Simon - Firstly, its good to see someone from a spreadbet firm taking an active interest in the BB.
Secondly, I would largely agree with what you say about peoples sudden interest in the world of binary bets. It does seem to be taking off in a very big way, as I'm sure you are aware IG has a special site dedicated purely to binary bets. On the subject of spreads you are correct, the spread is normally always around 4% (or more) which is very large in terms of what is available on other instruments. I'm really interested to know why people are showing this amount of interest in these products - surely they are nearer to gambling than to trading ? If people are interested in a lower risk then they should look at some of the bets offered by betonmarkets.co.uk as the offer some up / down bets with much tigher spreads (like 2%). With BoM you also have the benifit of fixed odds so you know exactly how much you can lose.
Moving back to binary bets - I'm interested in how much the companies offering these products vary their risk valuations on the bets on days like today. For example, IG at 2.40pm were offering FTSE to finish up at 93 to buy when FTSE was already up about 26 points. I'm thinking that prehaps their quotation model was still taking into account the exposure the UK market has during the first 2 hours of US trading on a normal market day. I have noticed several times now that quite often on US holidays when markets are shut that IG may not be taking the likelyhood of a lack of afternoon volitility into account when pricing at around 1pm - 2.45pm.
Any thoughts on the subject ?
Steve.