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Originally Posted by Felix Homogratus

Hi there

In the middle of 2007, they really caught up to it, and started massive actions against our traders by banning their accounts, and by sometimes even refusing to pay their profits.

Only because you spoke to their president Richard Olsen.
Here are your quotes from July 7th 2006:-

"You know, I just got off the phone with Richard Olsen, the President of Oanda. The reason I called him, is because as you know both Tom Yeomans and I use Oanda to trade during the news. And we recommend Oanda to everybody...and by the way, we don't make any money from our recommendations, it's completely unbiased. Anyway, bottom line is, I get close to a million hits per week on this forexbastards.com site, and Oanda being ranked the highest, I know for a fact, that because of Tom's and my recommendations, Oanda got thousands of real accounts opened, and a lot of these people trade the news like us. I personally place on average 400,000 per trade, so $40/pip. Sometime next week or the following week, I am planning to up that to 1,000,000 per trade, so $100/pip, and in another few weeks, I want to go up to about 2,000,000 per trade, so $200/pip. Now imagine few thousand people doing that at the same time on the same news report, and all make money, someone has to pay for that...Oanda is a market maker...not a broker. So I started getting concerned, I wanted to make sure that whatever we are doing won't backfire on us one day, and lose us all a bunch of money, because of slippage or whatever, so I thought it's good to address it directly to Oanda's president, tell him what we are all doing, and all that.

This guy Richard Olsen, is one of the nicest guys I ever talked...honesty, fairness, and concern for his customers just permeates from his words, his attitude, his tone of voice, what a nice and humble fellow, I mean I am literally still smiling in my heart from talking to him...and it's very amazing that a head guy of the 3rd largest online forex platform could be so humble... Bottom line is he listened very carefully what we are doing, looked at the forexbastards.com website, thanked me very much for asking this in advance as opposed to reacting to it later. He said that he will review my trades and activity of my Oanda account for the last few months, and he will get back to me, and will let me know whether they'll keep filling people with similar activity, and if they do, what's the maximum number of lots we could trade each with such activity, e.t.c. He said, he'll get back to me on Monday or Tuesday. And I can't wait to talk to him, because literally, I've had this fear for a while, that once I start increasing my lot sizes, Oanda will ban me or something...I mean making money during the news seems so easy, that I almost feel like I am doing something illegal or something. So, no matter what Richard Olsen tells me will be good, because at least both I and you will know how far we can go with this type of trading on Oanda, and instead of having hopes and fears, we will have facts and certainty. Stay tuned to my alert emails next week, I'll update you on what Richard Olsen tells me.

To Our Success!
-Felix Homogratus"


The conversation 2 weeks later 15th July 2006:-


"Okay, now...the conversation with Oanda CEO. Basically, I personally use Oanda right now as my forex broker, and I am in complete love with it. There is no other broker that I know that's better than Oanda for news trading, because Oanda has one step execution, so I just click buy or sell, and I am in the trade, most of the time before the spike even starts happening during the news. I don't set their boundaries, and I've never had a reject on a trade, and never really had any slippage. The only thing is Oanda widens their spreads during the news releases...the highest I've seen was 12 pips...but I am now hearing that some people witnessed a 15 pips spread on the GBP during this week's PPI numbers. The high spreads never bothered me much, because I mostly trade EUR/USD, and the spreads usually don't go higher than 5 to 7 pips on that pair during the news. And whenever I trade the GBP, the spreads do get usually 10 pips average, but the pound has such big range, that it moves usually at least 40 to 50 pips after my triggers are hit, so that 10 pips spread simply becomes a normal business expense.

I've normally been trading with Oanda about 400,000 per trade on average, and I usually shoot to make about $2,000 per week in profits. I've been so successful doing this, pretty much having absolutely no negative trades on the news releases, that I wanted to increase my trade lots to 2 million, and start even taking some managed funds possibly. One thing that worried me was that there was no other broker that was consistently filling people during news before the spikes. Most of them have 2 step execution which makes it pretty much impossible to get in before the spikes, others have terrible slippage, others don't let you exit the trades once you are in them during the news. So bottom line was that Oanda was the knight in the shining armor for my trading style. However, all these other broker problems always made me worried, that once I increase lot sizes, Oanda will stop filling me and will start slipping me like everyone else. Therefore, I decided to call Richard Olsen, the CEO of Oanda, and talk to him personally about what I do, how I trade, and how most of my subscribers trade, and see if it would be a problem for me to increase my lot sizes to 2 million, and still get filled the same way, and if my subscribers could still feel safe with Oanda about this way of trading. I called Richard last Friday, July 7th, he thanked me for the concern and call, and said that he'll review my account and will get back to me, and I told everyone that I'll email you once I talk to him second time. And here is why I am writing this email...

So this week we've been playing phone tag with Richard, but I finally got to talk to him Thursday morning. Richard told me that the way I currently trade with getting in before the spike, and exiting usually in less than a minute, is more taking unfair advantage of their technology than it is news trading. In order for me to understand what he meant, he told me exactly how Oanda operates behind the scenes. Pretty much Oanda doesn't trade against their clients, what they do is for every trade you or I place, they hedge by taking the same position through the central feed. And that's done automatically through their software. So supposedly they really love profitable traders, because they make most of their money on the spread, and since they hedge, to them it really doesn't matter whether a person is profitable or not, except they understand that when the person is profitable, he'll be doing more trading, which means more spread commissions to Oanda. So bottom line is Richard said that Oanda wants everybody to succeed and it wants to create a fair environment where to them they actually get happy when they have profitable traders. However, news times is an exception to that. Because what's happening during the news times, is let's say I see the number during news that hits my trigger, and the EUR/USD is at 1.2700, I buy the EUR/USD, because let's say the report is bad for the dollar, the EUR spikes to 1.2740 within a matter of seconds, I exit my trade, and I am a happy camper with a profit. What's happening with Oanda, is they fill me on 1.2700, by the time their software is able to hedge that position, the market already moved let's say to 1.2725, so they hedged my position at a 25 pips loss to themselves, which means they have to pay the profits to me out of their own pocket. The reason they've been widening their spreads is to try to compensate for that. But since the market moves so much during these news, often times 30, 40, 50+ pips within seconds, no matter how wide their spreads are, if somebody is quick enough to enter and exit with a profit like I do, Oanda usually still end up losing money.

