Oanda’s FXLabs
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).
May 9th, 2007 at 4:27 am
I make heavy use of oanda’s tick data in my backtesting, however, I wish they offered more pairs than the majors. I’ve thought about using the current data offered to calculate the crosses on my own (i.e., (GBP/USD) * (USD/JPY) = GBP/JPY ), but I’m curious if my prices might be off by a tick or two at certain moments when prices may not be equalled out by arbitrage.
What do you thing about that?
A general comment on signals:
I’ve looked at a few services, and reviewed past trades of services on collective2. I’ve noticed that quite a few signal providers focus on win %. They attempt to get a high win % by setting enormously large stop losses, waiting around for a pair to move into profitability. While that’s probably OK for trades with positive carry, I find it to be a very irresponsible way to trade. Some of them send a signal, with no stop loss…not even an emergency SL. How is a trader supposed to manage risk with a signal like that???
I trade a mechanical system that has far more losers than winners…that’s b/c I used relatively small stops and let winners run. The equity curve looks different, but it works for me (I developed the system using Oanda tick data + perl).
May 14th, 2007 at 2:49 am
I recently downloaded data from FXTicks, but I don’t know how to convert it into 1 minute OHLC data for use in metatrader 4 for backtesting. If anyone can help me out with this, please let me know.
at-here@hotmail.com
August 6th, 2007 at 10:51 am
I’m just trying to find a place that will sell a block of data where you don’t require an account. It seems like this is unheard of.
I’m willing to pay for good unbroken data, and for as far back as I can get it. Does anyone sell this?
October 2nd, 2007 at 2:22 am
http://www.olsendata.com/
not cheap, but this is what you are asking for…
August 12th, 2009 at 4:28 am
Thanks for posting this article.This really gives more knowledge and ideas about trading and its applications. This helps me on understanding things about forex,its trading and other related topics about this.
keep on posting!