Choice Odds Fixed Odds and Binaries

[yorkshires_finest]

Ladbrokes pulled the Dow last night but Choice kept it open. What's all that about? Can't believe Lads got so rattled. With so much going on on the markets, that's one gold star for Choice from me.

 

[9DartNanny]

Hmmm... It's a shame about that. I was very disappointed. I found Choice's prices very easy to exploit last night though (when I could actually get a trade accepted). Very easy to make decent money over any move.

 

[leunt]

Absolutely useless,i can't trade more than £1 pp or at the most £4 pp on indices and they hardly get accepted.Is everyone experiencing this?I feel like all bin firms are picking on me.

 

[NotQuiteRandom]

My bets are going through just fine...

 

[chpok]

binary fx

Does anyone (binary FX players) know what is the FX feed to use for this game?
I have tried playing 5min fx on choice and it is fun but got a feeling that their product sometimes closes in the opposite direction of underlying.

thx

 

[Bintrader]

Chioce odds joke fills

Hi

I agree with the majority of posters here. I get rejected most of the time, often when there has been no price move only to see them move the price 60 secs later. I've even then tried to take the opposite trade and also been refused. A bit of a joke. Like all the manual fillers, I can't see it improving. My take on this binary game is that the losing traders all move to the next new firm as they think it will improve their results - WRONG!! They have a great range of bets but are very unlikely to get anywhere near IG in terms of turnover.

 

[eirebhoy]

Opened an account with the free £10. I find it great. I just stuck the 5 minutes, Fixed odds on Wall Street. The 5/6 betting only. Whenever there's a big change of about 5-10 points I wait for it to stop rising/falling. As soon as it moves one bit in the opposite direction I bet for it to rise/fall. For example:

It's at 12255
It starts to rise, 12256, 12258, 12260, 12262.
It then falls by 1 point to 12261.
As soon as this happens I already have my bet ready and I just place it to "Fall below 12261".

Out of the 7 bets last night, I won 6 and lost 1. I'm up to £41. The bet I lost was the only time I backed an odds against (floating odds) and it was only £2.

I haven't got a clue about this kind of thing but the 5 minute betting is only really luck surely? I probably won't be so lucky on Monday but I'm going to stick with the way that worked yesterday.

btw - Never once did I have a bet rejected and they all went through instantly.

 

[c6ackp]

Does anyone have the closing price ("settled at") for 12:50 (close) (21MAR07) for GBPUSD (on your settled bets page)??

Thanks,
c6

 

[leeson01]

Hi

I have had an account with these guys for roughly 2 weeks now, first attempted trades were on the oil binary £2, got 3 or so rejections, switched to £1, rejected twice then got one on at last, tried to get the 2nd pound on and same story, rejected numerous times, it seems if it moves 0.01 pt in your favour then it gets rejected with a "market movement caused significant price change" , quite funny really, because if it moves 30pts against you then it executes... now i would call that a significant price change!

Speaking of the 30pt move this was from an actual experience of mine a couple days ago, i tried a £2 binary bet on a daily currency, it was processing for over 45 seconds leaving me in limbo, i was waiting for it to execute so i could get my semi-arb bet on at another site, but they waited so long to execute that i was down many points without any hedge, i learnt a couple of lessons from this though, like get the long odds bet on first to lessen your risk if rejected at another site, by long odds i mean buying a binary price of 10 for example.

An annoying thing is that they seem to be able to put you on 'processing' for an unlimited time which allows them to effectively steal your money, to exaggerate it, you could put on an hourly bet at 1pm, then be on processing until 1:55pm at which point they can execute or reject at will depending if you are winning or not, i expect a lot of people have been hurt in the 5 min binaries like this. Much better would be to have an option to cancel your bet if it is processing for over 10 seconds, seems fair.

Someone here mentions the 5min currencies closing in the opposite direction, well they say they use over 350 sources for the price and i think that is the problem, that is far too many,currency quotes can vary a lot from one bank to another, add in different lag from all those and you get some unusual quotes, if you look at 5min AUDUSD for example you will see the price repeatedly swinging from positive to minus quite rapidly, which i think is caused by some of their 350 sources reporting a move and some not, of course this gives some arb chances and in fact i did try it, one second you can get 2.5 odds for the rise, next you can get 2.5 for the fall, i won a few times but decided to give up as it became a game of seeing if you could click fast enough on the price you wanted, sometimes in the time it took for me to click the price had gone from 2.5 to 1.5 for example.

