Customised betting could reap benefits
You can now personalise your betting screen to improve your chances, writes Katie Hope
If you get a suit made, then you might want to go for a bespoke one, so that you can make sure it fits you, with all your quirks and peculiarities. And when you buy a new car, the first thing you do is customise it to your liking – you choose the colour, seat covers, dashboard. If you so desire, you can add even more personal touches. Fluffy dice, perhaps, or a nodding dog. Why not? (Apart from that it’s naff, obviously.)
Customisation, or bespoke, has now hit the world of spread betting. Up until now choosing a spread betting provider has largely been a case of selecting the one that shouts loudest, opting for the one that you see advertised on a London taxi as it zooms past, for example.
More adaptable
But being able to personalise your trading platform to the way that suits you, and in a manner which potentially can improve your trading success, is fast becoming an important distinguisher for players.
CMC, for example, has recently revamped its entire trading platform to make it more adaptable. “We’ve updated our web front end to make it much more engaging,” explains Patrick Latchford, managing director of CMC Markets.
Indeed, having been a user of the old model, it was quite a shock to log in last week to be greeted by a multicoloured blizzard of flashing options.
One of the most useful of these is a new function that allows you to build up a series of personal watchlists. This is basically a list of your most popular trades.
You can have as many as you want, and are able to buy and sell directly from the list, allowing you to execute trades more quickly.
Another addition is the “what’s hot” section, which gives you a visual representation of shares which are showing unusual trading activity and could be worth researching further.
There is also an “energy bar”, indicating how much of your total balance is being used in existing positions, which is similar to a video game showing you just how much life you have left, only in this case it’s measured in pounds and pence.
Spread betting company IG Index has something similar, called PureDeal. The platform integrates a news service, charting tools and technical analysis as well as the same functions as CMC to build up a series of personalised share watchlists.
A popular function is the “one click dealing” button. It is like Amazon’s “one click order”, where the computer remembers your address and credit card number and lets you buy a book without delay. This is another way of executing trades immediately.
Critical Information
According to Tim Hughes, head of sales at IG, this kind of information and detail is crucial for an intraday trader.
“You can line it all up in advance and trade in and out at the click of a button. If the system is too clunky then you can’t be reactive enough,” he says.
But like anything in life, moderation is key. Just because you can add lots of extra details to your screen doesn’t mean that it is all useful to your trading. Being able to pick and choose the information available to you is great, but it’s best not to be tempted to overdo it.
“Beware of paralysis analysis,” says Dave Evans, market analyst at fixed odds better Beonmarkets.com. “If you are an intraday trader, zipping in and out of trades, you need as little distraction as possible.
It can be quite off-putting if you have put big money on and keep getting further information.”
Evans’ approach is to maximise the information he uses before he places a trade, but once he has placed it, to largely ignore any other data that comes his way.
“Pimp your screen” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as “pimp your ride” but for spread betters, it’s clearly a facility worth considering. Perhaps just leave off the fluffy dice.
What do you have on your screens?
Manoj Ladwa (Tradindex Derivertives Broker): I have all the indices as well as interrelated markets, so currently crude oil, gold, currencies as well as a newswire. On top of this I have a watch list of stocks that are in my portfolio and a scrolling ticker so that I can see all the trades that are going into and out of the market.
Dave Evans (Market Analyst betonmarkets.com): I have two monitors on which I watch all the live charts, a watchlist of the major currencies, all the main stock indices and any other markets having an impact such as oil, for example. For me the main thing is the S&P 500 futures which seems to lead most of the world equity markets.
Tom Hoougard (Chief Market Strategist City Index): I have four screens so have all the main markets including indices, currencies and a whole lot of other information. In the end though it’s a question of filtering. During the trading day for me it boils down to volume and price and the rest is just fluff.