Salvation for the Travelling Trader: Betfair Mobile Review

Here’s the scenario. It’s 2:00 PM on the last Saturday before Xmas. As a well prepared trader, you have spent a bit of time in the morning deciding which matches to trade and on the best lay options in the afternoon’s racing card.

Suddenly your wife/partner informs you that she needs some help with the last minute Xmas shopping –you have to stop everything including your plans for some very profitable trading! Does this sound familiar?

Enter Betfair mobile. This software allows you to display on your pda or Iphone all the markets available on the normal Betfair interface. This is an excellent ‘stopgap’ for someone on the move who for different reasons would rather not carry around a PC.

In my case I have a version of Betfair mobile on my handheld PDA. Downloading is very easy from the Betfair mobile site. You keep your mobile or pda pugged into the PC during the download and it should be recognised immediately.

But as was noted in the article iphone Betfair Mobile Review looking at this software, there are some drawbacks.

The average handheld device has only a small display screen and consequently the menus can be rather fiddly. It is very easy to select the wrong option.

Possibly my current handheld device, the T-Mobile MDA is no longer cutting edge, but it seems this is a problem even with the iphone.

Menu options selected have to be continually confirmed (though this could be a problem of the device rather than the software) and although it is possible to save preferred markets to “favourites”, this only improves menu navigation marginally. Screen refresh rates can be increased, but it is still far slower than trading on the main site.

Yet another area where Betfair mobile is a winner is if you want to place trades discretely without fear of eavesdroppers. Only recently I did some trading on my notebook in Starbucks and was conscious of the person next to me constantly tring to take a peek at what I was doing!

So all in all, despite the drawbacks noted, I would highly recommend this tool as an excellent fall back resource when you are unavoidably away from your PC for any length of time.

Happy Trading!