I also experienced the same thing bintrader did, during a fixed odds bet i tried to get a bet on at decimal odds 13.00 for an hourly bet, no tricks involved that was their quoted odds for over 5 minutes due to the currency being down big, i was then on a processing period again but the price was still 13, it should execute..... then after roughly a 60 sec wait like bintrader, the price changes to 6.5...instantly followed by "market movement caused significant price change" what a joke.

From my experience it seems like manual/auto fill depends on the payout of the bet, it seems to be lower for binaries though, on fixed odds it is nearly always auto fill, unless i am trying to do something like £10 at 11.00 decimal, my 10 pence binary bets were all auto if i recall, and odds on(less than 2.00 decimal) bets seem to go through ok.

Overall a bit of an annoying company that i hope will improve IF they get more customers, at which point it will become impractical to be manually filling bets wih over £100 payout, but for now it provides some good arb opportunities when combined with other bookmakers so it has its uses. I now try to place bets in multiple stages so as to avoid the manual fill trickery.

 

[Bintrader]

Hi

Good post. Has anyone rung them to complain when you get a bad fill?

Hi

I have had an account with these guys for roughly 2 weeks now, first attempted trades were on the oil binary £2, got 3 or so rejections, switched to £1, rejected twice then got one on at last, tried to get the 2nd pound on and same story, rejected numerous times, it seems if it moves 0.01 pt in your favour then it gets rejected with a "market movement caused significant price change" , quite funny really, because if it moves 30pts against you then it executes... now i would call that a significant price change!

Speaking of the 30pt move this was from an actual experience of mine a couple days ago, i tried a £2 binary bet on a daily currency, it was processing for over 45 seconds leaving me in limbo, i was waiting for it to execute so i could get my semi-arb bet on at another site, but they waited so long to execute that i was down many points without any hedge, i learnt a couple of lessons from this though, like get the long odds bet on first to lessen your risk if rejected at another site, by long odds i mean buying a binary price of 10 for example.

An annoying thing is that they seem to be able to put you on 'processing' for an unlimited time which allows them to effectively steal your money, to exaggerate it, you could put on an hourly bet at 1pm, then be on processing until 1:55pm at which point they can execute or reject at will depending if you are winning or not, i expect a lot of people have been hurt in the 5 min binaries like this. Much better would be to have an option to cancel your bet if it is processing for over 10 seconds, seems fair.

Someone here mentions the 5min currencies closing in the opposite direction, well they say they use over 350 sources for the price and i think that is the problem, that is far too many,currency quotes can vary a lot from one bank to another, add in different lag from all those and you get some unusual quotes, if you look at 5min AUDUSD for example you will see the price repeatedly swinging from positive to minus quite rapidly, which i think is caused by some of their 350 sources reporting a move and some not, of course this gives some arb chances and in fact i did try it, one second you can get 2.5 odds for the rise, next you can get 2.5 for the fall, i won a few times but decided to give up as it became a game of seeing if you could click fast enough on the price you wanted, sometimes in the time it took for me to click the price had gone from 2.5 to 1.5 for example.

I also experienced the same thing bintrader did, during a fixed odds bet i tried to get a bet on at decimal odds 13.00 for an hourly bet, no tricks involved that was their quoted odds for over 5 minutes due to the currency being down big, i was then on a processing period again but the price was still 13, it should execute..... then after roughly a 60 sec wait like bintrader, the price changes to 6.5...instantly followed by "market movement caused significant price change" what a joke.

From my experience it seems like manual/auto fill depends on the payout of the bet, it seems to be lower for binaries though, on fixed odds it is nearly always auto fill, unless i am trying to do something like £10 at 11.00 decimal, my 10 pence binary bets were all auto if i recall, and odds on(less than 2.00 decimal) bets seem to go through ok.

Overall a bit of an annoying company that i hope will improve IF they get more customers, at which point it will become impractical to be manually filling bets wih over £100 payout, but for now it provides some good arb opportunities when combined with other bookmakers so it has its uses. I now try to place bets in multiple stages so as to avoid the manual fill trickery.

 

[rossored]

Folks, just one thing - can you bear in mind potential libel issues when posting? I've had to lightly edit two posts recently for just that; keep your information factual please.

 

[HappyArber]

I’ve had similar problems trying to arb like bintrader and leeson01. I thought of complaining but what would I say? . . .

“Hi fellas – I’ve been trying to steal money from you by trading on mis-prices but half the time you catch me with my hand in the till, you slam the draw shut?!??!”

The way I see it, being an arber is a pretty seedy hobby and I’m not too keen to advertise it. If I was better at it I’d be a real trader but until then, I’ll have to contend myself with shoplifting ticks here and there.

 

[leeson01]

I guess the title was a bit harsh.

