Binary Betting Personal Rankings

Binary Betting Companies Personal Rankings

Would anyone care to post their personal rankings on what company/platform they feel are the best in terms of product range, spreads & execution? I would be very interested in hearing from traders with all lengths of experience how all the companies rank in their personal experience.

tinpot_trader said:

Would anyone care to post their personal rankings on what company/platform they feel are the best in terms of product range, spreads & execution? I would be very interested in hearing from traders with all lengths of experience how all the companies rank in their personal experience.

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In my experience most of the firms out there will start off okay. It's when you start making bigger profits that they 'limit' you. By limit I mean that they screw with execution (place you on manual) or delay issuing quotes when you request them. Effectively they increase your costs of trading and therefore make it more difficult.

The bottom line is that BB's can not be hedged and are therefore bucket trades - as these firms are run as businesses they can not afford unlimited losses.

Steve.

stevespray said:

The bottom line is that BB's can not be hedged...

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Now why do you say that? The market maker can always move the price if he does not like his position... or am I missing something here?

hedging

in a way these companies do hedge their binaries, they use their costumers for this, as they are bookmakers. if one side of a bet gets to big, they make the other side more "attractive" through a lower price and so they normally don´t have to care about the outcome of a binary, the bookmaker makes money anyway.

id say www.binarybet.com is the best. The have been around a long while so offer stability. They so far have never rejected a bet unless there have been a price movement and when they have it has been to my advantage as many times as it has not. I am ahead but not by much, but make money most days. They dont really need to hedge and probably wont bar u unless you bet to big and win too often. I dont think if you won £100k this year they would be bothered. I really like the look of betsofrtrader but they are new. Betonthemarket seem ok but their bets are not my style and they are small compared to BB

BinaryBet are easily the best bookmaker at the moment in terms of speed of execution, range of markets and toleration of winning punters. However, I'd like to see Betfair (or another betting exchange) as the place to be for trading binaries, especially as there are no bet rejections and with Betfair you also have access to a very large customer base of punters who are willing to bet on financials whilst waiting for the next sporting event to start etc.

I'm gearing up my Betfair API app to be the de facto way to trade on Betfair - features like stop loss orders, automated trading, advancing charting, etc. are all due to be added over the next few months

Hi Jules, I gather you're using http://www.binarysoft.co.uk/ for the API?
How are you finding it ? Does it work well with .Net?

bearfaced said:

Hi Jules, I gather you're using http://www.binarysoft.co.uk/ for the API?
How are you finding it ? Does it work well with .Net?

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I designed BinarySoft BDI in Java instead of .NET for a number of reasons:

1) It's not healthy for 1 company (Microsoft) to be in control of a software development platform (Java is open source)
2) Java is more widely supported - it works fine on Mac OS X and Linux, whereas .NET is only really compatible with non-Windows OSes via the unofficial Mono project (which doesn't support the latest .NET release)
3) .NET is a complete rip-off of Java by Microsoft
4) The "write once, run anywhere" ideology is I'm sure something that Microsoft aren't that keen on, they are more interested in "write once, run on any Microsoft OS"...

telcobert said:

Now why do you say that? The market maker can always move the price if he does not like his position... or am I missing something here?

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The problem which many firms face in quoting binaries is that they are more or less impossible to hedge into an underlying market. The only market which could be used would be the futures market in a particular instrument. Because of the way a binary bet works it is impossible to calculate the level of exposure needed in terms of futures to cover a potential binary loss. For example, lets look at FTSE to finish up or down in the next hour - we know FTSE will expire either one or the other ie up or down but there is no requirement to specify by how much in order to win the binary bet. I've seen FTSE close an hourly binary +0.1 - how would you hedge this position in futures if the client opened the bet when FTSE was called flat at the start of the hour? The chances are that the futures would be practically unchanged on the hour whilst the binary which started at around 48/52 would have expired at 100 incuring a loss of some 48 points from the firm's perseptive.

Bert, what you say does have merit but the spread is generally not large enough to be able to swing the quote enough to make it seem like there is value in it for the clever clients. Say that in most cases the quote is around 4%. Moving the quote 2 or 3 isnt going to make too much difference. If you moved it more, say 6 or 7 ticks then the firm would just be locking in a certain loss from their perspective.

The problem is that the quoting of binary prices isnt an exact science. If you use a 100% mathematical model then you get whipped in certain situations. Most of the people who I have known to make money from the firm's do so by 'thinking outside the box'. To do this you need a slightly more in depth understanding of options models and how prices can be affected by certain situations. It is a question of spotting potential value in certain situations.

The firms generally start looking at clients who appear to have a more than acceptable 'edge' over their markets. Dealing delays and refusal to quote are two tools which the firms use to generally push up the costs of trading to certain clients.

