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I am currently trading with oanda and want to switch to IB to use Sierra Chart as my main trading platform. The thing is oanda only charge the spread while IB charge a 2.50$ minimum commission/trade. my strategy calls for a lot of small trades instead of few big ones, so the commission will eat up a lot of my profit. I'm trading only XAUUSD and EURUSD. does any one know of a workaround for this.
Oanda has a good reputation. I think IB has a better one.
You should compare apples to apples, that means you should compare say 30 days of actual fills, slippage, commissions and fees from one broker to the other. Since you are trading spot forex, every bank has their own price - so you may find IB is giving you better fills (or you may not). If you did get better fills from IB, it would help offset the cost difference.
Also as I'm sure you know, you can increase the size with IB for the same price. So you might need to just modify your strategy to account for this. That is the most likely "workaround".
In the end, you can try to put some pressure on Oanda to support Sierra Chart. My understanding is Sierra Chart is open and willing, Oanda is the ones that seem to not care about expanding their business.
i think oanda had a good reputation for a long time and now they are surfing on that to attract new traders, but other brokers are catching up and offer a choice of platforms, other then MT4. I've recently contacted them and it is not in their plans to offer a mean to connect to other platform.
I've been a satisfied oanda user for a few years now, but can't stand to work with MT4 anymore, it's like going to war with a bow.
increasing my lot size looks like the only alternative to work with IB.
Sierra Chart also works with LMAX, which has a minimum position size of 1.000 units (so no 25k units for IDEALPRO), smaller slippage (no minimum tick size of 0.5 pip as with IB), and with a commission of 0.0025% of notional trade value (so no minimum $2.50).
Sierra Chart's implementation of the LMAX connection uses the FIX API however, which means you'll have monthly account minimums (in terms of volume and account size), or else pay the API fee.
An alternative, also since you mention you only trade two instruments, would be MultiCharts .NET Starter Edition (which is free): more professional than MT4, and uses the other API version (so no monthly minimums).