Full Overview of Oanda Forex Brokers Review ForexFraud
Full Overview of Oanda Forex Brokers Review ForexFraud
OANDA Oanda.com reviews and ratings by Forex Peace Army
OANDA Review 2020 - Investopedia
OANDA Review 2020 - Discover 3 Strengths and 1 Weakness
OANDA Review: 3 Key Findings for 2020 - ForexBrokers.com
APIs offered by brokers and data platforms
I’ve been looking for a broker that has an API for index futures and ideally also futures options. I’m looking to use the API to build a customized view of my risk based on balances, positions, and market conditions. Searching the algotrading sub I found many API-related posts, but then when I actually read them and their comments, I found they’re often lacking in real substance. It turns out many brokers or data services that have APIs don’t actually support index futures and options via the API, and instead they focus on equities, forex, or cypto. So here’s the list of what I’ve found so far. This isn’t a review of these brokers or APIs and note that I have a specific application in mind (index futures and futures options). Perhaps you’re looking for an API for equities, or you just want data and not a broker, in which case there may be a few options. Also, I’m based in the US so I didn’t really look for brokers or platforms outside the US. If you have experience with these APIs, please chime in with your thoughts. Also, I may have missed some brokers or platforms. If I did or if you see anything that needs correction please let me know.
Broker with a variety of platforms including CQG, Rithmic, TT, some with APIs
Wow, this list grew longer than I originally thought it would be. If you spot a mistake, please let me know and I’ll correct it. Edit: - added Lightspeed API - updated Dashprime to indicate some of the APIs available - added Medved Trader to table - added marketstack to table
Disclaimer: None of this is financial advice. I have no idea what I'm doing. Please do your own research or you will certainly lose money. I'm not a statistician, data scientist, well-seasoned trader, or anything else that would qualify me to make statements such as the below with any weight behind them. Take them for the incoherent ramblings that they are. TL;DR at the bottom for those not interested in the details. This is a bit of a novel, sorry about that. It was mostly for getting my own thoughts organized, but if even one person reads the whole thing I will feel incredibly accomplished.
Background
For those of you not familiar, please see the various threads on this trading system here. I can't take credit for this system, all glory goes to ParallaxFX! I wanted to see how effective this system was at H1 for a couple of reasons: 1) My current broker is TD Ameritrade - their Forex minimum is a mini lot, and I don't feel comfortable enough yet with the risk to trade mini lots on the higher timeframes(i.e. wider pip swings) that ParallaxFX's system uses, so I wanted to see if I could scale it down. 2) I'm fairly impatient, so I don't like to wait days and days with my capital tied up just to see if a trade is going to win or lose. This does mean it requires more active attention since you are checking for setups once an hour instead of once a day or every 4-6 hours, but the upside is that you trade more often this way so you end up winning or losing faster and moving onto the next trade. Spread does eat more of the trade this way, but I'll cover this in my data below - it ends up not being a problem. I looked at data from 6/11 to 7/3 on all pairs with a reasonable spread(pairs listed at bottom above the TL;DR). So this represents about 3-4 weeks' worth of trading. I used mark(mid) price charts. Spreadsheet link is below for anyone that's interested.
System Details
I'm pretty much using ParallaxFX's system textbook, but since there are a few options in his writeups, I'll include all the discretionary points here:
I'm using the stop entry version - so I wait for the price to trade beyond the confirmation candle(in the direction of my trade) before entering. I don't have any data to support this decision, but I've always preferred this method over retracement-limit entries. Maybe I just like the feeling of a higher winrate even though there can be greater R:R using a limit entry. Variety is the spice of life.
I put my stop loss right at the opposite edge of the confirmation candle. NOT at the edge of the 2-candle pattern that makes up the system. I'll get into this more below - not enough trades are saved to justify the wider stops. (Wider stop means less $ per pip won, assuming you still only risk 1%).
All my profit/loss statistics are based on a 1% risk per trade. Because 1 is real easy to multiply.
There are definitely some questionable trades in here, but I tried to make it as mechanical as possible for evaluation purposes. They do fit the definitions of the system, which is why I included them. You could probably improve the winrate by being more discretionary about your trades by looking at support/resistance or other techniques.
I didn't use MBB much for either entering trades, or as support/resistance indicators. Again, trying to be pretty mechanical here just for data collection purposes. Plus, we all make bad trading decisions now and then, so let's call it even.
As stated in the title, this is for H1 only. These results may very well not play out for other time frames - who knows, it may not even work on H1 starting this Monday. Forex is an unpredictable place.
I collected data to show efficacy of taking profit at three different levels: -61.8%, -100% and -161.8% fib levels described in the system using the passive trade management method(set it and forget it). I'll have more below about moving up stops and taking off portions of a position.
And now for the fun. Results!
Total Trades: 241
Raw Winrates:
TP at -61.8%: 177 out of 241: 73.44%
TP at -100%: 156 out of 241: 64.73%
TP at -161.8%: 121 out of 241: 50.20%
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account):
TP at -61.8%: 5.22%
TP at -100%: 23.55%
TP at -161.8%: 29.14%
As you can see, a higher target ended up with higher profit despite a much lower winrate. This is partially just how things work out with profit targets in general, but there's an additional point to consider in our case: the spread. Since we are trading on a lower timeframe, there is less overall price movement and thus the spread takes up a much larger percentage of the trade than it would if you were trading H4, Daily or Weekly charts. You can see exactly how much it accounts for each trade in my spreadsheet if you're interested. TDA does not have the best spreads, so you could probably improve these results with another broker. EDIT: I grabbed typical spreads from other brokers, and turns out while TDA is pretty competitive on majors, their minors/crosses are awful! IG beats them by 20-40% and Oanda beats them 30-60%! Using IG spreads for calculations increased profits considerably (another 5% on top) and Oanda spreads increased profits massively (another 15%!). Definitely going to be considering another broker than TDA for this strategy. Plus that'll allow me to trade micro-lots, so I can be more granular(and thus accurate) with my position sizing and compounding.
A Note on Spread
As you can see in the data, there were scenarios where the spread was 80% of the overall size of the trade(the size of the confirmation candle that you draw your fibonacci retracements over), which would obviously cut heavily into your profits. Removing any trades where the spread is more than 50% of the trade width improved profits slightly without removing many trades, but this is almost certainly just coincidence on a small sample size. Going below 40% and even down to 30% starts to cut out a lot of trades for the less-common pairs, but doesn't actually change overall profits at all(~1% either way). However, digging all the way down to 25% starts to really make some movement. Profit at the -161.8% TP level jumps up to 37.94% if you filter out anything with a spread that is more than 25% of the trade width! And this even keeps the sample size fairly large at 187 total trades. You can get your profits all the way up to 48.43% at the -161.8% TP level if you filter all the way down to only trades where spread is less than 15% of the trade width, however your sample size gets much smaller at that point(108 trades) so I'm not sure I would trust that as being accurate in the long term. Overall based on this data, I'm going to only take trades where the spread is less than 25% of the trade width. This may bias my trades more towards the majors, which would mean a lot more correlated trades as well(more on correlation below), but I think it is a reasonable precaution regardless.
