How to day trade with OANDA
Discover more ways to enhance your trades with these strategies for day trading. Explore technical strategies and institutional-grade tools like Autochartist.
What is day trading?
Day trading is a fast-paced form of trading where traders will buy and sell within the same day. Day trading removes overnight risk - where traders are unable to react to large market gaps whilst asleep. Instead, day trading focuses on actively monitoring intra-day price action and traders can wait for the perfect window to enter and exit trades.
And when it comes to costs, day trading has one huge advantage: It can lower or completely eliminate overnight funding fees depending on the instruments you trade.
Understanding day trading
How to day trade
To day trade you must manage your positions within a single trading day – meaning you must close out your positions by 5pm ET– to avoid overnight financing costs. Please note that financing costs on commodity, metal (excluding gold and silver) and bond positions are calculated on a continuous, second-by-second basis.
With your OANDA account, you can implement technical analysis tailored for short-term volatility.
Managing day trading risk
- Manage your trading risks with our suite of risk management orders, such as stop-loss orders and guaranteed stop-loss orders (GSLOs).
- Read our tutorials and guides to help you learn how to limit risks when trading the financial markets.
Understanding day trading rules
Under FCA regulations, designed to mitigate leverage risks, trading ratios are capped at 30:1 for major currency pairs and 20:1 for minor pairs, gold, and major indices. Negative Balance Protection guarantees that retail clients cannot lose more than the total funds available in their account. Additionally, a margin stop-out rule is in effect when you day trade: if your account equity falls below 50% of the required margin, the platform will automatically liquidate your most losing positions to prevent further deficit.
Advanced day trading strategies
Day trade with OANDA to execute professional-grade trading strategies:
Momentum and breakouts
Identifying when price clears a key resistance or support level with high volume, using 5-second chart intervals for precision.
Moving average crossovers
Using short-term (fast) and long-term (slow) moving averages (EMAs) to identify entry and exit points as trends shift.
Technical indicators
Accessing tools like MACD, RSI, and Bollinger Bands to find overbought or oversold market conditions.
Autochartist:
This automated tool continuously scans the markets for technical chart patterns, Fibonacci levels, and volatility analysis to flag emerging intraday opportunities.
Day trading vs swing trading
The main difference between day trading and swing trading comes down to how long you hold your trades and the costs involved.
Day trading is a fast-paced style where you open and close all your positions within a single day. The goal is to capture small price movements and "flat" your account (meaning no open trades) before the market closes. A major benefit of this is that you avoid most overnight financing charges.
Swing trading is a more relaxed trading style where you hold trades for several days or weeks, potentially "catching a swing" in the market's direction for a larger total profit per trade.
Choose your day trading platform software
Our range of platforms include OANDA web, mobile and tablet, as well as MT5, MT4 and TradingView.
Mobile and tablet trading
Trade on the go with our native apps for Android, iPhone and tablet devices.
Trade on the go
Access TradingView’s top indicators, drawing tools and world-class charts without leaving the OANDA platform.
Apply for an account today
Go from application to trading in three easy steps:
Fill in our app form
Wait for account activation^
Login, fund and trade
^Subject to meeting our criteria. Additional information/documentation may be requested prior to account activation to establish eligibility.