The part I rely on most is the pricing. OANDA quotes a spread that is built into the price rather than a spread plus a per-lot commission I have to reverse-engineer later, and the Activity tab gives me a clean breakdown of what each trade actually cost in spread terms. When I reconcile a month of trading, I am not exporting a fills file and re-adding commission lines to work out my real cost basis. On the majors the spread sits where it should, around a pip on EUR/USD in normal conditions, sourced from the bank liquidity providers behind the platform, and I have never felt like I was being quoted a number invented in a back room. There is a core-pricing option in some regions for people who prefer a raw spread plus commission, but for a discretionary book where I am in and out of the same pairs all week, a cost I can predict matters more to me than shaving a fraction off a headline number. The API is the reason I have stayed rather than drifted to a flashier platform. OANDA exposes a proper REST interface for placing and managing orders plus a streaming endpoint for live prices, and it is documented at the level you actually need to build against it rather than a marketing page pretending to be docs. I run two automated systems off it, one that manages bracket orders on a handful of pairs and one that just pulls historical candles every night to refit a model, and both have been dependable. The documentation is honest about its rate limits, which sounds like a low bar until you have worked with vendors who let you find theirs by getting throttled in production. Pulling clean historical pricing straight from the same venue I execute on means my backtests are not quietly trained on someone else's data. The Algo Labs program packages this for people who want it more guided, but the raw API is what I care about, and it behaves. TradingView being wired directly into the experience is the other thing I would not give up. I chart in TradingView anyway, so being able to analyze and place orders against my OANDA account from the same interface removes the usual dance of drawing a level in one tool and switching to another to act on it. The proprietary OANDA Trade platform, web and desktop, uses the same layout across both, so moving from my desk to a laptop does not mean relearning where anything lives. It is not the most beautiful platform I have used, and I will come back to that, but the charting is genuinely good because it is TradingView underneath, and the order ticket does what I expect without surprises. On execution itself, the order types cover what I actually use: market and limit orders, stops, trailing stops, and bracket orders that attach a take-profit and a stop-loss to an entry in one action. On the majors during normal hours my fills are effectively instant, which is what you want when you are entering on a level rather than chasing it. The mobile app is the part I would call merely fine. It does the job when I need to check a position or close something away from my desk, the two-step login is sensible, and I do not ask more of it than that. It is not where I do my real work and it does not pretend to be. The currency data is a quieter strength that I lean on more than I expected to. OANDA's currency converter and historical exchange-rate lookups are something I have used for years, separately from any trading, to check a rate on a given past date when I am reconciling an invoice or sanity-checking a figure that crossed currencies. Having that same lineage of FX data sitting behind the broker I trade with is reassuring in a way that is hard to put into words until you have been burned by a platform that prints prices nobody else agrees with. A few controls make position sizing painless: - I can set leverage manually rather than being stuck on the maximum the platform wants to hand me, which several competitors do not allow and which matters if you are careful about how much exposure a single trade carries. - Trade sizes can go very small, so I can size a position to a fixed risk amount instead of being forced into round lots that overshoot my stop distance. - The minimum to fund is effectively nothing, and the demo account does not expire in my region, so I forward-tested a strategy for weeks on the live data feed before risking real money on it. The regulatory footing is the part I think about least day to day and value most when I do think about it. OANDA has been operating since 1996, it holds licenses with the FCA in the UK, the CFTC and NFA in the US under OANDA Corporation, and ASIC, MAS, and CIRO across other regions, and it offers negative balance protection so a violent gap cannot push my account below zero. After a quarter century of running across the major financial centers, the question of whether my funds are where they should be is simply not one I lie awake on, and that is worth a great deal in an industry with no shortage of operators who do not clear that bar. The research is fine. MarketPulse and the daily analysis are well written and I read them, but I would not move brokers to get them and I do not pretend they drive my decisions. They are a sensible bonus sitting on top of the things that actually keep me here.

Rate reliability, it's always up to date, currency portfolio, usability

I like how you can select a range to get an average of historical rates and the ease of use.