Hi everyone, I am a newbie and am looking for a broker to get started with a demo account while I learn. I have read many good things on here about Oanda but have also read many reviews where the connections can be slow at times and it takes a really long time for a withdrawal. Does anyone have any recent experience with this that they can share?
Thanks,
I have a small account with oanda. I tried withdrawing £10 just to test it and it went through very quick. Never tried withdrawing large amounts though. As far as the speed goes, i dont find it a problem. The online fxtrade platform takes about 30secs to load.
Withdrawal using paypal is ok with oanda i’ve been doing it few times…but the fees is quite hefty one. But overall its still ok, i just don’t like their slow platform and analysis tool of the platform.
I’ve had an account with Oanda’s US Division for a couple of years now. Never had any funding related problems. Used credit card and paypal. Also, haven’t noticed anything unusually slow about the connection. Their FXtrade is a Java based platform. They do have an application icon you can download so you don’t have to go through your web account to open FXtrade. I also have an MT4 account. I don’t recall ever losing connectivity on MT4.
Of course, traders should have accounts with multiple brokers just to be safe. But I like Oanda. They offer some unique features not seen anywhere else:
They deal in increments of 1 currency unit. Of course that’s great for newbies because they can trade small positions. But this is also useful for people with more experience. You might want, for example, to scale all your trades to the same dollar amount for a particular trading strategy. I’ve used this feature to create “synthetic” currency indexes. The platform makes this easy because you can choose a default position size in currency unit or dollar terms.
You can easily open multiple sub-accounts in different currencies of your choice, and move cash between the accounts at the dealing spread rate. In the past this feature was even more useful because you could squeeze more interest out of the Australian Dollar that way. Also, US residents can use sub-accounts to get around the “FIFO” restriction.
Oanda also specializes in precious metals trading. They have the most metals spreads I’ve seen anywhere. In the US Division, they offer gold and silver pairs with nine different currencies. I think the European Division adds the same for platinum and palladium. For US residents, only drawback is Dodd-Frankenstein forced Oanda to offer precious metals trading on a “cash only” basis (don’t even get me started on another futile rant…).
Anyway, only caution I can give about Oanda is the spreads do widen a bit during the 1-2 hours after the NY session close, and might see price spikes around that time.
I think they are ok. Don’t worry about nothing. They are better than thousands of brokers online.