Time of Day
Time of day had an interesting effect on trades. In a totally predictable fashion, a vast majority of setups occurred during the London and New York sessions: 5am-12pm Eastern. However, there was one outlier where there were many setups on the 11PM bar - and the winrate was about the same as the big hours in the London session. No idea why this hour in particular - anyone have any insight? That's smack in the middle of the Tokyo/Sydney overlap, not at the open or close of either. On many of the hour slices I have a feeling I'm just dealing with small number statistics here since I didn't have a lot of data when breaking it down by individual hours. But here it is anyway - for all TP levels, these three things showed up(all in Eastern time):
7pm-4am: Fewer setups, but winrate high.
5am-6am: Lots of setups, but but winrate low.
12pm-3pm Medium number of setups, but winrate low.
I don't have any reason to think these timeframes would maintain this behavior over the long term. They're almost certainly meaningless. EDIT: When you de-dup highly correlated trades, the number of trades in these timeframes really drops, so from this data there is no reason to think these timeframes would be any different than any others in terms of winrate. That being said, these time frames work out for me pretty well because I typically sleep 12am-7am Eastern time. So I automatically avoid the 5am-6am timeframe, and I'm awake for the majority of this system's setups.
Moving stops up to breakeven
This section goes against everything I know and have ever heard about trade management. Please someone find something wrong with my data. I'd love for someone to check my formulas, but I realize that's a pretty insane time commitment to ask of a bunch of strangers. Anyways. What I found was that for these trades moving stops up...basically at all...actually reduced the overall profitability. One of the data points I collected while charting was where the price retraced back to after hitting a certain milestone. i.e. once the price hit the -61.8% profit level, how far back did it retrace before hitting the -100% profit level(if at all)? And same goes for the -100% profit level - how far back did it retrace before hitting the -161.8% profit level(if at all)? Well, some complex excel formulas later and here's what the results appear to be. Emphasis on appears because I honestly don't believe it. I must have done something wrong here, but I've gone over it a hundred times and I can't find anything out of place.
Moving SL up to 0% when the price hits -61.8%, TP at -100%
Winrate: 46.4%
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 5.36%
Taking half position off at -61.8%, moving SL up to 0%, TP remaining half at -100%
Winrate: 65.97%
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): -1.01% (yes, a net loss)
Now, you might think exactly what I did when looking at these numbers: oof, the spread killed us there right? Because even when you move your SL to 0%, you still end up paying the spread, so it's not truly "breakeven". And because we are trading on a lower timeframe, the spread can be pretty hefty right? Well even when I manually modified the data so that the spread wasn't subtracted(i.e. "Breakeven" was truly +/- 0), things don't look a whole lot better, and still way worse than the passive trade management method of leaving your stops in place and letting it run. And that isn't even a realistic scenario because to adjust out the spread you'd have to move your stoploss inside the candle edge by at least the spread amount, meaning it would almost certainly be triggered more often than in the data I collected(which was purely based on the fib levels and mark price). Regardless, here are the numbers for that scenario:
Moving SL up to 0% when the price hits -61.8%, TP at -100%
Winrate(breakeven doesn't count as a win): 46.4%
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 17.97%
Taking half position off at -61.8%, moving SL up to 0%, TP remaining half at -100%
Winrate(breakeven doesn't count as a win): 65.97%
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 11.60%
From a literal standpoint, what I see behind this behavior is that 44 of the 69 breakeven trades(65%!) ended up being profitable to -100% after retracing deeply(but not to the original SL level), which greatly helped offset the purely losing trades better than the partial profit taken at -61.8%. And 36 went all the way back to -161.8% after a deep retracement without hitting the original SL. Anyone have any insight into this? Is this a problem with just not enough data? It seems like enough trades that a pattern should emerge, but again I'm no expert. I also briefly looked at moving stops to other lower levels (78.6%, 61.8%, 50%, 38.2%, 23.6%), but that didn't improve things any. No hard data to share as I only took a quick look - and I still might have done something wrong overall. The data is there to infer other strategies if anyone would like to dig in deep(more explanation on the spreadsheet below). I didn't do other combinations because the formulas got pretty complicated and I had already answered all the questions I was looking to answer.
2-Candle vs Confirmation Candle Stops
Another interesting point is that the original system has the SL level(for stop entries) just at the outer edge of the 2-candle pattern that makes up the system. Out of pure laziness, I set up my stops just based on the confirmation candle. And as it turns out, that is much a much better way to go about it. Of the 60 purely losing trades, only 9 of them(15%) would go on to be winners with stops on the 2-candle formation. Certainly not enough to justify the extra loss and/or reduced profits you are exposing yourself to in every single other trade by setting a wider SL. Oddly, in every single scenario where the wider stop did save the trade, it ended up going all the way to the -161.8% profit level. Still, not nearly worth it.
Correlated Trades
As I've said many times now, I'm really not qualified to be doing an analysis like this. This section in particular. Looking at shared currency among the pairs traded, 74 of the trades are correlated. Quite a large group, but it makes sense considering the sort of moves we're looking for with this system. This means you are opening yourself up to more risk if you were to trade on every signal since you are technically trading with the same underlying sentiment on each different pair. For example, GBP/USD and AUD/USD moving together almost certainly means it's due to USD moving both pairs, rather than GBP and AUD both moving the same size and direction coincidentally at the same time. So if you were to trade both signals, you would very likely win or lose both trades - meaning you are actually risking double what you'd normally risk(unless you halve both positions which can be a good option, and is discussed in ParallaxFX's posts and in various other places that go over pair correlation. I won't go into detail about those strategies here). Interestingly though, 17 of those apparently correlated trades ended up with different wins/losses. Also, looking only at trades that were correlated, winrate is 83%/70%/55% (for the three TP levels). Does this give some indication that the same signal on multiple pairs means the signal is stronger? That there's some strong underlying sentiment driving it? Or is it just a matter of too small a sample size? The winrate isn't really much higher than the overall winrates, so that makes me doubt it is statistically significant. One more funny tidbit: EUCAD netted the lowest overall winrate: 30% to even the -61.8% TP level on 10 trades. Seems like that is just a coincidence and not enough data, but dang that's a sucky losing streak. EDIT: WOW I spent some time removing correlated trades manually and it changed the results quite a bit. Some thoughts on this below the results. These numbers also include the other "What I will trade" filters. I added a new worksheet to my data to show what I ended up picking.