So bottom line was, I asked Richard what he suggests I should do...and he asked me to keep my positions a bit longer, perhaps 5 minutes or so, and not exit within 30 or 45 seconds. Then I asked him...well, what if I have a stop/loss and a limit, and one of those gets hit within a minute or 30 seconds. He said that it's part of business, and he understands a stop/loss or limit being hit. I asked him...well...if I continue doing what I am doing without changing anything, will you suspend my account? He kept saying that he doesn't want to do it, and kept asking to please work with him on this, and all. Then I asked, well...what about my subscribers...I have referred probably over a thousand of people to you, and most of them trade the same way I do...are you going to suspend them? He said, they'll take it on case by case basis. They don't like to suspend people, and try to avoid that as much as possible. Then I asked...well what if someone is extremely profitable at this news trading...will you purposely slip them or widen their spreads more than anyone else's? He said that Oanda doesn't discriminate against their clients on individual basis. What one person gets, everyone else gets. They won't put anybody on manual execution or do any other dirty tricks. The only thing they can always do is ask client to close an account with Oanda.

So here is my take on this whole Oanda situation. Of course, until Richard Olsen approves of my trading style, I won't be trading 2 million dollar lots. Because if all of a sudden I start making $12K per week, and my trading style is still not approved, they'll probably won't be willing to negotiate with me much longer with a burn rate to their company of close to $50,000 per month. And as you know, I take my profits weekly... So I'll play carefully, keep my trades at 400,000 per lot or so, try to tweak my trading a bit to satisfy their policies...perhaps after each trade, to put a stop/loss with a 10 pips profit, and a limit of 30 to 50 pips profit (depending on the report), and let my positions run...if it hits either stop or limit within first minute or tow...I guess that's part of business as Richard says...and hopefully large number of the trades will play around between my stop and limits, and eventually hit my limit in 5, 10 or 15 minutes or whatever. Anyway, we'll see... And of course, I'll start actively searching for another trading solution that would allow me to do what I am currently doing, and I'll keep you posted. I do hope, I find a compromise with Oanda though. I do believe 100% everything Richard told me, and I do believe that Oanda is super honest. The reviews on my website, and positive posts on many internet forums can't lie...

Here is another thing...from my experience and Tom Yeomans's experience, at least 80% of people that trade the news usually make money on the news, and then piss it away on other trades during the rest of the day. Very few people can stay disciplined and keep their profits. If you fall into that category...you surely have nothing to worry about...remember until you get your broker to physically send you a check or send you a wire transfer, whatever money you see on your account are nothing but numbers, and unless you start cashing in profits on consistent basis, nobody is even going to care about you. You'll be getting filled the same way on the news, making the bucks, and then losing that on other trades...none of the brokers will probably have a problem with that J I have a new saying..."you don't know your broker until you start cashing in your profits on weekly basis, because until you get that payment, whatever you see on your live account are just numbers that few brokers care about, because they know 90%+ of all traders lose whatever profits they have in the account anyway"

Obviously, also remember this about Oanda...the reason they are so popular is because they are so honest. I've never even seen Oanda advertise, it's all word of mouth, and they don't even pay a referral fee to anybody, so whoever recommends them has absolutely no financial incentive. Richard Olsen of course cares about that reputation a lot, and if they start closing accounts left and right, the word will spread super fast, and they'll start losing their reputation, so start losing their business. It's a trade-off. Kind of like...if they make 10 million on spreads, and they lose 500,000 to some news traders, because their software wasn't able to hedge the position at a similar price, that may be worth it just pay that to save the reputation. And of course, if you keep your news profits under $10,000 per month, they'll probably tolerate you much better than if you start making $50K or $100K per month.

Bottom line is I believe in win-win situations for everybody, and I respect very much what Richard Olsen has done with Oanda and the kind of honest service they have provided to every trader that I personally ever met, so I'll try to accommodate my news trading to make them happy, and once I succeed and Richard is happy about the way I do it, I'll let you know. And if for some reason I find another magical broker that will allow me to do what I've been doing with Oanda, I'll also let you know. Bottom line is, just do what you used to do, don't worry too much about this...Richard is not stupid, he is a businessman and he cares about his company, so he probably won't let the **** hit the fan, and he probably won't start suspending accounts left and right, because that would create TERRIBLE reputation for Oanda. I'll be actively trying to seek a compromise with him about us as a community... In the meantime, just don't get greedy, if you are making money on the short term fundamentals, and your trading depends solely on entering before the spikes, and keeping your position for less than 2 minutes, try to keep your profits below $10,000 per month, withdraw them on weekly basis, so that you don't lose them on some other stupid trades, and start thinking of ways to keep your positions a bit longer and still be profitable... If you are already trading in a way, where you keep most of your positions for longer than 5 minutes, then this doesn't even apply to you...

Thanks J

-Felix"

Interesting reading...