Steve.

jules101 said:

I'm gearing up my Betfair API app to be the de facto way to trade on Betfair - features like stop loss orders, automated trading, advancing charting, etc. are all due to be added over the next few months

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Jules

I would just like to say, if you can implement stop loss orders on your binary software, I really think that that one introduction alone will be a winner for you and it will attract a lot of volume when you get your Betfair project up and running.

I demo'd your Binarysoft software and I have to say it was very good, however I didn't follow it up as there wasn't a lot of volume within Betfair.

If you can implement stop loss orders into the system, please could you let me know as I would definately think this would be a winner and sway a lot of people from the spread bet companies to your software and Betfair.

Thanks

Blu-Ray

Cheers, I think you are probably right about stop loss orders - they will be added in BDI v2.1 which I'm working on at the moment (along with some other order types such as timed / fill-or-kill).

However, Betfair has no native support for stop loss orders so this means that there is no guarantee that they will be filled at the stated stop loss price. It also means that BDI will need to kept running for the stop loss orders to be attempted, although I'll be implementing it in a different way to some of the other Betfair API interfaces.

BinaryBet.com is good for 25K. Maybe 50K if you are lucky. After that you get put on Manual.

The point of being put on manual is so that they can adjust their prices based on your betting. You go to buy a market at 70-74, they might reject your bet and move the price to 76-80. This is just one example of what BB will do with big winners.

In the end you are forced to trade 'at the money binaries' priced around 50.
They cant really reprice these as they are 'correctly' priced regardless of volatility and time left. But the spreads are widest around 50. In the end trading the underlying futures are a better bet than than trading an 'at the money binary'.
The only advantage to binaries in this case is the lower margin requirements.

Donald have you been put on manual? I've heard very few reports about BB limiting/suspending winning accounts (certainly far fewer than the other binary firms)

jules101 said:

Donald have you been put on manual? I've heard very few reports about BB limiting/suspending winning accounts (certainly far fewer than the other binary firms)

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Yes i am on manual. I doubt they will ever ban me though, but the end result will be the same. Its just annoying waiting for upto 2 minutes for a fill, and sometimes getting rejected. I would say my rejection rate is about 15%, but every trade has a long wait. They seem to be inconsistent aswell, its almost as if some of the dealers are more rejection happy than others, or perhaps it depends on how busy they are at the time.

At the end of the day i will feel forced to quit trading binaries (or atleast cut down to only the occasional punt), why bother with binaries when you can get instant fills trading other instruments.

I think BinaryBet are no different to the other Binary firms except because they make more money they have a higher threshold before putting a winning punter on manual or rejecting his orders.

Well I'm up a fair amount on BB (over 25k) and still on automatic, I was put on manual on all of the other binary firms when my account was at much lower profit (less than 5k for all the others)

jules101 said:

Well I'm up a fair amount on BB (over 25k) and still on automatic, I was put on manual on all of the other binary firms when my account was at much lower profit (less than 5k for all the others)

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I dont know what the exact criteria they use, but i know they do put you on manual if you start winning more than they are happy for a single client to be making.

I dont know the exact definition of 'more than', perhaps its the total amount youve made, perhaps its how much you are averaging a day/week/month..

So it seems pretty obvious that Binarybet.com is the people's favourite... who would people rank 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th etc.? And who would deserves the wooden spoon?

stevespray said:

...Bert, what you say does have merit but the spread is generally not large enough to be able to swing the quote enough to make it seem like there is value in it for the clever clients. Say that in most cases the quote is around 4%. Moving the quote 2 or 3 isnt going to make too much difference. If you moved it more, say 6 or 7 ticks then the firm would just be locking in a certain loss from their perspective.

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This is a very comprehensive answer, Steve, with lots of meat for further thought. Now, we both know that the gamma of a binary is a devil in that +0.1 pt situation, so hedging via futures (or the underlying for that matter) with a vastly different gamma is just plain nonsense. Let's take that as a given. But there is a hedge, which you laid out well: moving the quote 6 to 7 ticks they could LOCK-IN (if at a certain loss) ... whoa: a "natural" hedge.

Now, that raises the even more interesting question why the binary firms offer tighter spreads on binaries than required for such a natural hedge. Unless we want to believe they are really charitable chaps :cheesy:

bearfaced said:

...since I completely blew them up with an 80% win rate on the binaries. I took my account from £200 to £7000 in just 3 weeks using very small bets.

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Could you please spear some tips for a beginner?

Welcome Liza may u enjoy the site. Bearface can you please Pm me details of how you turned 200 to 7000 in 3 weeks.Id happily set up the account and pay you half the winnings,or why not set up a paltalk trading room and we can all do the same. You call us out 10 trades of which 8 are correct and make the required binary target and Ill happily bring traders to the room and you can make money from all of us.