Currency Secrets

As most of you know Oanda is one of my preferred forex brokers. Sure, I understand that they’re not perfect, no forex broker is, but they suit my needs.

One area of Oanda’s site that I particularly like to frequent is their FXLabs site.

Here you’ll see innovations that Oanda are working on to help improve customer experience, which will no doubt help their bottom line.

Several things that interest me at the moment are:

• FXDesktop - Finally! An easier way to access your account by clicking on a shortcut on your desktop! No need to have the trading station open up in a browser.
• FXNewsEffects - Here you can view the effect an economic announcements has on a currency. Quite insightful if you’re starting out with trading the news.
• FXTicks - Want some free tick data? Just simply put USD$1,000 into your Oanda account (unless you wish to apply for academic exemption in which case you don’t need US$1,000 in your account, but you’ll still need an FXTrade account nonetheless) and subscribe to receive free tick data going back since 1st January 2004. Currently you can only order one currency’s tick history at a time, and you can only download data on: EUR/USD, GBP/USD, USD/CAD, USD/CHF & USD/JPY. Also note the following notice on their site:
  NOTICE: Once again the FXTicks service is experiencing overwhelming demand. We have scheduled a major infrastructure upgrade for the weekend of April 21, which will allow us to service this large volume of orders in a timely manner. Order processing will effectively be suspended until the upgrade is complete. Thank you for your patience and for your continued interest in the OANDA FXTicks product!
• FXTradeTicker - If you have Google desktop or Yahoo widgets then you can’t go past Oanda’s Google gadget and Yahoo widget that shows prices for popular currency pairs plus your account balances (including sub-accounts).

Hopefully there’ll be more innovations that Oanda will bring out over the coming years, but for the time being I applaud their creativity and effort at publishing some of these useful tools (I’ll be particularly interested to see how FXTicks develops and keeps up with demand throughout the year).