Asian online bookmaker Sbobet has become one of the early adopters of binary options trading among betting sites as the company attempts to diversify its offering beyond sports and casino games. There are intersections between financial betting and binary options in terms of appeal to their respective target audiences and the bookmaker seems to feel that there is a profit to be made by combining them in one offering.
On the betting site, the binary Trading Platform is situated in the right hand corner of the betting types that can be seen on the main page. It’s named “Financials”, chosen most likely due to it being easier to understand and having a more universal appeal to those who have entered the site for football and/or roulette and are not familiar with options trading.
After an initial roll out with limited instruments available, the list now has a rich offering of currency pairs, indexes and commodities. The stocks cover the major markets, but also include more and more regional companies such as SingTel and Genting to appeal to their large Asian clientbase.
Sbobet has gone for all the main option types, offering the richest possible variety and is usually better as a site introducing new users to binary options. Their arrangement focuses attention on “up/down” options (although they've gone for the name “high/low”) and turbo options with one minute duration.
The display of the charts is not the strongest point here, as there can be some initial confusion as to what is displayed and how the whole process works. Step-by-step guides are offered on the right-hand side of the display and novice users can get started from there.
The whole setup feels slightly pressed into the framework of the main site, although many of the buttons are customized. Overall you get the feeling that while it is working it isn't completely ready.
Another point that can be of some difficulty to users is that potential payouts are displayed by most binary options brokers in percentages. For example, if an option expires in the money, it would bring 176%, which equals the initial investment plus 76% profit. This can be difficult to understand by some sports betters who are either used to decimal or fractional odds where it would be displayed as 1.76 and 0.76/1 respectively.
Customer support is prompt in replying, but for more complex discussions, like bonuses or promotions and their terms, there might be some difficulty in understanding the English language agents, but that can be different for Asian languages.
Sbobet was among the most prominent advertisers in the British Premier League, with several campaigns over the last years aiming to enlarge their market and expand outside of East Asia. They seem to be continuing their quest for new markets by testing an unproven model, as far as mixing binary options and gambling is concerned. Time will tell if their bet pays off.
