Social trading has been a huge growth area in the past couple of years with a number of brokerages offering significant social trading features and others such as eToro building their entire business around Social Trading. So it something of a shock that OANDA has decided enough is enough and pulled its social trading platform less than a year after its launch. 

OANDA’s social trading platform fxUnity, was one of the few platforms in the industry to be powered by proprietary technology with the majority of brokerages opting for a third party solution such as FXJunction. However OANDA’s FxUnity platform hasn’t been particularly popular and has received some pretty stringent criticism from those who have used the platform.  

Traders using the fxUnity platform have been requested to close all open positions by 5pm on the 8th of March 2013. All trades that remain open at that time will be automatically closed by OANDA. All funds deposited with the fxUnity platform can be either withdrawn or transferred to a standard OANDA account. 

There has been no comment from OANDA whether this marks the end of social trading at OANDA in general or whether OANDA will seek a third party solution. The number of competing social trading networks out there in the market place at the current time makes it very difficult for a new social trading network to reach the critical mass needed to really take off.