Currency Secrets

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).

Keeping in theme with the previous posting on CMC, we’ll include another popular broker that I haven’t had the time to research or test, hopefully those who have used GFT Forex before can help share some of their experiences to others about this forex broker.

Several years ago when GFT Forex was relatively new on the block, I read on the MoneyTec forums about one guy who claimed he made a large amount of money which GFT Forex weren’t honouring.

I never knew what happened to that case, but it made me steer clear of GFT, although I did sign up for a demo account and trial their platform.

Regardless, several things of note that I liked about GFT were:

• Their Dealbook platform was quite good (things may have changed since I last tested it - for better or worse)
• 400:1 leverage available

If anyone would like to share their experiences on GFT Forex please add your comments below.

CMC Markets opened up a new branch to their CFD platform many years ago by introducing the ability for their clients to trade the forex market.

Some of the benefits of CMC Forex include:

• Small spreads (as compared to larger forex firms such as FXCM)
• No need to trade in specific lot sizes
• 100:1 leverage
• One click trading
• No commissions
• If-Done and OCO orders

Some of their disadvantages include:

• $2,000 opening balance
• Minimum trade size US$10,000

If you have used CMC Forex in the past before let us know about your experiences by adding a comment below. By sharing your experiences we can be a small yet powerful force in finding out which forex brokers a better than others (as I can only do so much whereas if we have everyone adding detailed comments we can all help each other).

FXCM have released a new version of their platform aptly labelled FXCM Trading Station 2.

The new features of this platform include:

• Cosmetic changes to skins
• News and charting plugins integrated within the same platform - although you still need to download them separately
• Customization of look and feel of just about everything in the platform
• Hot keys (create your own)
• Tabbed browsing

Unfortunately there’s nothing too exciting with the changes, however, it is a change and I guess a change is as good a holiday!

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.