Lesson 09 – Best arbitrage software – required features

We now experience quite massive appearance of arbitrage services, trading-related services, surebet-seeking sites and arbitrage industry related initiatives.
Partially this is because arbitrage trading becomes more and more popular, quite big group of people start to be aware of such possibility of earning decent amount of money. This trend also produces in time experienced arbers, who may consecutively think of creating their own surebet-software and produce income selling subscription/access to arbitrages.
That is why we right now see many releases of alerting services and we will certainly witness more of this trend in the near future.
In this article I would like to focus on listing few most important features and characteristics good arbitrage software should be equipped with, without relating to existing services.

1. Surebets finding algorithm – the Detector

This is certainly most important, challenging and demanding part of every successful arbitrage machine.
Analyzing odds originating from bookmakers sites/xml-s, its task is to combine them together and list all surebet opportunities. The more it can find out from the same data, the better the detector.

2. Rapid odds refreshing

How you can get odds from bookmakers? In general you have two major options, first being making use of accessible xml-feeds provided by some bookmakers, second being manually scrapping odds directly from the website.
First option is much easier, however second ensures rapid odds refreshing and presence of all available odds. In xml-files many bookmakers do not show all odds. Moreover xml-files are often not updated frequently, like every 15, 30 minutes, which for arbitrage player is not acceptable. For rapid data analysis and consecutive prompt showing arbitrages to clients you need also good hardware support and quick internet connection, which as your business grows is quite expensive, but required.

3. Intuitive client/website

Provided you already have nice detector and you generate many arbitrages originating from odds you gathered from bookmaker`s websites you need to show them in user-friendly way to your clients. Generally you again have two options. Either you construct software, which will be available to download at your website and where arbitrages will be displayed or you may like to show surebets directly on your website. No of these options is better, however each of these have different advantages and disadvantages.
On the one hand software can be equipped with sophisticated alerting system, personalization options and other factors, which will make life easier when arbing. On the other hand some users will not very gladly download anything to their computers and will prefer website-based service. No matter the solution you will choose you need to combine your service with fully automated surebet-calculator, so that your client can rapidly calculate stakes before placing bets. Additionally you may like to construct dedicated browser, so to speed up navigation to appropriate bookies, when placing arbitrage. This solution however requires bookmaker’s account password sharing inside the software. Even though you can apply password encryption technology, which is fully secure for your clients they might be a little bit worried and decide not to use it.

4. Supporting many decent bookmakers

While introducing new bookmaker to your software you need to be totally sure, it is done perfectly – meaning all the odds are present, odds gathering time is low and optimized, and there are no silly mistakes like tennis game is recognized as football match. It is also your interest to include in your software only reliable, trustful bookmakers and avoid at all cost deposit-only bookies. There are many services nowadays, who support hundreds of bookmakers, most of which will never pay back any money to their clients. It is generally your client responsibility to find out, whether the bookie where he is going to open account is trustful or not, however in order to keep the guy alive you should help him to know it. All in all try to support as many reliable bookies as possible.

5. Defining events

Here you will encounter most arduous work of whole project. You will need to tell your software that Manchester United from Bookmaker 1 is exactly the same team as M. Utd from Bookmaker 2, Manchester. U from bookie 3, Man United from bookie 4 and at the same time it is not the same team as Manchester. C, Manchester City, Man City… and you need to repeat this job for every team and every bookmaker so to avoid mistakes and false surebets inside the software.

6. Prize/promotions

And last but not least – prize. Once you developed your software you need to establish prize for it. It certainly needs to be competitive, because in the times your machine is new at the market, not many people will risk much money to test it, having other one. Good option is to share it for free while in beta-phase or to share it for free for limited time, once completed. In this way you gain market, reputation and clients for the future.

Having written all these information’s I would like to assure you, that while developing our software we have had in mind all five of these suggestions, so we really hope you will be satisfied with our product.