Hi RCP,

Working in the finance industry I can provide some additional detail to the bots type thing for financial markets. It has got to the point where the firms who run these high frequency trading bots have actually re-located their hardware closer and closer to the stock exchange to gain any mili-second of an advantage as possible. They have also got to the point where some firms essentially run two bots, one of them is their usual 'money making' type bot whilst the other trades in smaller parcels and is created to essentially try and 'fool' the other bots and/or regular traders out there so the money making bot can skim even more profits.

The most infuriating thing about these bots is the MASSIVE advantage they have over the regular day trader and/or mum and dad investors. The bots have the ability to trade 2-10 shares at a time worth maybe $10-$100 per trade and simply pay a monthly brokerage amount for the privilege based on their total level of trade not per trade.

The other concern with bots is what occurred in the US a few years ago. One guy accidentally added an extra zero to the end of a trade he was doing and sold a reasonably large parcel of a stock. The bots went haywire picking up on this sell and all tried to dump stock at an alarming rate as well and caused a massive drop in one day which from memory meant the market had to be closed an a lot of trades reversed etc.

How will this affect betfair etc is an unknown to me, some may say its a positive because it might mean greater turnover but I can't see how it will really assist those who don't use bots. I'm starting to have a growing belief that if I used a bot to trade on my top rated horse to green up each race I'd probably be making a steady profit. The way in running odds can jump around I seriously believe the opportunity is there you just need the bot in place to do it.