Review by Nathan Andrews, Editor – MiddleEastForex.com 

OANDA are one of the innovators in the retail Forex market and offer their FXTrade platform for trading currencies in all of the major pairings. FXtrade is a java based application which can be run through a browser. A desktop version also exists which is considerably faster to start-up.

FXtrade is a simplistic and on the surface a rather dated trading platform with basic charting features (does not offer ability to draw Fibs).

OANDA offer mostly tight spreads and advertise an “industry low spread of 0.9 pips on EURUSD”. Their promotion of 0.9 spreads is highly misleading as the 0.9 spread rapidly expands to the highest in market (up to 10 pips) upon market events making it frusrating to trade for traders who like to bounce of support and resistance with tight stops. The leverage offered is a max of 50:1.

One gets the impression OANDA’s offerinsg are more the more “senior” FX traders.

Overall a decent solution, but very dated and the very annoying increase in spreads which often hunt out your stops/limits makes it a frustrating platform to use. The java platform is prone to network disconnections on seamlessly good network connections.

Company

Website: fxtrade.oanda.com

OANDA Canada
330 Front Street West,
12th Floor Toronto, ON.

Platform

FXtrade is the java based platform which loads up optionally via a pre-downloaded desktop applet to via your internet browser. The interface to FXtrade is dated but is simple to use and understand though some of the academic heritage of OANDA is evident in the FXtrade platform, in short you can see its designed by a Computer Scientist using UNIX and not necessarily the Forex trader of 2008.

Trade and Execution

Very fast trade executions with rare slippages.

Charting

The Charting is basic without use of a full range of colours of Fibs.  

News and Market Research

For live market commentary OANDA provides the IFR (Thomson Reuters) service which in itself is not the best of commentary.

 Overall Rating

2 Stars *** (out of 5)

A dated solution in need of a revamp, but clearly OANDA have a winning formula and the logic “if its not broken, don’t fix it” applies though the issue of widening spreads is problematic.