Dan Laffan of InTrade to Todd Griepenburg – #1

Dan Laffan of InTrade has just given me permission to republish his e-mail(s) to Todd Griepenburg:

Dear Todd,

Thank you for your email, received yesterday. We’re always happy to receive customer feedback. We don’t always respond individually to user input due to the volume of input being received, but we do consider all of it in the development of our services.

We have discussed the content of your email internally and wanted to get back to you with our thoughts on your comments. To facilitate this, I have attempted to summarise the key points that you have made in your email as follows:

1. Early closing of the SMC/USF game on Monday night.
Our trading engine closes down daily to allow for various housekeeping tasks on a schedule that, we believe, causes the minimum interruption to our user base. While we had identified that the system downtime schedule should be delayed in this case, and had instructed this to happen, the system closed down on the originally scheduled time. This is obviously regrettable, and for that we apologise, not only to you but to all members affected.
We do not have a policy of closing down early to generate more fees but always try to close and expire markets as soon after the event as is practical. We certainly do not do this in order to increase our revenue but rather to maintain orderly markets.
You were unable to get help on the phone because we do not provide telephone-based support after 22:00 GMT daily, as stated on our site on the “Contact Us” page.
We noted from your email that you paid $44 in fees on the game in question. However, your account shows that you only paid $9 in fees on that game, and $45 on all of your trading on that day. If you disagree with this calculation, please let us know and we can explain it further.

2. Our new fee structure.
Volumes / liquidity reducing: Volumes and liquidity are driven by many factors, not just the fee structure.
Trading at the extremes: We understand that trading at the extremes is desirable for some members who wish to avoid expiry fees, but this is not an issue for the vast majority of our users.
Discount structure for high volume traders: I am pleased to report that we are actively considering a discount structure for high volume traders (beyond those already given to market makers).

3. Staffing decisions: We continually review our staffing policies as business needs and resources permit, and all managers are available to staff by cell outside of hours.

4. Grading contracts: Occasionally, staff expire contracts incorrectly, but the vast majority of contracts are expired correctly. We aspire to 100% accuracy, and apologise for our occasional errors.

5. Grading of hourly financial contracts: We have discussed this at length before, and the conclusion of our discussion is that we grade the contracts in accordance with the published rules. We could change our rules to those that you have suggested, but the choice of our approach is at least as valid as your suggestion, and as our user community have accepted our approach and geared their trading methodologies around them, in their interest, we have already decided to continue using the existing approach. We understand that you disagree with this, but if I can say as respectfully as possible, this is the basis on which these contracts are offered for trading.

6. Market makers: Please be assured that we fully understand the input of our market makers into the lives of our market places.

7. Comments on security and banking: Thank you for your confidence in our taking care of your funds and banking transactions.

We have not replied to all of the copied email addresses on your original message as this email contains information private to your account. May I ask that if you decide to copy this email out to the public domain, that you represent it fairly and ideally, intact.

As you are no doubt aware, we are about to split the TradeSports and Intrade services into separately owned businesses, and we believe tat this will help both platforms to develop to their best potential, unrestrained by the association with each other. We believe that this will help to strengthen our users’ experiences of using the platforms, and we hope that you will continue to use both services into the future.

Yours sincerely,
Dan

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