Total Trades: 75
Raw Winrates:
TP at -61.8%: 84.00%
TP at -100%: 73.33%
TP at -161.8%: 60.00%
Moving SL up to 0% when the price hits -61.8%, TP at -100%: 53.33%
Taking half position off at -61.8%, moving SL up to 0%, TP remaining half at -100%: 53.33% (yes, oddly the exact same winrate. but different trades/profits)
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account):
TP at -61.8%: 18.13%
TP at -100%: 26.20%
TP at -161.8%: 34.01%
Moving SL up to 0% when the price hits -61.8%, TP at -100%: 19.20%
Taking half position off at -61.8%, moving SL up to 0%, TP remaining half at -100%: 17.29%
To do this, I removed correlated trades - typically by choosing those whose spread had a lower % of the trade width since that's objective and something I can see ahead of time. Obviously I'd like to only keep the winning trades, but I won't know that during the trade. This did reduce the overall sample size down to a level that I wouldn't otherwise consider to be big enough, but since the results are generally consistent with the overall dataset, I'm not going to worry about it too much. I may also use more discretionary methods(support/resistance, quality of indecision/confirmation candles, news/sentiment for the pairs involved, etc) to filter out correlated trades in the future. But as I've said before I'm going for a pretty mechanical system. This brought the 3 TP levels and even the breakeven strategies much closer together in overall profit. It muted the profit from the high R:R strategies and boosted the profit from the low R:R strategies. This tells me pair correlation was skewing my data quite a bit, so I'm glad I dug in a little deeper. Fortunately my original conclusion to use the -161.8 TP level with static stops is still the winner by a good bit, so it doesn't end up changing my actions. There were a few times where MANY (6-8) correlated pairs all came up at the same time, so it'd be a crapshoot to an extent. And the data showed this - often then won/lost together, but sometimes they did not. As an arbitrary rule, the more correlations, the more trades I did end up taking(and thus risking). For example if there were 3-5 correlations, I might take the 2 "best" trades given my criteria above. 5+ setups and I might take the best 3 trades, even if the pairs are somewhat correlated. I have no true data to back this up, but to illustrate using one example: if AUD/JPY, AUD/USD, CAD/JPY, USD/CAD all set up at the same time (as they did, along with a few other pairs on 6/19/20 9:00 AM), can you really say that those are all the same underlying movement? There are correlations between the different correlations, and trying to filter for that seems rough. Although maybe this is a known thing, I'm still pretty green to Forex - someone please enlighten me if so! I might have to look into this more statistically, but it would be pretty complex to analyze quantitatively, so for now I'm going with my gut and just taking a few of the "best" trades out of the handful. Overall, I'm really glad I went further on this. The boosting of the B/E strategies makes me trust my calculations on those more since they aren't so far from the passive management like they were with the raw data, and that really had me wondering what I did wrong.
What I will trade
Putting all this together, I am going to attempt to trade the following(demo for a bit to make sure I have the hang of it, then for keeps):
"System Details" I described above.
TP at -161.8%
Static SL at opposite side of confirmation candle - I won't move stops up to breakeven.
Trade only 7am-11am and 4pm-11pm signals.
Nothing where spread is more than 25% of trade width.
Looking at the data for these rules, test results are:
Winrate: 58.19%
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 47.43%
I'll be sure to let everyone know how it goes!
Other Technical Details
ATR is only slightly elevated in this date range from historical levels, so this should fairly closely represent reality even after the COVID volatility leaves the scalpers sad and alone.
The sample size is much too small for anything really meaningful when you slice by hour or pair. I wasn't particularly looking to test a specific pair here - just the system overall as if you were going to trade it on all pairs with a reasonable spread.
Raw Data
Here's the spreadsheet for anyone that'd like it. (EDIT: Updated some of the setups from the last few days that have fully played out now. I also noticed a few typos, but nothing major that would change the overall outcomes. Regardless, I am currently reviewing every trade to ensure they are accurate.UPDATE: Finally all done. Very few corrections, no change to results.) I have some explanatory notes below to help everyone else understand the spiraled labyrinth of a mind that put the spreadsheet together.
I'm on the East Coast in the US, so the timestamps are Eastern time.
Time stamp is from the confirmation candle, not the indecision candle. So 7am would mean the indecision candle was 6:00-6:59 and the confirmation candle is 7:00-7:59 and you'd put in your order at 8:00.
I found a couple AM/PM typos as I was reviewing the data, so let me know if a trade doesn't make sense and I'll correct it.
Insanely detailed spreadsheet notes
For you real nerds out there. Here's an explanation of what each column means:
Pair - duh
Date/Time - Eastern time, confirmation candle as stated above
Win to -61.8%? - whether the trade made it to the -61.8% TP level before it hit the original SL.
Win to -100%? - whether the trade made it to the -100% TP level before it hit the original SL.
Win to -161.8%? - whether the trade made it to the -161.8% TP level before it hit the original SL.
Retracement level between -61.8% and -100% - how deep the price retraced after hitting -61.8%, but before hitting -100%. Be careful to look for the negative signs, it's easy to mix them up. Using the fib% levels defined in ParallaxFX's original thread. A plain hyphen "-" means it did not retrace, but rather went straight through -61.8% to -100%. Positive 100 means it hit the original SL.
Retracement level between -100% and -161.8% - how deep the price retraced after hitting -100%, but before hitting -161.8%. Be careful to look for the negative signs, it's easy to mix them up. Using the fib% levels defined in ParallaxFX's original thread. A plain hyphen "-" means it did not retrace, but rather went straight through -100% to -161.8%. Positive 100 means it hit the original SL.
Trade Width(Pips) - the size of the confirmation candle, and thus the "width" of your trade on which to determine position size, draw fib levels, etc.
Loser saved by 2 candle stop? - for all losing trades, whether or not the 2-candle stop loss would have saved the trade and how far it ended up getting if so. "No" means it didn't save it, N/A means it wasn't a losing trade so it's not relevant.
Spread(ThinkorSwim) - these are typical spreads for these pairs on ToS.
Spread % of Width - How big is the spread compared to the trade width? Not used in any calculations, but interesting nonetheless.
True Risk(Trade Width + Spread) - I set my SL at the opposite side of the confirmation candle knowing that I'm actually exposing myself to slightly more risk because of the spread(stop order = market order when submitted, so you pay the spread). So this tells you how many pips you are actually risking despite the Trade Width. I prefer this over setting the stop inside from the edge of the candle because some pairs have a wide spread that would mess with the system overall. But also many, many of these trades retraced very nearly to the edge of the confirmation candle, before ending up nicely profitable. If you keep your risk per trade at 1%, you're talking a true risk of, at most, 1.25% (in worst-case scenarios with the spread being 25% of the trade width as I am going with above).
Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread TP -61.8% - not going to go into huge detail, see the spreadsheet for calculations if you want. But, in a nutshell, if the trade was a win to 61.8%, it returns a positive # based on 61.8% of the trade width, minus the spread. Otherwise, it returns the True Risk as a negative. Both normalized to the 1% risk you started with.
Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread TP -100% - same as the last, but 100% of Trade Width.
Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread TP -161.8% - same as the last, but 161.8% of Trade Width.
Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread TP -100%, and move SL to breakeven at 61.8% - uses the retracement level columns to calculate profit/loss the same as the last few columns, but assuming you moved SL to 0% fib level after price hit -61.8%. Then full TP at 100%.
Win or Loss in %(1% risk) including spread take off half of position at -61.8%, move SL to breakeven, TP 100% - uses the retracement level columns to calculate profit/loss the same as the last few columns, but assuming you took of half the position and moved SL to 0% fib level after price hit -61.8%. Then TP the remaining half at 100%.
Overall Growth(-161.8% TP, 1% Risk) - pretty straightforward. Assuming you risked 1% on each trade, what the overall growth level would be chronologically(spreadsheet is sorted by date).
