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).

I get a lot of spam and junk email in my inbox every day so I usually don’t pay attention to new forex sites that spring up over the place, however, a couple of my subscribers have added comments on this site about a popular forex broker review and free forex signal service at Forex Bastards.

So, this weekend I decided to go and check it out. I signed up for Forex Bastards’ free forex signal service and read some of their popular review pages on forex brokers, forex education, and forex alerts.

Having perused the site I liked the similar views held by the owner of Forex Bastards, Felix Homogratus (not his real name), on Oanda – that being: Oanda is the best forex broker out there (but not perfect). Another interesting thing I found about Felix’s site was the economic announcement portals he uses to obtain the latest released figures. If you’re someone who isn’t using Bloomberg or Reuters to obtain your economic figures and you need these numbers with your forex trading strategy (and you can afford the hefty monthly fee) then you’ll want to subscribe to Felix’s signals and read what he has to say. Lastly, I had a good laugh at his “Forex Scams” page where he listed popular forex brokers such as AC-Markets, Refco, and FXCM on this page!

Probably the most interesting thing about Forex Bastards was Felix’s braodcast email that he sent out on the weekend on an interview he had with Richard Olsen, CEO of Oanda. I’m probably not at liberty to copy the entire email here, but what struck me was the fact that with Felix’s news announcement strategy (where he takes a direction as soon as figures are released on popular news announcements and then proceeds to exit that position within ONE minute of it being opened) was that Oanda were willing to take a loss with the positions he was taking (due to the fast moving market)!!

As Felix has had some success with this news announcement strategy he was looking to increase his position sizing to see if he could make more money with it, but after realising the cost to Oanda of his strategy he concluded after the interview that he would maintain his current position sizing and continue to withdraw his profits on a weekly basis.

In a way it reminded me of the days when forex brokers guaranteed stops and traders, such as myself, were able to make good money trading volatile announcements such as the Non-Farm Payrolls by strangling either side of the currency – unfortunately this strategy was nullified when forex brokers no longer guaranteed stops and we all experienced slippage of between 30-50 pips!

I similarly think that Felix’s news strategy will not last long at Oanda, as I haven’t heard of too many brokers willing to take a loss on behalf of their clients. Things that make it even worse for Felix are the fact that he has a large subscriber base where he details his strategy before the event and no doubt some of them use his strategies on Oanda too – all it will take is one person with a big enough bank to nullify this opportunity for everyone else.

For those using Felix’s strategies: take advantage while the opportunity exists, but don’t think it will last forever (although for your sakes I really hope it does).

Well, it seems it has been ages since Oanda’s last platform update, but as of 18th July 2005 Oanda have a new beta version of their FXTrade platform which they originally have been using in their FXGame but have now moved it over for live account traders.

Some of these new features include:

• You can select chart views (basic or advanced). The advanced chart view allows you to see the bid/ask/average price of the currency being displayed.
• There is now a quote panel similar to that seen in FXCM
• By placing your mouse cursor over the quote list you can bring up a sell or buy order according to which side of the quote list you click on
• There’s BUY and SELL buttons in the lower left hand corner of the chart
• They’ve seem to got rid of their annoying news ticker and replaced it with a much better news platform (I isn’t real time… yet… coming soon)
• Changed the format of the user preferences section – a bit cleaner and easier to navigate now

The most exciting change is the news!! I can’t wait until it becomes real time!!

Apart from that I can’t see any other changes, if there are other great ones please post them into the comment section below.

Even if Oanda isn’t a forex broker that is suited to your forex trading needs then I would highly recommend that you set up an account with them regardless!

Why?

Well, as far as I know – and correct me if I’m wrong dear friends – Oanda are the only forex broker that allow you to trade 24/7. Most forex brokers, especially the main players that I’ve reviewed, only operate between Sunday 1700 NY EST and Friday 1700 NY EST.

What happens if something happens over the weekend?

That’s two days of NO trading activity – nearly 30% of the week is taken up during the weekends… but does that mean that because the forex broker’s are closed the world closes too?!

Of course not.

If something occurs over the weekend, by having instant access to a market quote you can amend existing orders or enter new ones… and even if you don’t use Oanda you’ll at least be able to enter into trades that will hedge existing open trades from your closed forex brokers.

Think about it.

The second largest forex forum that I frequently visit is the Oanda FXMessage Board.

I like this forum for several reasons:

• It is hosted by the forex broker: Oanda
• Oanda’s director and staff occassionally visit and post in the forum
• Quite a few experienced forex traders visit and post
• Great way to find out if any problems that you are experiencing are also happening to other people

If you have an Oanda account then you’ll want to frequently visit these forums.