I’ve been doing days worth of research to figure out which broker I’m going to go with for a live account. It seems that the real contenders will be Forex.com, whom I’ve been using for demo, and OANDA. It seems, from what I’ve gathered, that OANDA is the more favored of the two, even though Forex.com has about ~50% market share & OANDA has around ~25% + a squeaky clean regulatory track record.
The only issue that I have is that, in MT4, you have very limited access to historical exchange rates. After consulting with several of their agents, the general consensus was that ‘it is what it is’. One suggested I download the historical data, which I did, but ran into a disclaimer of the difference/accuracy between MT4 & OANDAs feeds. I find this very limiting & detrimental to my ability to thoroughly analyze & make informed decisions on the trades I’d be taking if I can only access 6 months or less worth of data. Currently, Forex.com gives me access to the beginning of time. lol
Am I missing something? Is this not an issue for most people? I’m surprised this is even ‘a thing’.
Also, if that really is the case & I opt to open my live account with Forex.com instead, would that be such a terrible move since they clearly have more people trading with them…?
Thanks in advance for your thoughts, opinions, & help!
I will put it here, maybe it helps you.
I trade with another broker from which I could download history data back from 2002.
You normally get OHLC , 4 pairs of (bid,ask) values for each timeframe candle in that interval.
I write my own software, so I feed my strategy with “m1” timeframe OHLC in order Open, High or Low depending if Close was higher then Open or not, and Close price, in order from 03-JAN to 31-DEC 2008.
The strategy result overall is like -200 pips.
I decide to interpolate between OHLC at 1 pip interval, so I generate between Open and High additional quotes of 1 pip, and so on.
The next strategy result is like +50 pips.
At this point is clear to me that history OHLC bars cannot be used to backtest a strategy.
I use history data to initialize indicators like ATR, SMA for which the past 20 hours (weekend excluded) is enough.
I would need more history data for the weighted indicators like EMA and such.
I am not sure if this helps you, just saying.
Thanks for taking the time to provide those suggestions & breaking down your process.
My main concern in general is just the lack of critical information from the broker in general. It limits our access & ability to form educated decisions & calculations due to lack of complete historical information.
Demoing with Forex.com, I can scroll as far back as I want. I don’t know why OANDA would limit historical exchange rates to just 6-12 months ago.
I ran into the the same issue this past 3 months, when I moved to Oanda. I tried contacting them but their customer service is not that good and they have a very long wait time. The only thing they told me was that I would have to go to Mt4- tools- Historical data and download my own data. Also that you should be cautious using third party data. I find this really limiting and negatively impacts a traders analysis. Hopefully this isn’t intentional and they resolve the issue. Oanda does have some Pros though, for example fast withdrawal; if they would fix this problem, they would be an exceptional brokerage.
,Best Regards
Here is a link of how to download Historical Data. Hope this helps