they have such basic poor software that it permits you to do something which is contrary to their own T&C, such that you then incur a financial cost.
So you were right, Oanda closed my short positions because I had a long position already opened. And no, they didn’t reimburse me even though they should have never allowed these short trades to be placed in the first place. They also added that hedging is indeed possible, but that you have to open a sub-account with them and allow for hedging in this account (I’m based in Mexico so I’m not sure if this hedging option only applies to me). Thanks to everyone again for helping understand this.