Financial Betting fantasy wish list

I've looked at some of these sites and had a bit of a go on the big ones. This is something I'm interested in getting in to but I keep hearing all these scare stories. Are any of the bookies open to having winners? i guess not eh?

I'm going to start a wish list of all the things that I'd want to see from a financial betting site:

- accepting all bets
- quick acceptance of bets
- charts
- quick payment
- markets calendar
- news feed?
- ???????????

please add any others you can think of!

1. easy to use interface
2. helpful customer services !!!

1. Stop losses.
2. Limit orders.
3. Trailing stop losses.
4. Public, live, computer-readable price data, so that I can have something automatically 'watch' for certain scenarios.
5. An API so that I can write software to automate trades.
6. A macro language so I can 'script' trades.
7. Transparency around what will and won't be accepted as bets (akin to Level 2 data for shares)

I'd like to see all of them, and I think they'd be great for folks that use binary bets. For various reasons I can't see any of them happening though.

But I can dream.

Geoff

Most of that list will be available as features in my Betfair API interface within around 6 months or so... (items 2 and 7 are already featured, item 1 is coming soon)

Interesting. I've mostly ignored Betfair because when it crops up here people complain about liquidity. And when I read posts about BinarySoft I'd assumed it was a Betfair program for market makers, so I never bothered investigating further. Now that I know different I may check it out...

Oh, and I thought of another wish list item:

• More ladders.

I like the way that ladders (such as 'FTSE to close over X', 'FTSE to close over X + 10', 'FTSE to close over X + 20') give you more opportunities to access 80/20 prices, if that's your thing.

Yeah BDI is mainly aimed at traders at the moment, although it will eventually have full automation so it can be used for pretty much any purpose. Also, not sure why people on here keep calling it "BinarySoft", the program is called "BinarySoft BDI" or just "BDI" for short, BinarySoft is the name of the company... (people don't refer to Microsoft Word as "Microsoft" )

Well, to be fair, Microsoft does have more than one product.

There's a tendency to use the shortest name possible to clearly and unambiguously define what someone is talking about. The ice hocky team here in Belfast used to be sponsored by Harp, a brand of beer. They insisted everyone refer to the team as the 'Harp Lager Belfast Giants'. No one really did, except for those who were being paid by Harp through spoonsorship or advertising. It seemed silly to me that they would think people would take to that name.

So I can understand why people shorten the name here. 'BDI' doesn't really communicate anything, so using it on its own would confuse more than inform, and it doesn't add any differentiation to the overall name (there's no ADI or CDI, or anything else). It may stand for something (I haven't checked), but if it does it's not obvious. Adding it to BinarySoft in my post wouldn't have helped the reader (they'd either know about BinarySoft already or would have to look to find out more) and it wouldn't have helped me (I'd have had to type more, and I'd have had to spend extra time looking up the name because, as I said, BDI doesn't really communicate anything to me). And it's probably better to settle for folks calling the product BinarySoft instead of 'Thon BinarySoft doobry'.

None of which really has anything to do with wishlists for financial betting. Sorry about that.

Geoff

Fair point.

http://www.binarysoft.co.uk/bdi/introduction.php

BDI primarily stands for Binary Dealing Interface, which is self-explanatory, but it is also a play on words...