The change is announced about a month after the broker relaxed the margin requirements for this currency pair.
Online trading company OANDA Japan is planning yet another change to margin requirements for FX instruments. This becomes clear from brief notice filed by the brokerage on its website on September 7, 2020.
The company warns that it will be raising the margin rate for GBP/USD to 3% from the current level of 2%, with the change set to become effective today, September 14, 2020. As usual, traders are advised to make sure that they have sufficient funds in their accounts in case they want to maintain their GBP/USD positions open. Some traders may prefer to close their positions in this pair as losses may be incurred.
The leverage change for GBP/USD is announced about a month after OANDA JP relaxed the margin requirement for this pair from 3% to 2%. The company did not provide any reasons for its decision. OANDA Japan has been among the Forex brokers that have seen increased trading volatility across FX markets over the past several months. This can explain why the company has been revising margin requirements for various instruments quite often.
The increased volatility has also led to some technical issues. In mid-March 2020, for instance, the broker issued a warning regarding the performance of MetaTrader 4 (MT4) during a period of hectic market activity.
Back then, the broker said it had received a report that MT4 did not operate smoothly when the market became active. That is why the company conducted a check. As a result, it was confirmed that when the frequency of updating prices (the number of ticks) increases, the operation of the platform becomes unstable depending on the specifications of some customers’ PCs or the Internet environment. The same problem was not confirmed with the 64-bit MT5.
On July 21, 2020, however, tech problems plagued the work of MT5 too. The broker confirmed that there have been delays in execution of trades on MT5. OANDA Japan explained that as a large amount of trades, limit and stop orders had been placed by some customers the night before, its trading system got overloaded, which in turn affected the transactions of other customers. Several hours later the broker confirmed that the execution issues were resolved and that there were no more delays.
The broker apologized for the inconvenience caused to its customers and pledged that it plans to further strengthen the system.
Let’s recall that OANDA Japan launched MT5 early this year. In December 2019, the company announced that its clients can apply for MT5 demo accounts. The brokerage noted that it had been receiving traders’ requests for the addition of MT5 for quite a long time and was happy to respond to these requests.
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