Oanda

Unlike many other top Forex brokers, OANDA is a multi-faced financial services provider that serves not only as a Forex broker, but also as a vehicle for numerous other financial investments and transactions. While company’s expansive offerings may pique the interest of some traders, those who are looking for a straightforward Forex trading experience can quickly be distracted by the mix of services, tools and information that are presented on the site.

During the course of the following OANDA review, we tried to extract the company’s valuable Forex trading services from the range of supplemental services that OANDA provides, which includes hedging and actual currency conversions. We saw through all of the marketing hype and evaluated the pure value of the company’s Forex trading services in our OANDA review, and we hope that this will help you make the right decision regarding this unusual brokerage. 

 

General Information
Maximum leverage: 50:1
Minimum deposit: None
Minimum deal size: None
Languages available: English, Chinese, German, Japanese, Spanish

 

Trading Platform
OANDA’s primary trading platform is called fxTrade. The demo version is aptly dubbed fxTrade Practice, in lieu of its former name, fxGame. Unlike most other Forex brokers that offer a demo for a limited time, OANDA’s fxTrade Practice is available for as long as it takes you to beef up your trading skills before opening a real account. Unfortunately for those who are familiar with other Forex trading platforms, OANDA’s platform does not offer the MetaTrader 4 platform, though users can integrate this popular platform into their OANDA trading platform, by invitation only. 

If you’re looking for a mobile trading platform, OANDA may offer just what you’re looking for, as they offer several options, including those for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. A more general mobile Forex platform, fxTrade Mobile, is designed to work with most other cell phones.

Generally speaking, we found OANDA’s trading platform to be sufficient, but if you prefer to use the popular MetaTrader 4 platform exclusively, you’ll want to consider other Forex brokers like Ava FX or FXCM.

 

Features
Despite its incompatibility with MetaTrader 4, OANDA offers some notable features that greatly augment the Forex trading experience. One unique feature offered by OANDA is its desktop trading application, which essentially creates a shortcut through which you can instantly access your OANDA account. This feature requires JAVA to run.

Another feature we found useful was the ability to create your own ‘box options’ in real time. In other words, OANDA allows you to mark your own indicators on your trading graphs so that you can easily track your Forex currency pairs to determine your next move. Similarly, the company’s Exchange Rate Ticker Widget enables users of both the real and demo versions of OANDA to receive real-time exchange rates for up to twenty currency pairs.

Lastly, OANDA offers a range of useful trading tools. During the course of our OANDA review, we found the currency converter, which is available in over 10 languages, to be the most useful, though not entirely unique. In addition to the services above, OANDA offers FXLabs, in which the new tools the company OANDA has developed can be used by users, thus allowing them to enjoy an enhanced trading experience. Among OANDA’s tools are live feed information, charts, comparisons and historical data as it relates to different currencies. Also available, are an FXManager platform for brokers, and the FXContest platform that allows users to compare their performance to the relative successes of other users.

 

Customer Service
Customer support is available from OANDA’s team 24/5. Specifically, support is available from Sunday at 4pm through Friday at 4pm EST. On the whole, OANDA’s customer support services are on par with those offered by the other top Forex brokers, if not slightly better. Our email to OANDA was answered in 16 hours, which was long, but relatively reasonable considering that we submitted our query on a Sunday afternoon, several hours before the customer service department opened for the week. Our chat inquiry received a courteous response within 3 minutes, which is significantly faster than most other Forex brokers responded, though not quite as quickly as Markets.com. Finally, we called OANDA’s customer service center and were on hold for under 2 minutes, which was a relatively short wait time as compared with other top Forex brokers.

OANDA also offers a well-organized help center which includes articles (many of which are also available in PDF versions) and useful how-to videos that explain both basic Forex principles and specific tasks related to using the OANDA trading platform. Just keep in mind that since OADNA offers a myriad of services in addition to Forex trading, you’ll need to peruse the help center until you find the information relevant to Forex trading, instead of having it at your fingertips. Still, once you familiarize yourself with the layout, you should have no trouble finding the information you need.

 

Ease of Use
Before discussing the ease of use of OANDA’s trading platform, it’s critical to note that OANDA requires you to disable your popup blocker, and that the site does not function maximally in Chrome. As such, Chrome users wishing to use OANDA should try using an alternate browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Because OANDA offers many different financial services, finding the Forex registration isn’t as simple as it would be with a broker that only offers Forex services such as eToro. Moreover, once you locate the Forex section which is placed above the site’s primary navigation, you’ll be asked to complete a five step registration process, which is markedly longer than the three step registration process of most other brokers. What we found especially unusual is the depth of the questions provided, many of which required sensitive confidential details that weren’t requested by other brokers, such as who your employer is, and your job title. You will also need to scan and upload copies of your government-issued identification and proof of residence, steps which prolong the registration process and can be aggravating for users without easy access to scanning equipment. This process also differs dramatically from other Forex brokers’ registrations which allow for trading immediately after registering. 

When opening an account, you will be able to choose from seven available currency options. You will also be able to select the leverage you want for your trading. OANDA offers much lower leverage than other platforms, which limits the risk. OANDA recommends a leverage of1:20, though they offer a maximum of 1:50 (whereas most platforms offer 1:200).

Once logged in, using the application if fairly simple and intuitive. It is easy to open new positions and then edit them. There is full information on the history of positions, transactions and activities in the account. The desktop can be set according to your personal preferences, to provide you with the tools most valuable to you. So you can decide which pairs you want to see and in what order, and you can set the form of the charts to be the most convenient for you to use.

To withdraw funds for the first time you are also required to set up a user profile that includes your bank account details, even if this wasn’t the method you used to deposit. Once the profile is set up, withdrawal process is rather simple. Funds will be returned to the same payment method with which you made the deposit.
OANDA claims to “be obsessed” with offering the lowest spreads in the market.

They are the first who offered pipettes, meaning that they offer spreads as low as 1.2 for EUR/USD. In addition, the spreads are the same for traders of any size. So even if you decide to trade only $1 – which you can on this platform, you will receive the same spread as someone who is trading $10 million (the maximum size of a single trade). These low costs are made possible by the high liquidity the company has access to thanks to their many members, as well as the banks they are partnered with which include: JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, UBS, Deutsche Bank and Royal Bank of Canada.

OANDA prides itself with the accessibility it provides to users discussion forums from anywhere within the site or the trading platforms. The community of users provides powerful information from which users can learn about FOREX and using OANDA’s platform and services.

With all its products, resources and forums to browse thru, OANDA offers a complete Forex trading experience. While it definitely takes time to master all these tools, you should have no problem mastering the system with a bit of practice.