Question about margin requirements on OANDA

Hey everyone, I’ve just started using OANDA as my forex broker and have a quick question about its margin policy. So, I usually place my buy/sell orders first and then set my stop-loss and take-profit afterwards. I’ve got about $2,000 in my account, but when I tried to take a long trade and set a stop-loss or take-profit, I kept getting an ‘insufficient margin’ warning. The order only went through when I used 1/10th of the original lot size.

Would placing my SL and TP at the same time as my orders help with this?

EDIT: I originally said ‘liquidity’ instead of ‘margin,’ so I corrected that.

>Would placing my SL and TP with my orders help?

That won’t fix liquidity issues, but did the error say ‘insufficient liquidity’ or ‘insufficient margin’? Insufficient liquidity is really rare, especially with a $2,000 account—it’s almost unheard of. I’ve mostly seen that with prop firms during rollover times. It’s more likely you saw ‘insufficient margin,’ which is a completely different issue from liquidity.

@Ricardo
My bad, I should’ve clarified earlier—I meant ‘insufficient margin.’

Dominik said:
@Ricardo
My bad, I should’ve clarified earlier—I meant ‘insufficient margin.’

No worries! ‘Insufficient margin’ means you don’t have enough in your account to cover the margin requirement. OANDA offers 50x leverage, so with $2,000, you control up to $100,000 and can open roughly 1 lot. Changing how you place orders won’t fix this—you’d either need a broker with more leverage or more funds in the account to open positions that big.

@Ricardo
Yeah, not sure why I said liquidity in the first place.

Thanks for the clarification.