Hey guys I was just wondering which of the two are best and if you would recommend one over the other.
Thanks!
Hmm, which is “best” really depends on your own preferences and this may vary among traders. I suggest you open demo accounts for both brokers to try it out yourself. Hope this helps!
I wouldn’t really know for sure which is the best, but I have a good feeling about Oanda, the reviews about this broker is far better. I would have love to trade with them, but the 1:500 leverage made me stick with Profiforex instead.
At the moment I’m using both with demo accounts, I haven’t made my mind yet in case I want to open a real account. Pros and cons:
[B]OANDA[/B]
[B]Pros[/B]:
- They allow you to trade in exactly the amount of units that you want, not being forced to trade in lots, minilots or microlots.
- They offer MT4 and fxTrade, which is not a bad platform. However fxTrade’s grids sometimes are not clear enough to see in one sight all the details of the trade.
- As they offer MT4 you can monitor and have open as many charts as you want.
[B]Cons[/B]:
- Don’t close daily candles with NY session close, which is a big problem at least for me.
[B]FXCM[/B]
[B]Pros[/B]:
- They offer NY session close for daily bars.
- Trading Station II looks like a nice platform, I’m doing chart analysis there and quite good. Please note that I use Price Action so I don’t need too many and complex indicators, just channels, support, resistance, SMA and ATR, I think.
[B]Cons[/B]:
- You can’t trade the exact amounts of units that you want. The smaller piece of units is a microlot (1000 units).
- By default you can only monitor a maximum of 18 pairs. In a standard live account (more than $2K) you can ask them to change this, but in the demo one you can’t.
- In the demo account you are given $50K and a leverage of 200:1, which is completely unrealistic. You can’t change this by yourself, you have to ask them to do it, but even that, the minimum leverage that you can have is 30:1
So at the moment my situation is that I’m doing my chart analysis with FXCM Trading Station II and placing my trades with OANDA fxTrade.
I don’t know what platform will I pick for the live account if someday I open one, but for sure I can’t use OANDA as charting platform because I need NY close.
isnt FXCM the company that was caught manipulating the price against their customer ? … that would make the decision very easy for me
I’m not defending them, this is what I’ve read. The thing is that they had many problems with their NDD system and the orders weren’t being executed at the customer’s desired price, by far. I mean big trouble. This was in 2010/2011.
At the moment they say that they have completely improved their NDD structure and now the orders are executed most of the time at the proper price, but they advice to use limit orders for that.
They shouldn’t need to manipulate anything. They are NDD so they should only transfer the orders here and there. Also they are regulated in many countries.
That is what I’ve read. Having said that, I have to clarify that I only have a demo account and I haven’t traded even demo trades with them.
There is no right answer, personally I would say neither. Some will prefer one over the other. In the end it only matters what you think and what you feel as a good choice. Listening to others about which broker to pick is not really going to be beneficial.
Do your research and due diligence (which I assume you already did as you came down to the two you mentioned) and then make the choice you feel best, and not the choice others think is best.
Yep, everyone has pros and cons, so in the end a serious investigation is needed. Some cons are important like when OANDA closes the daily candle which makes impossible for me to do analysis there (but not the trade).
I don’t know yet which will be my live trading broker. It could even be a third one!
Hi guys,
Just to clarify, the NFA action back in 2011 was for positive slippage not being passed along on orders prior to 2010. That year, FXCM completed upgrades to our platform to allow orders to receive positive slippage when a better price is available. As you can see from the stats below, our clients now receive positive slippage (AKA price improvements) just as frequently as negative slippage even while some brokers may still not give positive slippage.
Does your broker ever give you positive slippage on your orders? That’s easy to check. Simply record your limit order price and check to see if you can get filled at a better price. If your broker re-quotes you, do you ever get re-quoted for a better price if the market moves against you? How many times have you ever experienced a re-quote in your favor for a better price or received positive slippage on a limit?
Unfortunately for traders that get re-quotes, their broker is often happy to fill them at the price they requested when the market is moving against them, but re-quotes them with a worse price when the market moves in their favor. At FXCM, traders get no re-quotes and benefit from positive slippage. In addition, our Trading Station platform has a feature called Market Range to help you limit negative slippage.
Jason
There is no minimum amount of leverage that you must use when trading. Leverage is a ratio between the amount of money you are controlling in the market and the amount of money in your trading account.
For example, if you have a 30k USD/JPY trade open and your account equity is $1000, then your leverage is 30:1. If you wanted to reduce your leverage down to 10:1, you could do so by taking either one of the following steps:
[ol]
[li]Close part of your trade to reduce your position size down to 10k
[/li][li]Deposit funds in your account to increase your equity up to $3000
[/li][li]
[/li][/ol]
Either one of the steps above would reduce your leverage to 10:1.
Hi Jason, nice to speak with you. I’ve read you many times in different threads or forums and you are very helpful.
By default the demo account is $50K and with a leverage of 200:1, and the leverage can be changed by customer service up to a minimum of 30:1. I’m not making this up, I got this information from the support chart. If I was given the wrong information I’m not responsible.
Let´s say I have a demo account with $10K and I risk 1-2% per trade. That is circa $100-$200. Lets say that I trade a pair that is quite even 1:1 so that if I buy $10K the cost of a pip is $1, therefore I will risk at most 200 pips. If I operate with a leverage of 20:1 I could put $500 to open that $10K position and my risk is completely covered by that margin of $500, so I still have $9500 of free margin to operate in other pairs. The math here is quite straight forward.
Now with a leverage of 30:1, my trade margin is 333 and for most pairs it should still be covered, but as soon as a pair is trading at $1.66 (GBP/USD very close for instance) my margin doesn’t cover anymore my risk and I could have a margin call. So as you see the bigger the leverage the easier I can be in trouble.
Just take your time in making the right decision for you and your portfolio.
To clarify, there’s a difference between maximum leverage and effective leverage. Maximum leverage is the ratio between the largest trade you could possibly open compared to the equity in your account. Effective leverage is actual size of your open trade compared to the equity in your account.
For example, by default an FXCM UK demo account has a max leverage of 200:1. That means only $1 has to be set aside as used margin (Usd Mr in the Accounts window) for every $200 in open trades. That means to open a 10k USD/JPY position, $50 has to be set aside as Usd Mr. It’s possible to reduce the maximum leverage possible on an account by raising the minimum margin requirement (MMR in the Simple Dealing Rates window) from the default 0.5%. If the MMR is raised to 2%, that reduces the maximum leverage to 50:1.
However, it’s effective leverage, not maximum leverage that determines the risk you are taking relative to your account size. That is why I mentioned in my previous post, if you want to reduce your leverage, you can do this by reducing your trade size, or by increasing your equity. To have a leverage of 10:1, you must have $1 in equity for every $10 in open trades. That means, to open at 10k position with 10:1 leverage, you need $1000 in equity.
That is not what is meant by 20:1 leverage. What you’ve actually described is a scenario where you are trading with 1:1 leverage, because you have $10,000 in your account, and have $10k open position. If you have a 10k USD/JPY trade open, and then open add a second 10k position in USD/CHF, then your effective leverage has increased to 2:1, because you are controlling $20k in open trades with $10,000 in your account.