Dear Dan,
Its a shame that TS/Intrade needs to use this split up to hide behind as a reason to not solve the issues of management incompetence. As I read thru your email, I laughed to myself many times as to how your company takes a defensive stance on the issues, rather than addressing them to make the user have a more friendly experience. While I may not be 100% correct in all my opinions either, the people on my email forward list above generally agree with my opinions. If you take the time to look at some of the names on that list, you will see that it consists of millions of lots traded, and other users who have attempted to contact you regarding issues.
Even though your responses are short, and basically just repetition of some generic line I can find somewhere in website rules, I will take the time to respond to them.
1) Early closing of games. SMC/USF was not the first time. Like I said to you, review the email chain between myself and live help. It needs to be explained to them on a weekly basis for the Big Monday college basketball games, or ANY game that runs late. You create the featured game schedule, so if you have a game that starts at midnight EST, I would think you would have enough common senses to set the proper exchange closing time.
You say you do not have a policy of closing early to generate more fees. When in actuality this is a blatant lie. The pause button had NEVER been used like it is now. Your new fee structure has created a benefit to cover all in game positions at games end. Covering of these positions is a loss of revenue for your company. Many, many times events are paused early. Before the new fee structure, I had never (in 7 months) seen you pause an over/under for a game with 5 minutes to go. Now it happens all the time. If the over is achieved while the game is still going on, it gets paused to save a few cents. However, you dont pause a golfer in an event who has completed his round and is scored behind another golfer who has completed a round. But don’-t you see, TEN created this. Your fee schedule is wrong. Bottom line. Fees should be structured so there is no benefit for a winner to have to cover a position to save money, and for your employees to be forced to pause a game with time remaining on the clock.
I was unable to get help because when an issue arises during your PEAK hours, no one is there to help. You are the only website who has no real ‘-live’- help available during peak hours. One person to serve the 150 people or so logged in at am EST is not suitable. Email, and Internet ‘-live’- help that never comes online to help is not practical in my opinion.
You noted from my email my fees. Maybe you should review, I traded 508 total lots in that game, and expired (with no other choice but to expire them) 244. I was short 132, covered my position by buying 132, then went long 244. $24.40 was my forced expiry fee because you did not give me a chance to trade out of my position during the last 1:00 of clock time and 5 minutes of elapsed time. So $9 in fees in that game is impossible. Once again TEN gets on the defensive. You should willingly refund all fees in that game- in game, expiry, market makers, etc. You gave us no chance to trade in the only time during the second half where the game was close. I showed you my desire to cover by my trades on another website. So my expiry fee would have been non existent. The event traded 1500 lots at most? Is that few dollars really that important to TEN? Doing the right thing should be what is important. It should be a policy that if TEN pauses early or closes, its a fee free event. But you are not user friendly. Im still awaiting my refund, as are other STM/USF traders.
2) Your new fee structure – You are correct it’-s not the only reason why volume is suffering. No new deposit methods, while other sites have added many, Market makers leaving events, etc., etc., Do I need to review them again?
You say trading at the extremes is desirable only for avoiding fees? Do you realize what your saying? Trading at 97 my return is now .17, while it used to be .23. Do you realize what a difference that is? It used to be great to be able to take on someone else’-s low risk in an almost decided event and make some money doing so. Now you have made that a lot less desirable.
And yes, avoiding fees is the pitfall of the structure you created.
Interesting that a high volume discount is now being considered with a few days left for TEN as a whole.
3) I have also always been available to my staff members in my business via cell phone. But I always had people in each of my store locations who were authorized to make a decision. During your PEAK volume times, you have no management. Defend your position all your like, but it makes no sense at all. Overstaff during low volume times, skeleton crew when your site is making its most revenue. Great business decision.
4) Grading decisions – Haste, and incompetence. In order to pause a game at :00 like you do, someone must be watching. When the score differs from your ’-source’-, to what they see, wouldn’-t it be worth an extra minute or two to find out?
5) Financial contract grading – Intrade just has no desire to grade the contract fairly. The information is out there. Your grading is wrong, and at some point it will come back to bite you. You cannot pause a contract at a specified ending point xx:00:00. Then grade it based on data some random number of seconds later while no one can trade on that data. Maybe your new management should think about the logic of that. We all know what can happen in a few seconds.
6) Market makers – I linked you to conversations with market makers where they openly say there are disagreements with TEN. But everything has changed from when I started here a year ago, and when some of the long time traders in my forward list started here. MMers now leave events during the game, they reduce their size in game by sometimes up to 75%, they change their in game spreads. You are looking to have fair and accurate markets? Well, they don’-t exist here.
I hope you feel I represented your email fairly, ideally, and intact like you seemed concerned that I wouldn’-t. My goal here was not to make you look bad, but to make you understand what its like on the other side of the computer screen. And that is obviously a position no one at TEN has every taken the time to view their business structure from. Maybe you feel everything works great, but from the support of my ideas in many forums by huge volume traders, not just the TEN forum, things are not running smoothly from our perspective.
I am aware of the split. I honestly feel bad for whichever company is keeping the current management. Hopefully, whichever site gets the new management- they are more open to suggestions that would benefit customer satisfaction and corporate bottom line. The current management does not seem to have the desire to create the industry leader that is so often referred to in statements from management. When your users/customers call you the industry leader, only then will it be reality.
Sincerely,
Todd Griepenburg
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Dan Laffan to Todd: #1 – #2
