Even after a few weeks of research, I still have hundreds of small questions lined up. I’m trying my best not to ask them because I know you all probably hate answering them and I’m sure they’ll become clear after more exposure, but this one is bugging me!
What are the exact trading hours for Oanda? I thought I saw they are open 24/7 but the market is definitely closed over the weekends. I’m currently using their practice account through MT4 - would the hours differ for some reason?
the market is definitely closed over the weekends
This is not true there is no single market to close. brokers shut the price feed to retail traders down on the weekend. Oanda’s price feed runs 24/7 except when they are working on the servers. They do this on the week end. Spreads are very big but most of the time you can close a trade if you need to. On Sunday you can see price start to move around 1pm New York time. The weekend gaps that traders talk about are usually made during this pre-open activity. Its very choppy and spreads are still pretty high.
The “generally accepted” market open is 5:00PM EST on sunday.
Shr1k is right, oanda offers you a bid and ask to close or open trades, but there is pretty much no movement on the weekend til about 2:00PM EST. I don’t know what others call it, but I call this pre-open trading “interbank trading” which is just banks trading between each other with no Major market open.
While the market opens at 5:00PM EST, I’ve noticed that the spreads don’t enter a ‘tradeable’ range until about 6:00PM EST. Watch on Sunday, make some observations of your own 
edit:
I think you’ll find this link quite helpful :41:
Forex Clock | Forex Session Times | Forex4Noobs
Oanda is shut at the weekends, there is no price feed, you can’t place trades, it’s just the way their platform works, over the weekend there is no trading.
Thanks for the replies guys. Since Forex runs 24/7, why do brokers shut down on Saturday and Sunday? Does it just cost more for them to stay running 24/7 so they cut their losses on the less profitable weekends?
yes you can as long as the platform is not shut down for maintenance. I am not recomending trading eu with with a 20 pip spread and no price movement. but you can open and close orders.
I just opened a 1 unit eu trade to test this its 9:30 am New York time, Sunday morning.
I guess I just wasn’t looking close enough. It appears there is some movement over the weekends but it’s so slight it barely shows on my charts. Although, it still only see the latest feed of data at Aug 6, 14:30
Ok, it seems you can, I had to try, you didn’t used to be able to, but that will be a bug in their platform as opposed to actually placing a trade I’d say, but it really isn’t worth thinking about.
but it really isn’t worth thinking about.
I totally agree with this.