One of the most well-known and popular assets, stocks are offered by many online trading platforms. However, finding a good broker is a difficult task: you have to be extremely cautious to avoid inconvenient or unsafe companies. Oanda is one of those brokers who offer indices as a trading instrument, but should you trust them with your money? Let’s find out.
About Oanda
Oanda is an international broker with its headquarters located in the US. The company has been around since 1996, and it has a solid reputation for providing stable access to financial markets for more than a million clients. Oanda is heavily regulated: all of its relations with traders are monitored by four national regulators at once, including the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the central bank of Singapore (MAS). When it comes to safety and security, Oanda’s clients have nothing to worry about.
But what about the conditions? While they are pretty favorable, many users claim that the platform isn’t very user-friendly for complete beginners in trading: the website is difficult to navigate, and there are almost no educational materials, so you’ll have to figure everything out all by yourself. When it comes to available instruments, the selection is also pretty small: the company lists currency pairs, indices, even crypto — but how can you trade actual stocks? Let’s figure that out.
Stock trading options
Oanda stock trading options are limited to indices, which means you can only access stocks in a form of some pre-made basket, so you’re basically investing in many stocks at once through a single instrument. However, Oanda allows trading indices only as a CFD (Contract for Difference). That means you don’t actually buy or sell stocks — instead, you bet on their price movements and earn (or lose) the difference. Think of it as an add-on to some basic instrument. You can’t trade options with this broker.
Oanda offers CFDs for many primary indices, including US SPX, US Wall St. 30, UK 100, and Japan 225. All the spreads for indices are rather competitive. Other CFD trading options offered by this broker include 70 various Forex pairs, a wide range of hard and soft commodities, and metals. All in all, there are more than enough trading instruments to choose from, if you don’t focus too much on stocks.
