Hi all,

I am posting my experiences today and recently with Oanda at the urging of a friend, she thinks the community "needs to know" what is happening with brokers....the more people that share their experiences the better, and I tend to agree, so here it is.

I signed on with Oanda after reading rave reviews about them, many seem to think they are "hands down the best broker out there", and i really had a hard time finding much in the way of negative comments. I demo'd for a while, really got to like the platform....its simplicty, the interface is very intuitive, and the order execution is excellent in my opinion. I in fact became one of the "rave reviewers". I recommended Oanda to friends, got them to sign up for demo and live accounts.

The funny thing is, in the 6 months that ive been trading live with them, I've lost a huge amount of my starting capital.......close to 50% gone. It never once occured to me to blame Oanda for my losses. I take full responsiblity for my trades, always have, always will. The fact is I lost that money because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I was undisciplined, impatient....I had no plan, no strategy....it was pure "seat of the pants trading" and my account balance fully reflects that. Through all my losses, Oanda was still the "best broker out there". I never had a single problem with them while I was losing money.

My trading has recently taken a turn for the better. In particular this last month has been my most profitable. I am just going to give an example of things that have been happening to me recently with Oanda. I have been noticing "strange coincidental" disconnects from Oanda more than once in the recent weeks, and to be honest its just starting to look bad. Today I had several longer term trades on that were already well into profit. I decided I was going to do some short term scalping. I was feeling confident (overconfident) and I placed a larger than normal size trade on a quick scalp, not even changing the stoploss of 100 pips (which is the emergency stop for my normal trading off the 4hr/daily charts). I know it was stupid to not change the stop, but wouldnt you know it, the moment that trade started turning against me, here comes another one of those "coincidental" disconnects. This was very dangerous because i was actually trading against the main trend, and if this turned into a trend continuation with my stop 100 pips away, I would be out a LOT of money if I couldnt reconnect. This happened on a Friday with no major news releases and a slow moving market. Again, I take responsibility for this trade, because it was just a dumb trade....but I just cant help but notice the uncanny timing of these recent disconnects. I was pretty frantic to get this trade closed so I called them....guess what, they won't close a trade for you unless the connection problem is on "their" end, and they insisted that their servers were fine, and of course the problem was on "my end". Their response was pretty much "tough luck", try to get the issue resolved on your end. What I ended up doing was signing up for a free netzero dialup account, installing a 56k modem in my computer, connecting through dialup, and closing the trade (which luckily for me ended up as only an 8 pip loss).

For the rest of that day, I was unable to connect to Oanda's live server with my cable modem. EVERY OTHER internet connection was perfectly fine. My connection to the FXGame demo server was perfect. My connection to several MT4 brokers was perfect. FXTrade was the ONLY thing on the internet I couldn't connect to, at all. I did everything their "customer support" told me to do, clear the cache, restart the computer, reset the modem....which I knew was ridiculous, this was happening on 3 different computers, what is clearing the cache and restarting one computer going to do, when this is happening on 3 seperate computers? but I did it anyway. I reset my modem and router 3 times.......On a hunch I decided to try something. I changed my IP address. Normally your not supposed to be able to change the WAN IP address assigned to you by your cable ISP, it is a static address, and the cable company wants it to stay that way. There are certain routers that allow you to change the MAC address of your hardware, which then allows you to forcibly change your IP address, so that is what I did. The MOMENT my new IP address was issued, I clicked on the FXtrade icon....it came up instantly. The ONLY thing that allowed me to login to the FXtrade server after I had been disconnected all morning, was changing my IP address. Same computer, same ISP, same location, same internet backbone, SAME TRACEROUTE, every single variable the same, except for the IP address. I don't know about you, but that just smells bad. If someone can come up with a good explanation of how my IP address got blocked from accessing the FXtrade live server, at the exclusion of EVERYthing else, I would love to hear it.

Regards,
David