Pairs
AUD/CAD
AUD/CHF
AUD/JPY
AUD/NZD
AUD/USD
CAD/CHF
CAD/JPY
CHF/JPY
EUAUD
EUCAD
EUCHF
EUGBP
EUJPY
EUNZD
EUUSD
GBP/AUD
GBP/CAD
GBP/CHF
GBP/JPY
GBP/NZD
GBP/USD
NZD/CAD
NZD/CHF
NZD/JPY
NZD/USD
USD/CAD
USD/CHF
USD/JPY
TL;DR
Based on the reasonable rules I discovered in this backtest:
Date range: 6/11-7/3
Winrate: 58.19%
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 47.43%
Demo Trading Results
Since this post, I started demo trading this system assuming a 5k capital base and risking ~1% per trade. I've added the details to my spreadsheet for anyone interested. The results are pretty similar to the backtest when you consider real-life conditions/timing are a bit different. I missed some trades due to life(work, out of the house, etc), so that brought my total # of trades and thus overall profit down, but the winrate is nearly identical. I also closed a few trades early due to various reasons(not liking the price action, seeing support/resistance emerge, etc). A quick note is that TD's paper trade system fills at the mid price for both stop and limit orders, so I had to subtract the spread from the raw trade values to get the true profit/loss amount for each trade. I'm heading out of town next week, then after that it'll be time to take this sucker live!
86 Trades
Date range: 7/9-7/30
Winrate: 52.32%
Adjusted Proft % (takes spread into account): 20.73%
Starting Balance: $5,000
Ending Balance: $6,036.51
Live Trading Results
I started live-trading this system on 8/10, and almost immediately had a string of losses much longer than either my backtest or demo period. Murphy's law huh? Anyways, that has me spooked so I'm doing a longer backtest before I start risking more real money. It's going to take me a little while due to the volume of trades, but I'll likely make a new post once I feel comfortable with that and start live trading again.
Which one of these brokers is reliable? I have read reviews on slippage and freezing markets on almost every broker i search. 1. Fxtm 2. Hotforex 3. XM 4. Exness P.s i live in a country in which i cant use oanda or forex.com if someone can guide me I'll really appreciate it. i have read other reddit posts but most of them have affiliates commenting for the brokers.
What are the best platforms for both Forex and Futures trading?
Hey guys, hope everyone is doing well! I have searched on this sub to help find this answer, however every post is in regards to only Futures or only Forex platforms. Seeing if you could please offer some feedback in regards to the best platform to use that includes both Forex and Futures trading? I understand that I would probably need to have different brokers for each, but I would like the simplicity of having both in one. For instance, is trading-view a platform that you can trade both Forex & Futures? If so, do you personally use it for both, or do you have separate platforms for each? I have been paper trading Futures on Ninja Trader 8, and do enjoy it, however I never read any info/reviews about using Ninja Trader 8 with Forex trading so I am skeptical.. although they say they can with; Oanda and Forex.com. FYI - I have my TDAmeritrade/TOS account for Equities and Options. (I wouldn't use TOS for Futures at this moment due to the high margins, and looking for low margins as I will be using small capital to start <$2,000.) Any help will be greatly appreciated, and I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you in advance!
Hey everyone, I'm searchig for some good forex brokers online and there's some popular brokers that seem to be professional and trusted... yet, when i search for the reviews(mostly on forexpeacearmy) all what i read is 1 star reviews of how they automatically modify people's trades and make them lose all their money... such brokers like fxtm, ig, oanda.... i'm still new to forex but all those good brokers seem to have really bad and convincig reviews... any help, advice, experience is appreciated.
ETORO vs INTERACTIVE BROKERS vs OANDA vs CORE SPREADS
Hi guys, just want to compare brokers. I am looking for a broker that allows users here in the philippines I want to open an account to trade in the global market. I've been using ETORO for some months already and there's a lot of negative reviews with regards to their withdrawal process/fee. Then the trader that I am following uses Core Spreads which is why I want to consider it. I also saw Interactive Brokers allows API calls which is also good since I also want to automate my trades. I see OANDA from some posts here and they say it's also good. What you think guys? Pros and Cons? EDIT: I am now reviewing this brokers: pepperstone, IG and Forex.com. Those brokers had the best reviews made by pinoy bloggers
Different brokers showing different charts (same candle open/close)
I have on tradingview oanda and fxcm's nzd/jpy chart open and the difference in the charts is pretty significant, especially on the lower timeframes (looking at 12 hour). Even on the daily, the gaps are still noticable. They have the same candle open/close time, so any reason for this difference?
Oanda refused me an account due to lack of knowledge, then decided to give it to me anyway and deposit £250 for free. Cause for concern?
I've been demo trading for about half a year now, and got it into my head that i was probably ready to start trading for real. Doing some research for accounts to set up i came across Oanda and saw positive reviews and that they were one of the older fx traders. Seeming reliable, i went to sign up for an account with them. At the end of their account process it asks you multiple questions, testing you on your knowledge of the Forex market. I did not pass, and had my account refused. Taking this as a sign i was not ready, i've gone back to learning, found this subreddit and am currently running through the Babypips course. I would have thought this the end of the story, but three weeks later i receive a missed call/voicemail from Oanda, saying that they wish to speak to me about opening my account. I ignored it, since i'm still going through the course. A few days later they call me again, leaving another voicemail to chase, and then again. After the third one i just blocked the number, but i kept getting voicemails from them. Listening to these they now tell me that they've gone through with creating my account, and they've deposited £250 for me to start spending. They also say that after five completed trades i'll be able to withdraw the money. They have since called me about ten times, once a day, always leaving a voicemail. Considering they originally denied me an account due to lack of knowledge (which i'm perfectly willing to accept, i was trying to jump in too early) this all seems kind of dodgy. They're not only giving me an account, but they're encouraging me to get to trading, when they specifically know that i wasn't able to pass the test. Is this normal behaviour for a group like Oanda? Are they trying to target me like i was purely a gambler? Should i take advantage(sign into the account, make five tiny trades, close them and withdraw the <£250)? Or do i just contact them to tell them to close the account and leave me alone, (or just ignore them altogether)? Thanks in advance.
I'm looking for recommendations for paper trading on futures. Specifically, I'm looking at trading the e-mini and eventually some others. Does anyone have a good recommendation? I looked at ninjatrader but it seems like they have some kind of 14-day trial and not long-term paper trading setup. I'm also finding so much biased information/reviews online that I'm kind of lost at where to start with futures in terms of brokerage and platform. I'm paper trading Forex through Oanda and Tradingview since it's free at the moment to practice in that space, but the ES seems like a better fit for my style. Thanks in advance!
