William Hill, one of the UK’s largest leading bookmakers is launching a new betting service called Day Trader which allows customers to bet on commodities, indices and currency pairs.
William Hill follows the trend of many gambling venues which think they can cross the lines into trading, specifically Forex . Why forex and not securities or futures? I guess the answer lies in the nature of forex traders who are perceived (rightfully so) as part gamblers part speculators part investors and therefore gambling operators feel it's an audience they can easily tap into. This however is not exactly so - Party Gaming's effort to enter this field wasn't an overwhelming success and its financial brand Partymarkets.com was later rebranded to Intertrader.com in an effort to gauge more interest. Teddy Sagi's (Playtech) Go Forex/GFC Markets/Markets.com isn't a big success either. Ashton Fraser wrote a nice post about the differences between forex and gambling here: https://www.financemagnates.com/trading-room/education-centre/forex-vs-gambling/
For now it seems like gambling operators are struggling to leave their mark on the forex market and I don't think that William Hill's effort is going to be any different.
At present William Hill is allowing you to bet on gold, silver, oil, a number of foreign exchange rates (Forex) and market indices ( German 30, UK100 and Wall Street). Unlike Intertrader which is in essence a white label platform of London Capital Group William Hill's financial Trading Platform is an in-house development. And it's nothing pretty to say the least... In fact, and this is alarming, it operates by completely different rules than other broker/platform and the difference is in just about everything - starting from trading hours (only from 10:00 to 23:00 on Monday to Friday) and ending with very odd currency and indices contracts found nowhere else.
If I understand this correctly William Hill decided not to waste time on developing a trading (or even pseudo-trading) product and went straight to a casino like financial trading for pure gamblers. The problem is that this type of activity seems like a financial trading but it's everything but that.
