Are they having problems? This has happened twice today - it’s a demo account but has me worried. Has anyone seen this before?
On the current trade it’s dropping back down so a bit of a non issue, but does anyone know if they would refund losses on a live account if this happened?
dave.
You should report this on the Oanda forums. I am not sure what the problem might be, but I’m pretty sure the demo platform is somewhat of a beta system.
I know that a few of the platforms out there that are proprietary to a broker, won’t register stops unless your computer is active.
If it went to screensaver mode or idle, it’s no longer communicating with the broker. And for the most part, on demo, your stops are on YOUR computer only. A live account will register your stops on the broker’s data base, so no matter what happens they will get filled.
Does that sound like what may have occurred?
There’s no real value for Oanda to “miss” your stops. If you lose money, they lose money (future). All orders are pretty much the same. A stop loss is an inverse limit order of your current position, nothing more. It makes no sense that brokers would honor one type of stop over the other.
It could have to do with it being a demo acct like Master Tang said. I use Oanda live and have never had a problem. I never used them for demo.
Please let us know what Oanda says about this. Is it a system glitch? and would they have credited your account back had it been live?
It happened to me once on a live account, it’s the only real problem I ever had with them in over 3 years of trading, it lasted a couple of hours, but it is very much an exception for them to have problems.
None of the major brokers (Oanda, FXCM, Interbank, etc.) are going to deliberately miss your stops. There’s a lot of increased competition in the retail FX broker market and it’s just not in their interests to drive away their lifeblood to their competitors by messing with your stops. They want you to stay with them and keep on trading long-term in order that they can continue to collect their commissions from you via the spread. For this reason they don’t really want us all to fail miserably and blow our accounts and never come back either. Their ideal trader is one that trades regularly and profitably over the long term.
simpliest is to check if Oanda offer SLs trader side, or server side, as well contact support, even though it is a demo, what migh have a maintanance sometimes even during market hours. keep in mind brokers normally reserve the weekend to deal with the real account’s servers, while demo of course much less a concern.
to PipBandit: the ideal trader for a broker might be a regular, profitable one. but for a market maker like Oanda it is a trader who regularly lose and refill account…just like a gambling addict. while you trade on a market maker, they in fact most case bet against you, bet that you will blow up your account after a (they prefer shorter) while.
dave0
On the lower left corner of Oanda’s platform there is a small box titled “connection”. When you have a good connection the box will be green, if orange, the connection is weak.
I’ve experienced orders & order modifications not going through to Oanda’s servers when there is an orange weak connection.
So, I would suggest you take a look at the small connection box and only enter orders & order modifications when you have the green signal 
PS I’m 99% sure both Oanda’s demo and live orders are all server based.
I wrote to Oanda’s frontdesk to ask the questions in this thread, I’ll report back when they answer.
d-pip, in his picture, it shows the trade in progress with a stop level, but price has moved far beyond the stop for several bars and the trade is still open.
They replied back:
Short Description: policy about missed stops
Hello _____,
Thank you for contacting OANDA.
With regards to your inquiries, please see our answers in sequence:
There was a known minor technical issue with the demo platform earlier this morning. The issue did not affect the live platform. Our technical team was immediately informed and rectified the issue as soon as possible. Within a very short period of time, traders were able to access the demo platform without difficulty.
If such a technical issue would’ve occurred on the live trading platform and it was an issue on our end resulting the client in a forced loss, a trade investigation must be conducted prior to deciding if a credit is required or not. A credit is not guaranteed; it must be looked into with each trade investigation.
Stop losses and any other types of orders are handled by the trading system itself’ in other words, by the server. We do not get involved in a trader’s platform or manage a trader’s orders. The platform need not be open at all times for orders and any other features on the platform to work.
I hope this clears up any misunderstandings. Please contact me again if you have additional questions.
Best regards,
OANDA fxTrade Team (OC)
Forex Trading | Currency Trading | OANDA fxTrade
Hi all, thanks for chasing this up with oanda for me, I haven’t had much time with work to contact them but I will be emailing them with the screenshots and will update this thread. I’m not too worried that something went wrong, no system is going to be perfect I’m just concerned how it will be handled.
I’ve attached another screengrab on MT4 as I don’t think oanda goes back 2 days on the 1 min chart. My worry is what would happen if the trade hadn’t dipped back below the stop? Could I have ended up with a margin call?
I was all set to open a small live account with them in the new year so I’m going to be very interested how they deal with this. I’m hoping for some reassurance that this can’t happen on live or at least any additional losses would be credited back to me.
They seem to have a good reputation with most people so hopefully how they deal with this will be a big green tick to put some money with them in the new year.
In my opinion Oanda is one of the best brokers out there. It’s especially good for newbies also because of the way they use units instead of pips. This lets your trade super-micro lots of even fractional pennies.
I am a customer with Oanda for many years and had no problems for a long time, but sad to say, about 6~7 weeks ago it started, the platform would crash at newstime (08:30AM EST) when the traffic would get really high. The server just crashes. I am talking about live account, not demo.
Now, whenever news-time comes around and pips would move 40+ in seconds the server just crashes and comes back intermittent for the next 20 minutes. After that everything works fine for the rest of the day.
Since I have the demo from IBFX at the same time running I know I have the connection because I can make demo trades there. I do that on IBFX after Oanda crashed just to check if it is Oanda or my ISP. It is not the ISP it’s them.
Conclusion, at the moment I don’t recommend Oanda anymore. I send them e-mail but the answer was a bunch of BS.:mad:
I usually like to trade the next 1 or 2 candle after the initial big move as a counter trend but can’t do it anymore since the server just comes and goes and therefore would not be able to open/close a trade in time. Even if I open a trade, if the server is back, I may not be able to close the trade when I want because the sever might be gone and therefore my pips would run away without a possible control on my end. I opened a other life account with a MT4 broker and use that to trade during news-time. If it works out I may go and ditch Oanda. I only have the new account for 2 weeks and I will wait at least for a month before making a decision. The only thing that keeps me still on Oanda is the spread.
On the Oanda forums, people are quick to bash Oanda for these outages. I refuse to get sucked into that type of negativity.
But I have noticed that nearly 100% of the complaints of supposed outages are related to trading around known news releases.
If these outages are truly occurring (and it seems that they must be, as several people continue to complain)… then Oanda needs to get their butt in gear and fix the problem. Boost servers or add horsepower or whatever it takes. As they say… though a compliment may be rare, a complaint is usually spread to 10 or more people. Complaints are often heard louder than compliments.
Personally I have never experienced any outage or any major problem with Oanda (several hundred trades so far). But, I also do not trade at times of known major news releases. In fact, I specifically avoid them.
In my experience the platform is very stable.