So, long time lurker of this subreddit, but only have posted once before. I'll get to that later. First, I'd like to share my appreciation for this sub as a new beginner getting into trading. There's a lot of crap out there and it’s hard to sift through it. Not saying crap doesn't get posted here, but it's well modded. So thanks for that. This is a decent place to get grounded. Intention of this post is info from one newb to other newbs getting started. The purpose of this post is more for information and factual stuff than advice. As a beginner some times just factual info can be the most help rather than advice. I’ll try to make this quick. Probably won’t be, I’m summarizing a year and 4wks here. How I got started. I was listening to Jim Cramer on Mad Money while at work. Yea don’t laugh. I always wanted to trade stocks, but never really had the capital to do it. The idea of working from home and trading always appealed to me like it has to many others. Also, I was getting frustrated with my job, (still there by the way). Anyways, once I finished paying off all my school loans I started seriously looking in to trading. I’m 26 atm. Quickly learned I still didn’t have the capital to trade stocks the way I wanted to. Living in the U.S. and subject to the pattern day trading rules I would need 25k. Which I don’t. Not sure where I found the info but looking for other ways to trade I discovered spot forex. Hey! And you don’t need 25k to trade like a mad man. Quickly learned from multiple sources, seriously its everywhere, if doing FX you need to go through babypips. So 1 year ago at the beginning of March I started working my way through baby pips. Also, I opened up a practice account with Oanda at the same time of starting babypips. Being in U.S. the broker options are limited. I saw the big 3, Gain, FXCM, and Oanda. Gain had terrible reviews, FXCM already had a sketchy past, so I picked Oanda. But honestly they all have bad reviews, but I wanted to trade. Took me about 2 months to work my way through baby pips course while trying every indicator under the sun on my practice account. Also discovered tradingview during this time. Best analysis center out there honestly. Now around my 3rd month I started to hit this wall ( this is a magical wall that re-appears throughout this endeavor whenever you finally think you’re getting somewhere) . Realizing that with all the crap and indicators on the screen and if I’m being honest with myself I haven’t got a clue what the crap I’m doing. I knew I needed to simplify things and stick with things that stuck out to me (you know what they say, find your edge). For me that was going to be MACD. It’s the one thing I thought I understood. Keyword “thought”. And only in the larger time frames 4hr + charts. I could clearly see divergence and convergence throughout the charts. And I could clearly see a shift in the trend after things like divergence. So my goal was to master the MACD. It was brutal, but in some ways it worked for me. I could clearly see that an up or down trend was dying out on the daily or 4hr. charts. So when I thought the trend was almost over I would start taking reversal trades or what I thought were break outs of the trend. My practice account almost got murdered multiple times. But if I was convinced the trend was turning, I kept buying or selling more positions until it reversed (but sometimes it never turned and I just ended up cutting a huge loss). Now I’m getting close to 6 months of trading. I was up about 40% on my 100k practice account. Believe me, I understand I still didn’t have money management, and it was probably complete luck, and it was stupid trading with such a large practice account, but at this point in my mind I thought I was ready for the “next stage.” Going live, some people suggest not going live until you have your strategy completely mastered. ( I didn’t) So naturally my sympathy’s fell with those who suggest after 3 months of positive trading you should start prepping yourself mentally with a small real account. By this time I had saved up $3k to throw into my live account with Oanda. And I told myself I was mentally prepared to completely lose all 3k (was I really? I don’t’ know). Why did I pick 3k as my start amount? To me it was just large enough that it would hurt if I lost it, and the potential wasn’t too small where if I was successful I would only be able to buy a happy meal from McDonalds. So here I am, 6 months into trading with a live account. It started about as bad as one could expect for someone with no money management. I still didn’t know how to take profit with targets. It’s like I took a stupid pill right before trading live. Cause not only did I not trade divergence all the time, I started taking trades from others on tradingview. Hence my first post on this reddit which I got railed for copying another persons trade. I had to take break for like 2 weeks after that to recoup my mind. I lost about 25% or more of my account. Started taking money management seriously at this point. Started reading up on it, started taking calculated trades with risking only 2% of my account. Those first 2 weeks were necessary for me to grasp money management. Believe me I read all about money management, I even understood it for the most part, but I didn’t really utilize it till I took that hit on my account. Reading is not the same as experiencing. Now things started to work out for me again. I went back to searching for divergent trades, my trades. But I also started looking for others on trading view who traded just divergence. This helped, especially when it came to spotting trades you agreed on. I didn’t just follow the highest rated traders, I followed those who were trading similar to my style. Now, believe me, I still suck at trading at this point, but my money management still allowed me to recover my account, and even gain on it. But I was break-even trader 9-10 months in with my bad trading. Now this is going to be the part that I never thought I would do, especially since its frowned on in general by this group. But I paid for a trading course, well more like to join a permanent trading group who trains you. (I’m not recommending this) I won’t say who or what the group is. This is just factual information. Yes I paid 2.5k to join a group. So don’t ask who the group is. I’m not writing all this just so the mods delete it as a promotion. But through trading view I found someone whose charts I liked a lot and got in contact with him. Our trading styles were similar and he peaked my interest and was nice when I contacted him and I wanted to learn more faster. So like I said, I found someone whose trading style I associated with. Your style maybe completely different and probably is. So finding a group who doesn’t trade like you would be a complete waste of time. And what do I think of my experience in a trading group? I refrained from live trading during these several weeks of training. I wasn’t the only student. In general we had 1 week of lessons, then split into a small groups for 2 weeks of 1 on 1 trading with a senior trader. Rinse and repeat for a couple of weeks that was my training. All in all, it wasn’t all I expected and yet it was more than I could have expected. I did learn new techniques that I believe help me, but I only finished 2 weeks ago. So all in all its been 1 year and 4 wks since I started trading. I haven’t made globs of money in a short time. And I’m still not as good as the senior traders in our group. I still maintain a full time job because it’s necessary for me at this point. I was waking up at 4:30am in the morning just so I could attend these training sessions. And trade before and after work, and have reduced my work hours from 50+hrs a week down to just 40 hrs so I have more time to trade. I hope one day to quit my job so I can trade full time. Anyways that’s my first year of trading in a nutshell. Going into my second year. If you would like me to update again at the beginning of my 3rd year give it a thumbs up. God Bless.
Hey everyone. A while back I made the decision to moderate this subreddit because I was once in your shoes. I honestly did not know where to begin. I would type in “daytrading” in google and come up with so many companies trying to sell me the dream. “Make $$$ while you sleep!” “Look at how much I made today!!” etc. I wanted to make this post to first give new people a place where to start and to even offer some resources that can get you started in the right direction. If I have anything else to add I will add it here.
Open up a papertrading account with Think or Swim. It is free and you can get live data just by requesting it from support. All you have to do is ask them to add live data to your papertrading account. Do not pay monthly for any papertrading account. There are a lot of free videos out there that can help you get started with Think or Swim. The program looks complicated at first but it is very powerful. I spent a few days with the program and at the end of the week I was fairly comfortable with understanding where everything was. I have never had a 60-day limit with my papertrading account by the way. https://www.thinkorswim.com/t/pm-registration.html Start here and start taking trades! It is all fake money and will give you some insight into how the program works as well as how the markets move.
