Recently, I’ve begun experimenting with a free foreign exchange trading account with OANDA. You might wonder about my silence on the blog lately… between several jobs, learning about financial markets, flying model airplanes, and keeping up on my reading, I just haven’t been really interested in the blog.
You know how it goes. By this fall when the weather cools off, I’ll resume my normal 5-days-a-week blogging. But in the interim, I thought I’d provide this useful link for those wishing a free, never-expiring paper-trading account for ForEx:
https://fxtrade.oanda.com/your_account/login.shtml?account=fxgame&type=trading_platform
Five reasons I like Oanda:
- You can specify arbitrary sizes for your trades. So rather than specifying, say, 7 lots of 10,000, you can leverage one trade to 70,000 shares, or even pick an arbitrary lot size like 35,768. This is HUGE, because it means there’s really no distinction between a “mini” account or standard. You set your thresholds exactly where you want them.
- FXGame never expires, even if you don’t put money into your OANDA account. I now want to put real money into my OANDA account, because they’ve been so friendly about letting me have a free paper-trading account for as long as I want to practice.
- Lowest spread on EUR/USD that I’ve seen.
- The Java client is compatible across Linux, Windows, and Mac. I had real problems with the Java client for Thinkorswim.com on Linux, which is my main comparison point. On the plus side, Thinkorswim works great on Mac as well as Windows.
- Better implementation of Ichimoku Kinko Hyo, the main trading indicator I’m working with. It lets you specify values for trading windows A, B, and C, rather than only A and B like some other trading platforms.
Too bad it doesn’t let me set my trailing stop loss automagically. Then it would be just about perfect. As it is, if I want to adjust a trailing stop loss on FXGame, I have to do it manually. No biggie, but my co-workers might wonder what I’m doing a couple of times a day 🙂