Others : Bots Infiltrate in Betting Exchanges

Bots (or robots) are automated software applications, created by a human user. He places bets on the betting exchanges following a specific criteria.

Their target is to take any value bets, for instance when a book for a certain event goes below 100% on back, or above 100% on lay. Here a bot would take the bets for every possible outcome and assure a small profit, related to bookmakers.

Being used many times during a day, the bots can bring big profit to their owners. Note that they are as helpful as the people who programmed them. In many cases specific market events have caused a bot to make bets that ruined the programmer by costing him a lot of money, the final solution was abandoning it.

Bots have existed in the stock market for several years now, but they are becoming a common presence on the exchanges as well. The sporting press wrote more and more reports on bots conquering the exchanges, and devaluating the markets before the human users get a chance to. It may sound like rumors, but it is true that human users find value bets harder and harder.

Many people experienced this first-hand in the FTSE markets on Betfair especially last year. Bots have given financial traders a hard time, but they should know there are many ways of making profits left.

Bots do have their advantages as well. For instance, they can bring the needed liquidity to other quiet markets. If they go wrong it can offer extremely unfair and generous odds for other users.

Still, their existence and their growing number are bothering average human users. We can only estimate the effects this will have in the future. The exchanges won't be able to ban automated bots only because if they are profitable then naturally the exchanges will profit through commissions from all the profits that the bots achieve.

What can we do about these bots? The answer is to outsmart them. Market moves can be anticipated before they happen. Sometimes bots don’t pay too much attention to quick changes.

If you are aware of all the trading strategies you can definitely beat them at their own game. For instance, trading the FTSE markets uses technical indicators; live data and news feeds, to predict market moves and this will steal the bots' bets before the market moves and triggers the bot to move its prices.

All in all that ultimately bots are not useful for normal users, but like they are getting harder to avoid. If they won't be banned, people have to accept them. Let's keep in mind that human users are usually the majority of any market, and this means there will always be many money-making chances.