One other tip for setting up your papertrading account is to only set it up with a reasonable amount of money. I know a lot of papertrading accounts give you 100k right off the bat but realistically, how many of us are going to have that much money to start out with? Set it to something more reasonable like 10-20k if you are trading forex (or even less if all you have is 1-5k to trade with) or 25k+ if you are going to daytrade stocks only because the regulations require you to have at least 25k in your account at all times to daytrade (In this case, I would probably give yourself 30k just to be safe). If you are looking for a stock screener, ThinkorSwim has a pretty good one. A personal favorite of mine is www.FINVIZ.com which has an awesome screener for finding different chart patterns and conditions (such as prices crossing above 20 bar EMA, trending up, etc) Think or Swim has stocks, forex, futures, and options. Options are an entirely different beast all together but stocks, forex, and futures are all "yes-no" type of trading while options give you a little more leeway with your mistakes. If you are interested in learning about options, message me and I can help guide you with the right direction and best resources I used to learn options. EDIT: Due to the amount of PM's I was getting, I have decided to post the options course I started with here https://www.udemy.com/learn-options-trading-courses/ You shouldn't pay more than 10 bucks for it as Udemy does a ton of sales throughout the year. You can also just do a "Udemy coupon" search on google and see what you pull up. Its about 10 hours worth of content and in my opinion it is worth every penny if you are wanting to learn more about options. There are a ton of other great classes on Udemy as well for learning just about anything. Just make sure to read the reviews! Stocks is kind of the well known market for new comers but I would argue that Forex can also just as easily be traded by a newcomer. Also the benefit of trading Forex is that there is no commission off the bat. Most brokers will charge what is called a spread of some number of pips that you are essentially paying back. Futures trade in ticks and each tick nets you a gain of some amount or a loss of some amount so I do not suggest any new person to jump into futures until you understand the way markets work. Futures charge commission on each contract you buy or sell. It can be sort of related to Forex since a tick and a pip are essentially the same. The huge benefit to trading Futures and Forex is that there is NO pattern day trading rule. This means you can buy and sell as many times as you want without being flagged for not having 25k in your account.
Tradimo is a great resource for getting your feet wet with technical analysis. It is free and shows you the ropes with how you can start looking at prices and charts: https://learn.tradimo.com/courses
If there is ever a company you want to pay to help you learn, please do your research first. Type in the company’s name along with “review” at the end of your search and make your educated decision off of that. A lot of these companies have amazing advertising but will never teach you the right way to trade. A lot of them are scams too. I read that there was one trading system which the guy had the secrets of the “code of trading” and only he knew the code but would sell it to you for hundreds of dollars. So many people come into trading with high expectations that if I just pay this company to teach me, I can be like them when in reality that may never happen. Always look at their testimonials with a grain of salt. Read the reviews just like you would on amazon for buying a product. I also like to type in the company's name and add "scam" at the end to see if I get any hits on that. Read the good reviews but also the bad to understand the bigger picture here. Very few will actually teach you how to trade. Also, Reddit is a great place to read up on things like this too. Just add "Reddit" at the end of your search and read up on other users reviews.
Investimonials is also a good place to use as well (but do not use it as your only review source!!! Fake reviews are everywhere) http://www.investimonials.com So before you drop that 1-2k on a course, make sure you do your homework. Don't be fooled by smooth advertising.
A high probability indicator or a holy grail strategy is not out there. If it was, everyone would be using it and making money. And if there does happen to be one, do you really think anyone will want to share it? The only way to get good at trading is to be able to read the charts and read where prices are going. This is through support and resistance and understanding channels. I cannot recommend Mack’s price action YouTube channel enough. https://www.youtube.com/usePATsTrading I am a firm believer that price action is the basis for understanding price movement. Reading an indicator may help but you should not rely on solely indicators to guide you with trading as they may give you a signal to buy when you are at a major resistance level or sell when you are at a major support, both of which could burn you.
My only other advice is to look into markets that let you maximize profits. For some, it is not possible to buy 1000 shares of Apple. While trading low priced stocks lets you buy hundreds and maybe even thousands of shares at once, those stocks are too unpredictable because they can be influenced by individuals who do what is called a "pump and dump" schemes. Plus they can be difficult to read as far as what they are going to be doing next (going up or going down). My recommendation (and it is only my recommendation so only use this as guidance to make your own decision) would be to look into trading forex if you do not have a lot to start out with as some brokers (like FXCM) allow you to buy "micro" lots which let you invest as little as 100 dollars in some cases and have a much better chance of working in your favor due to the amount of people trading the same instrument. Note: There are some discussions about forex market makers adjusting the markets so you get stopped out prematurely. While I have not experienced this, it could theoretically happen? So if you do decide to trade Forex make sure you pick your broker carefully and again read the reviews!
EDIT: I have read that what I mentioned above about Forex is outdated and the brokers are under stricter regulations. Do your own investigation and do not let what I said steer you away from trading forex if you really want to. The big Forex brokers you are able to open an account with in the US are FXCM, Oanda, and Forex.com. You have a lot more options if you are in another country. EDIT 2: Well it looks like FXCM may get banned from having clients in the US. Apparently they took some trades against their clients to profit on their end and have been using clients accounts to fund their extra expenses. Tread on your own risk.
Above all, do not invest money that you are not willing to lose. I cannot emphasize this enough. Work on a simulator until you feel that your strategy works. This means putting in the time to sit down and analyze every trade you took which worked as well as the ones that didn't work. You need to go back over your mistakes and review why your trade did not work the way you thought it would. Was it because you bought at a high and sold at a low? Was it because you bought at a major resistance level thinking the stock would still go up? Was it because you were impulsive and entered in too early? Was it because you were too slow and entered in too late? This is the most important part about learning how to trade. Putting in the time and work to analyze what you did right and what you did wrong. You will never get better if you do not do this.
Consider subscribing to a free daily financial newsletter such as The Morning Brew. It’s a free subscription that is delivered Monday through Friday to your email before the markets open around 5-6 am central time. It summarizes the big financial topics of the morning in short easy to read sections that you can read over a cup of brew.
I wouldn’t say this is essential for daytrading but it’s nice to read if you are wanting to stay up to date on the financial markets as they will write about companies and stocks to look out for. It’s also not spammy or filled with ads though there are one or two that are listed as “sponsored”. They don’t typically put out a weekend read but instead send it M-F. https://www.morningbrew.com/?kid=08944ba0 I want to make this subreddit not only as a resource for newcomers but also for those who wish to improve their skills with learning how to day trade. I do not want this subreddit to become spam and companies trying to sell dreams. We all need to keep a realistic vision on what learning the market entails because this is a journey. No one becomes a doctor in a day or even a week and you should expect the same becoming a trader. Making consistent money in the markets can be very challenging and most wont ever make it, but it can be very satisfying once things start to click and you can live a very different life if this ever happens.
Especially for USA clients. Seems our only regulated choice is Oanda and Forex.com. Both are market makers, and the spreads seem pretty high. Both have poor reviews over at forexpeacearmy. myfxchoice seems to be the best place for us clients, regulated by belize and spreads seem decent. Curious to what peoples opinions are regarding this...
Hey folks. I'm rather new to Forex and I've been looking for a broker but I can't seem to find one that both works and has a somewhat simple user interface (on mobile) I originally was going to try Oanda after really liking their mobile application, but I found out that even though I'm a Canadian, because I am currently living in South Korea I am unable to use their service. I was looking at finpro trading, hotforex, and simplefx but I can't seem to find many reviews on any of them. I am mostly looking for one with a low minimum deposit and also one with a good (and simple) mobile app, since I'll be doing most of my trading that way (I am often travelling for 2-3 hours a day). Does anyone have a broker they recommend that works for both Korea and Canada?
