IB or Oanda or ????

Have been trying it out this week Def. It is very good, a great service for forex traders.

 

I was talking about pips and not big figure it was 116.95

 

Sorry to be off thread here but changed my USD for GBP at a UK bank yesterday and they charged me 1.84 for them - swoon. I could have bought USD for 1.65.

On what trading platform and in what parallel world were those terms being offered yesterday???

Or just another instance of online fx trading being a million miles away from the real world.

 

hey, u know what? this gives me a good chance to make a point - u were trading with a single MM - instead of with an ECN!!

 

Don't think either an ECN or MM would have changed my physical $$'s!!

 

1. Up Time
Some currency brokers tend to have a high correlation between extreme market volatility and system outage.

I understand that Oanda has no designated telephone dealing desk other than an off-the-record commitment to close positions only.

For those trading with Oanda, how is their up time? Are they down frequently? Is their a correlation between outages and market volatility?

2. I have seen comments here and there that Oanda conducts price shading based on your positions. I am left with the conclusion that this is in play to a certain extent in the entire FX market.

Any comments on this would be most helpful.

Thanks in Advance

 

I have just visited Oanda's Forums under "FXTrade Platform Issues". There are 2 threads that discuss outages today during US NFP data release. Some comments about this being the 2nd US NFP in a row where Oanda has been down.

I called Oanda and they state that only their FX Game was down.

It would be great to hear from some more Oanda traders on this to clarify as there is a clear difference in opinion on the system performance today.

 

Lots of problems that happened right at 8:30 when NFP was released on Oanda. It wasn't freely quoting until 8:45 AM, and order entry was hit and miss - sometimes stuck, sometimes kicking out an error (server rejected). I had to log in no less than 4 times this morning. What could have been a fantastic day (had Oanda executed my orders) turned into a decent day.

The above relates to the live server.

 

Another thread, at http://elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=61727, says that CMSfx was also out today.

Coincidence?

 

ECNs, for example, Interactive Brokers, cannot shade price based on your positions, because counterparties do not have access to info re: each other's position when trading through ECNs. This is one of the reasons why it makes no sense to trade through a bucketshop, when one can instead use an ECN.