I managed to get a couple £1 binary bets on with them today, both less than £20 payout and they executed instantly, then later on, on the same instrument i bought at 9(£1 binary) something and was subject to a manual fill, so i think it is certainly based on payout, possibly anything over £50 for the binaries, unless someone else has some new evidence? simply though don't feel picked on if all your bets are delayed.

I can't see a problem with genuine arbitrage trading, by genuine i mean trades based on natural price difference between different firms, as opposed to trading on laggy or fake ticks, it is just another style of trading. I checked out that betaexoticbets site today and it looks like their formula for making prices is slightly different to all the existing firms, so that can only be good for us.

 

[NotQuiteRandom]

I am willing to bet that ChoiceOdds don't do any manual fills.

I am unable to justify my claim with empirical evidence but it does not make economic sense given the likely volume. If we assume that they take between 5,000 and 10,000 bets per day - I don't know how many they do take but this would not be unreasonable given industry stats - they would need a lot of staff.

Rather I suspect that if you get slow fills on larger bets it is possibly due to some additional price validation process relative to smaller wagers. Having said this I also doubt that they would run larger bets through an additional process as it would not be logical to sit behind their price for bets of size <= $n only when a punter can make multipe bets of size n.

This is an inherantly different business model to spread betting and they drive the maximum size per bet that they want as a function of their bet size per point. They can also build additional margin into bets where they have existing over exposure.

Accordingly I respectfully submit that it is all automated and any speed differential experienced that you perceive to be related to bet size is actually a coincidence and probably just a bandwidth issue.

Just my 2c of inductive logic based on the limited information available.

NQR

 

[henry766]

i don't like being edited

 

[NotQuiteRandom]

I may well be wrong but I think that the balance of probability favours my logic.

How about an adjustment to my proposal above as follows: Bets of size >=$n are held in the system for the next x consecutive ticks and then only executed if the fair value of the bet does not increase by a factor greater than the expected value of their profit margin on that bet?

While speculating is amusing we are not going to speculate our way to validation of our guesses. Why don't you ask them? If they are reasonable people there is every chance that they will tell you how it works.

NQR

 

[Bintrader]

I'm ceratin it's manual and I don't think there volume is very high. Cantors, City and Capital all do the same. Choice are in joke quote mode at the moment with the 12:00 40/50 bet on 45/57 - a bit like hanging a sign up saying DON'T TRADE THIS!!

I may well be wrong but I think that the balance of probability favours my logic.

How about an adjustment to my proposal above as follows: Bets of size >=$n are held in the system for the next x consecutive ticks and then only executed if the fair value of the bet does not increase by a factor greater than the expected value of their profit margin on that bet?

While speculating is amusing we are not going to speculate our way to validation of our guesses. Why don't you ask them? If they are reasonable people there is every chance that they will tell you how it works.

NQR

 

[NotQuiteRandom]

I admire your commitment to certainty in the face of an uncertain axiom. I fail to see how we can induce 'truth' from the effect rather than a known cause.

We are all hypothesising and I maintain that the delay is a function of some automated process, if we do assume for the purpose of the discussion that it legitimately exists. Moreover, how do we know that the other vendors listed all do the same? This is not public information and it would be very expensive to manually validate binary derivative instruments. Far cheaper to hold them in the system, await further data for model input validation and then confirm the trade. Manual just doesn't make cost efficient sense in this instance.

Please note that I am not defending (or attacking) the practices of these people. Rather I am saying that manual fills make no economic sense in this context. It is not the same as spread betting where the 'price' is observable in the market and the question is one of liquidity and spread. The latter instance lends itself far better to manual interjection.

To manually validate individual bets one would require a large number of people inputting 3 to 6 variables into a model. This is illogical when a program can do it just as easily. The more I consider the matter the more probable I consider it that they are awaiting validation of their spot price input by sitting on the order until more ticks arrive.

If you have evidence that this proposition is missing an important premise then please submit it so we can throw it into the mix.

NQR

 

[leeson01]

I really don't think these guys have a lot of customers at the moment, when you place bets you can see that he order # does not increase very much, quite often there are only a couple or 0 other deals in between mine, and no i am not trading every 5 seconds, more like minutes.

The processing time varies so much that i doubt it is automated, and my attempted deal at 13.0 decimal that was subjected to a long wait even though the odds did not change was obviously manual, and the undelying price was moving around during this, so it's not like an auto system was waiting for more data to evaluate (13 was their max quoted odds so that's why the underlying was moving but the odds stayed the same)

 

[NotQuiteRandom]

I understand your point but ask you this:

What do you think that this person is doing with your order when they see it? What process do you suppose that they run in order to determines acceptance or rejection?

If this can not be answered then there is no case in favour of your hypothesis.

NQR