Ok, so I’ve been playing around with a few new markets to see what they were like.
The one I would like to personally like name and shame is IBetX. Their api is pretty easy to use and they have basically copied the betfair api with a limited degree of success but their design and testing is just outright sketchy.
The first point is more of an annoyance, IbetX seemed to have decided it would be clever to make orders assume one of three states Unmatched, Partially Matched and Matched. This is because they have no concept of transactions like in bf. This means you have to make 2 full getOrder calls just to see what happened to your unmatched orders, since if it’s not in the unmatched category and you haven’t cancelled it, it still could be in the partially matched category. Long story short you have to be quite careful if orders go unmatched.
The second point left me in absolute awe; you can go into debt. i.e you can place a trade when you have no money in your account. The balance will then be negative. This I have to say is one of the most spastic things I have ever come across. Im quite lucky I was running a bot which I know to be very stable but if you didn’t know about this and you ran one that accidently blew up in a liquid market you could easily piss £10,000 you don’t have up the wall.
Finally their crowning glory has to be their response to the fact that their api is still buggy. While writing an adaptor for the market I noticed an interesting thing, it was impossible to cancel bets. Now this I thought was me just being dim, but it turns out that the order id returned by the place bets function was wrong. Hence you cant cancel a bet that isn’t yours and you have no handle to the bet you just placed. On emailing them to raise this fairly crucial oversight to their testing they responded by just turning off the api. Safe I agree, but just generally gives an indication of their lack of professionalism as you'd expect that the loss of revenue from over 4 days of trading would maybe spur them on to you know... fix it or something. Obviously not.
So a word of warning to you all. If you are thinking of using IBetX. Be very, very careful as its amateur at best.