Opinions wanted: Choosing Broker after SNB Floor Removal
Hello, I am conflicted about the options for a brokerage account that I am now facing in light of recent events and would enjoy hearing others opinions. Pertinent Information:
I am a trader located in the USA
I trade several technical strategies, all of which revolve around tight breakouts and trend riding.
I have never needed to use more leverage than 1:50
I have had accounts with Forex.com and more recently held all of my funds in a Finfx account
My accounts have a combined value of ≈ $30,000
I recently received an email from Finfx stating that they could no longer accept US clients but had secured a deal with a broker in Grenada called "Tallinex". All of my funds, open positions, and accounts are to be moved automatically to a Tallinex server the first of next month. I have long considered hedging my risk by holding accounts with multiple brokers, and because of recent events I am more inclined than ever to do so. The only issue I am facing is selection of brokers. I have always known that if i were to open a US account it would be with FXCM but I am not sure about how safe that would be now, especially if my goal is to hedge risk; However, as far as US accounts go they are by far the least expensive to trade. So my questions are:
Should I keep my funds with Tallinex? I am conflicted about their reviews and regulatory standards.
Should I open an account with FXCM? They are by far the least expensive broker I know of and are very well regulated and known, but would my funds be safe there if they close down?
Should I open accounts at two different brokers to hedge my risk? Perhaps one in the US as a primary account and one off shore that allows hedging and higher leverage. And if so should those two brokers be FXCM and Tallinex?
I prefer being able to be able to hedge and have access to high leverage, however i would weight the cost of daily trading lower than the risk of having my funds in an account where it would not be safe. My current Opinion is that I should open an account with FXCM as I do not necessarily need to hedge or use high leverage, however I am unsure of the relative safety of doing that. If it is to risky than perhaps another US broker like OANDA would be good because I can feel safe with my money being there as well as their prices (though they are not stellar). Thanks for any and all responses! I have lurked this sub for almost a year for entertainment and relaxation, but I hope to be more active in the future.
I'm an Australian living in china and have been trading on shenzhen and shanghai for about 5 years and have done well. I wanted a little more action since the market here is only open 4 hours a day so I thought I'd look into forex. I traded with a demo account the past six months and now want to open a real account. The issue is that every broker seems to be a disaster in one way or another if online reviews are to be believed. I'm not sure if it's worth the trouble since I've never had to deal with any issues whatsoever with my stock market broker. I would be opening an account with about $500 at first because from all the stories online I wouldn't be comfortable with more at first. But would ultimately like to trade with 40,000-80,000. I narrowed my choices down to fxcm, oanda and pepperstone. With a small account on fxcm and oanda you get dealing desk which is not ideal. But with a razor account on pepperstone you get ecm but people say you can get massive slippage sometimes. So I have to ask is it even worth the trouble? Is there any straight up legitimate brokers who do what they should make their money of spread and have no issues withdrawing etc?
Seriously.. I´ve been with FxPro, they are ok i guess? but still reading some bad reviews about them and being a Cyprus broker is not the best thing either.. So i went with Fxcm tried out their platform with a small deposit, was about to deposit more when i read an email about "Account termination" so apparently they just terminated my account without giving any reasons.. So i check out Oanda where this youtube trader trades.. i read they are a pure market maker.. and i just cant see myself trading knowing they are loosing from my winnings.. Then we have the other 100billion forex brokers, Freshforex, Hotforex, Coldforex, insertrandomnameForex.. Fake reviews, deposit bonuses, ECN, this and that.. Why cant this be easy? I dont need bragging "spreads" "amazing execution speed that beats speed of light" i dont need hot chicks on front page, nor Barcelona sponsorship.. Here i am planning on living of Forex, i´ve solved all the problems after 3 years I have a winning strategy I have a winning mentality Who would have guessed that finding a honest/genuine broker is the Holy Grail.. So far ive only managed to find 1 honest broker(i think), Global Prime from Australia.."We are the only broker in the world where all clients can ask for a trade receipt at any time which shows which liquidity provider took their trade" they seem to have a low key website, no bonuses, or contests.. Other than that there´s Interactive Brokers.. And thats about it.. The other 100000 brokers seem to all have some defect.. Discuss, (Also if you are a profitable trader, and does withdrawals please share your broker)
I started trading live recently, had a few nice results, here are my questions to you
Hi Everyone, I put $1200 on OANDA and have been making some trades, up $137 so far in about 4 weeks risking about $5-$30 dollars a trade. I realize this is some pretty lucky profit but I thought it was a good start. Here are a few questions I have: Has anyone had any luck shorting the dollar on one pair going long on another pair? I imagine this isolates the other pairs and the dollar positions wash minus the spread, but it sounds a little too tricky for me at this point. For traders in the US, have I blown my chance to elect a favorable tax election for 2015 trading year? the one where you get 60% capital gain and 40% long term gain? I trade the forex spot market. I also think that once you make an election you cannot change your election. For those of you who work the normal American business hours, what are your favorite pairs to trade and what hours do you trade them? Do you place your trades the night before and maybe check them once/twice per day? do you trade the EUUSD first thing in the morning? I imagine swing trading will be the most viable option for the working people. What are your favorite forex books or manual back testing softwares? I am currently reading Naked Forex... liking it so far. If anyone that is serious about becoming a solid trader wants to talk forex, PM me and we'll see about maybe skype session and see where it leads. Maybe a little group. Would love to hear from some fulltime traders or review someones trades and hear their thought processes - PM me. What are your favorite Broker's? Feel free to answer any that apply to you, thanks gents!
After a short research run which investment platforms suits my appetite, I've resulted to go for Forex. You have control the volume of your appetite and when would you digest it whether be good or bad for your stomach. Unlike other investment methods though reasonable and concrete, there's a great turnaround period which could be served as spoiled for me. Oh, sorry about the bad illustration but I know you get my point. Anyways, done to the point. I've heard about Forex brokers like Oanda, FXCM, etc. They share both positive and negative reviews. Yet, I know there are still other Forex brokers out there based here in PH or overseas. I want to know them and know where they're good/bad at. Note: Am fully aware of pro/s and con/s of trading in Forex. Have been playing at Oanda FXPractice for months already. Edit
Not getting the right context of comments, instead reading hindrance to deal with Forex while fully aware of it.
ECN. Used most by professional traders. Difficult platform for beginners
Tight spreads
Minimum deposit $10000 (or $3,000 if under 25yo) * Well diversified -Oanda
Market maker. Second largest retail FX brokerage in the US. Easy platform for beginners.
Fair spreads
No minimum deposit
Not well diversified, but well capitalized -Gain Capital (whitelabel forex.com) *Market Maker *Fair spreads *Minimum deposit $250 *Well diversified -FXCM Inc
ECN. Largest retail FX brokerage in the US
Tight spreads
Minimum deposit $2000
Not well diversified. CAUTION: FXCM nearly went bankrupt in Jan-2015 due to a lack of diversification and low capitalisation. As a result FXCM LLC was bailed out with a large loan which may prove difficult to pay back. Be warned that their business may not be sustainable in the long term. -MBTrading
ECN. Mid-sized retail FX brokerage
Fair spreads
Minimum deposit $400
Well diversified.
