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Oanda Broker Review: Why Nobody Will Ever Promote Certain Brokers

admin on August 10th, 2008

With the media interest in online forex brokers skyrocketing in recent years and the subsequent proliferation of forex-related websites, one would think that all of the best online brokers would have been given abundant reviews, featured and linked to by dozens and dozens of websites and so on, all for the best interest of the forex trader. However, this statement doesn’t exactly hold true.

Introducing Brokers (IB) in the Forex World

Many online brokers offer an affiliate program, awarding their affiliates with either a flat rate per client subscription or a percentage on the site earnings. Of course, since most online brokers gain profit exclusively from their spreads, this means (at least to some extent) that spreads featured by such brokers tend to be higher than they could actually be. This doesn’t pose a big problem in terms of competition, since the vast majority of online brokers adopt this mechanism to drive investors to their sites anyway.

But what if some chose to do everything in their power to try and reduce the spreads, thus giving their traders favorable market conditions? They probably would have to renounce resorting to affiliate programs altogether, and reach all their customers by themselves.

Oanda Forex Broker Review

Oanda is one of such companies, maybe the best known of all among these. Comparing their conditions with a typical forex broker, we honestly think that their trading conditions are extremely competitive and much better than the standard online broker, including:

• trading any fraction of a lot (even just 1 unit);
• ability to set stop and limit orders with absolute precision;
• spreads that are variable (which brings an inherent additional risk to the table), but typically lower than the normal broker;
• second-by-second interest, etc.

The first three point are of great value for every forex trader, and as for the first two, we simply have no knowledge of any other online broker offering similar features. But then, why don’t you see Oanda reviewed and featured all across the Web? Of course, a great part of the answer lies in the fact that, as we already explained, they save on spreads by choosing not to have an IB program, so websites are rarely interested in featuring them.

Let’s clear something up: we are not saying that Oanda is the absolute best online broker you’ll ever find, because that’s not probably true: however, we definitely feel that it’s getting less reviews and much less exposure than it actually deserves.

Are brokers like Oanda destined to fade into obscurity? We honestly hope not, but the facts so far — safe for a few exceptions — tell us otherwise.