OANDA is one of the most important forex brokers in the world. It currently offers services to North America, Middle East and Pacific Asia. The main purpose of the company is to use innovative technology in order to provide a special trading platform that is combined with high quality information. It is also regulated by many financial authorities, thus being one of the most reliable companies of its kind.
OANDA comes to the table with 2 types of accounts. One is for individuals and the other one is for institutions. An individual forex trading account can be utilized by experienced and novice traders. An institutional account is better geared for general partnerships, trusts, corporations and limited companies. In order to open a OANDA real money trading account you need to supply the company with extra documents: proof of ID (ID Card, Driver’s License or passport), proof of residence (utility bill), a risk disclosure form that is issued by the local governing authority that watches forex trading and in the case of institutions an incorporation certificate is also needed. It should also be noted that an individual can register offline as well if he/she mails the application through an email address. As expected, you can sign up for an account that is designed for practice, called FXGame. You will trade forex through virtual money. This is risk free and you can easily learn what to do before you actually use money.
In order to fund your OANDA real money account you can opt for PayPal, money orders, checks or wire transfers. In most situations it will take a maximum of 5 business days for the money to be available. If you opt for PayPal you can start using the money the fastest, after just two days. OANDA does take longer to fund do to the regulations that are set by financial authorities. Even if you waste more time you can be sure that reliability is as high as possible. Keep in mind that you can only make a withdrawal by using the exact method that you used for funding the account in the first place.
The Oanda proprietary trading platform is called FXTrade. You can even download it for use on mobile phones and it currently supports Android, iPhone, Blackberry and iPad. FXTrade stands out as very user friendly and does offer a very wide range of good tools that you can use to facilitate your forex trading. The only problem is that if you have low bandwidth you might have loading issues.
Just like any good company in the market, OANDA offers 24X7 online chat support in a combination with telephone and email support. There is even a forum that users can log into and talk. The only problem that can be mentioned is the fact that support is in English so if you do not know the language there are going to be problems.