International Only- -LMAX (whitelabel DarwinEx) *DMA broker based in the UK. Note that as a DMA broker LMAX eliminates the ability for LPs to last-look transactions. This may result in reduced liquidity during volatile times as liquidity providers would be likely not to risk posting liquidity to LMAX's pool. *Tight spreads *Minimum deposit $10,000 *Fairly well diversified -Dukascopy *ECN based in Switzerland, but available elsewhere depending on local regulations. *Tight spreads *Minimum deposit $100 *Fairly well diversified -IC Markets *ECN based in Australia *Fair spreads on standard account, tight spreads on professional accounts. *Minimum deposit $200 *Fairly well diversified -Pepperstone *ECN broker based in Australia. *Fair spreads on standard account, tight spreads on professional accounts. *Minimum deposit $200 *Not well diversified Software / Apps: Desktop/mobile
Apps are typically broker dependent. Some brokers have their own proprietary software, while others lease common software like Metatrader or NinjaTrader. Some software has a large development community for indicators and EAs.
Terminology/Acronyms: www.forexlive.com/ForexJargon - Common terms and acronyms FAQ: I need to exchange money, how do I do it? This isn’t what this sub is for. Your best bet is using your bank or an online exchange service. Be prepared to pay a hefty fee. I have money in one currency and need to exchange it into another sometime in the future, should I wait? Don’t ask us this. We speculate intraday in FX and shouldn’t be relied on to tell you what’s best for you. Exchange the money when you need it. I have an FX account, should I start trading demo or live? This is highly debatable. You should definitely demo trade until you have mastered how to use the trading platform on desktop and mobile. After that it’s up to you. Many think that the psychology of trading live vs demo trading is massively different. So it may pay to learn to trade live. Just be warned that most FX traders lose almost their entire first account so start with a low affordable balance. What’s money management? Money management is a form of risk management and is arguably the most important aspect of your trading when it comes to long term survival. You should always enter trades with a stop loss - the distance of the stop allows you to calculate how large of a percent of your account balance will be lost if your trade stops out. You can run a monte carlo simulation to figure out the risk of having a number of trades go against you in a row to drain your account. The general rule is that you should only risk losing 1-4% of your account per trade entered. More on this here: www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/06/fxmoneymgmt.asp[35] www.swing-trade-stocks.com/money-management.html[36] What about automated trading? Retail FX traders have been known to program “Expert Advisors” (EAs) to automate trading. It’s generally advisable to stay away from that until you’re very experienced. Never buy an EA from a developer because the vast majority of them are scams. What indicators are best? That’s up to you to test and find out. Many in this forum dislike oscillating indicators since they fail to capture the essence of what moves price. With experience you will discover what works best for you. In my experience indicators that are most popular with professional traders are those that provide trading “levels” such as pivot points, fibonacci, moving averages, trendlines, etc. What timeframe should I trade? Price action can vary in different timeframes. In longer term timeframes the price action and fundamentals are much more clear. Unfortunately it would take a very long time to figure out whether or not what you’re doing is successful on longer timeframes. In shorter timeframes you can often tell very quickly if what you’re doing is profitable. Unfortunately there’s a lot more “noise” on these levels which can prove deceptive for those trying to learn. Therefore the best bet is to use a multi-timeframe analysis, working from top-down to come up with trades. Should I trade using fundamental analysis (FA) of technical analysis (TA)? This is a long standing argument in these forums and elsewhere. I’ll settle it here - you should have an understanding of both. Yes there are traders who blindly ignore one of the other but a truly well rounded trader should understand and implement both into the analysis. The market is driven in the longer term through FA. But TA is necessary to give traders a place to enter and exit trades from a psychological risk/reward standpoint. I’ve heard trading Binary Options is an easy way to make money? The general advice is to stay away from binaries. The structure of binary options is so that when you lose the broker wins. This incentive has created a very scammy industry where there are few legitimate binary options brokers. In addition in order to be profitable in binaries you have to win 55-65% of the time. That’s a much higher premium over spot FX. Am I actually exchanging currencies? Yes and no. Your broker handles spot FX is currency pairs. Although they make an exchange at the settlement date they treat your position in your account as a virtual currency pair. Think of it like a contract where you can only buy or sell it as a pair. In this sense you are always long one currency while short another. You are merely speculating that one currency will appreciate or depreciate vs another. Why didn't my order fill? Even if price appears to cross over a line on your chart it does not guarantee a fill. Different charting platforms chart different prices - some chart the bid price, some the ask price and some the midpoint price. To fill a limit order price needs to cross your limit's price plus the spread at the time that it is crossing. If it does not equal or exceed the spread then it will not fill. Be wary that in general spreads are not fixed. So what may fill at one time may not at another.
Oanda is a forex broker. Oanda offers the MetaTrader 4 and Web Trader forex trading top platforms. Oanda.com offers over 50 currency pairs, commodities, and precious metals for your personal investment and trading options. OANDA Review Strengths And Weaknesses. OANDA is one of the oldest and largest forex companies in the world, founded in 1996 by Doctors Olsen & Stumm. The market maker is a favourite for forex traders all around the world due mainly because of the following: Strength – Award winning service; Strength – Fast execution of orders The OANDA Corporation is a US-registered financial firm founded in 1996; this OANDA review will focus on the period after 2001, when OANDA launched its retail brokerage division. Though a tech firm at heart, this broker was the first to introduce a pipette to Forex trading in 2004 (a pipette refers to the fifth decimal in quotes of currency pairs). After spending five months testing 30 of the best forex brokers for our 4th Annual Review, here are our top findings on OANDA: Founded in 1996, OANDA is regulated in six tier-1 jurisdictions, making it a safe broker (low-risk) for forex and CFDs trading. OANDA's offering of research tools, news, and market analysis is excellent. OANDA Review 2020 Caters to traders looking for a stellar desktop trading experience ... making it one of the few global online forex brokers to do so. OANDA Corporation is a registered FCM and ...
Let's Talk About: Oanda - Are They A Good Broker? - YouTube
Forex com Review 2020 - Pros and Cons Uncovered Forex.com was founded in 2001 and it is a global forex broker. It is regulated by top tier regulators, like t... Review of Oanda and their fxtrade platform Price Action Trading learn more at www.love-the-pips.com Forex and Equity Index Trading Signals www.love-the-pips.com. 📈 Learn more about Oanda and get rebates on every trade: https://d2t.link/oanda In this new series "Lets Talk Brokers" I'll be reviewing different Forex brok... Best FX Trading Strategies (THE Top Strategy for Forex Trading) - Duration: ... OANDA Review: A Great Option for Low Cost Traders - Duration: 7:48. InformedTrades 26,451 views. OANDA paired with TradingView is a very smooth experience. In this video I go over what it's like using OANDA with TradingView and my experiences with it so ...
