I have been using Oanda to trade forex for coming a year now. Thought I will share my experience with using the platform. First things first, why Oanda? Well, I have discussed practical questions to ask when choosing a suitable forex broker quite some time back. If you refer to those pointers, below discusses why Oanda qualifies:

• Oanda has one of the highest excess net captial for a forex broker standing at around US$150 million. Compare with that of InterbankFX’s which stands at around US$30 million. Our money is safe with them!
• Oanda has a fully web-based trading platform. It allows me to trade virtually anywhere, as long as there is a Internet connection. No installation of software is required. This meets my need perfectly, because my office PC is locked down and no software installation is allowed.

After using Oanda for almost coming a year now, I found the features below to my liking:

• Small pip spread - During slow times, the pip spread for USD/JPY is around 1 pip! Compare this with 3 pips for InterbankFX and 2 pips for MIG.
• Flexible lot size - Just open 1 account and you can trade equivalents of nano, micro, mini and standard lot sizes.
• Trade off the charts - I can right-click on a particular price level on the chart and enter my orders from there. With a filled order, I can modify the stop loss and profit target by adjusting them visually on the charts. Great for a visual person.
• Sub-accounts - If you trade different systems at the same time, this feature is useful for you. Let’s say you trade a system A. You can open a new sub-account, transfer funds to it and trade system A with this sub-account. At the end of the day, you can generate transaction history and tell the account balance just for this system A. We can open sub-accounts in 2-3 steps and switching between sub-accounts takes up to 1-2 steps. Very clean!
• Profiles tied to sub-accounts - With trading system A, I may need 2 charts to be opened and I will need indicators X, Y and Z on the 2 charts. Once I got these set up once, I can save it as a profile and tie it to the sub-account for system A. So whenever I switch to this sub-account, the correct charts together with the correct indicators will be opened accordingly.
• Pending partial take profit - Let’s say I opened a position with 2 lots, I can enter a pending order to close 1 lot when price hit level X and another pending order to close the remaining lot when price hit level Y.
• Interest payout upon trade close - The swap is paid immediately after positions are closed. Most other brokerages only credit/debit the swap at the end of the trading day. I am not sure if this is really beneficial in the long run. But sometimes I get some “discount” off the spread with this.
• Unlimited period for demo account - The demo trading platform is known as the FXGame and there is no expiry date!

What I feel still can be improved:

• Limited set of indicators
• No price level indicated for Fibonacci retracement
• Do not allow view too far back into chart history
• Do not allow drawing of boxes and other shapes on charts

I do not trade news, so I am not sure about the price behaviour during news times. I have also heard about the platform being unstable. This I have not experienced too. But then again, all broker platforms can hang up on us, right?
To sign up for the FXGame account, simply register online.

I also urge you to install FXDesktop. It adds a icon to our computer desktop. Give it a double-click and we can sign in to either FXGame or FXTrade without opening our web browser. A great shortcut.

Disclaimer: This is an independent review. I do not represent Oanda and I do not get a single cent from them for writing this.

If you find this post or this blog is helpful to you in any way...do consider buying jmot a kopi (aka coffee)!