Good thing I only opened a practice account to figure out how the whole thing worked.  After a 3-day trade of oil which netted $259 I was left with a profit of $59!  That’s only 22% of the actual profit.  The rest went to 3 financing fees charged at the end of each day I held the position.  Each daily fee was about $60!  This is all small money, but I think you can see the proportions it works out to which is anything but small.  Oanda made more money from my trade than I did!!!!

Anyone who’s been around the leveraged ETFs (2x, 3x…) knows that they have “decay”.  Back about five years ago I held UWTI, a 3x leveraged oil etf for a few months and I calculated the WEEKLY decay to be about 1.5%.  With my recent Oanda practice trade of a position worth about 6k, the daily interest slice taken off was almost exactly 1% PER DAY!

Anyhow, so much for that.  Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.  And there seem to be a lot of devils out there in the trading world.

I started with 10k.  Made a small daytrade profit (no overnight financing fee).  Then made a larger, 6K multiday trade with financing fees and ended up approximately where I started with my daytrade profit.  I guess these CFD things are strictly for daytrading.  Apparently there are worse stories from  when the commodity contract rollover dates change each month.

Oh, and a special thanks to Patrick for alerting me to these financing fees a few weeks ago!