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Banc De Binary Review

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Banc De Binary attempts to be a one stop shop for your binary option trading requirements. It allows you to trade on anything from currencies through commodities to individual stocks and indices too, over a wide range of timeframes.

Banc De Binary is an option broker licensed and regulated in Cyprus, but also licensed and operational in all the major European markets including the UK, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria and so on. It is one of the few binary options firms that are MiFID compliant.

Apart from its strong emphasis on regulatory protocol and hence client security, Banc De Binary’s offers a wide range of trading time frames – they really push binary options trading as far as it can go for retail customers, from their ‘Sixty Seconds’ offering through to expiries 9 months away.

Banc De Binary

Asset Range

There are 5 main types of trades they offer. The first is standard binary options. The choices of duration include 30 minutes, 1 hour and end-of-day, though it does seem to vary from asset to asset. You can trade these on the major forex pairs and crosses, along with a comprehensive selection of international indices. You can also trade binaries on commodities, including gold and oil, but also silver, platinum, coffee, sugar . . . the array of commodity underlyings in particular is impressive. Finally, there are a wide range of single stocks from many different countries available to trade.

The next type of trade is ‘Long Term’.  Here you can trade options from end-of-week to 1 month to up to 9 months the maximum that I have seen. The range of assets available for long term options is not as wide, particularly in forex – there are hardly any currency crosses available.

Rounding off the standard binary offering is ‘Sixty Seconds’. As the name implies, for these options you bet on the price being higher or lower in 60 seconds; what the name doesn’t reveal however is that you can also choose to bet on 30 seconds and 120 seconds. These very short timeframes are not offered by many other brokers and so offer a unique proposition for Banc De Binary. However, there are very few assets that you can trade 60 second options on; only 5 forex pairs are available.

The binary offering is strong, and this is fortunate for Banc De Binary because the last 2 types it offers are much weaker. One-Touch options give you a fixed payout if the asset achieves the goal rate before expiry. Banc De Binary offers one-touches, but only on 4 assets (NASDAQ, AAPL, GOOG, AMZN). Moreover the options for customisability are extremely inflexible. You can only pick from 2 up price targets and 2 down price targets (both fixed by BDB) and there is no choice of expiry date.

The final type is called ‘Pairs’. This offers you the opportunity to bet on which one of two (related) assets will perform better in a predetermined time period. Again, there are very few available assets (no forex and just a handful of stock pairs). Furthermore the choice of expiry times is extremely limited with just 1 hour and end of day as options. Finally, it is not at all obvious what the metric used to determine outperformance is: more on this when I discuss the trading platform.

Asset range: 3.5/5, would be higher if not for one-touch and pairs.

Spreads

The spreads offered are not the best available online. 75% appears to be the most common payout percentage for binaries. Some combinations which appear superficially similar only pay out 72% for no clear reason. It should also be noted that the 60 second offering pays out only around 65%: unless you are convinced you have a win-rate higher than about 61%, that kind of spread is only going to lose you money in the long run.

Spreads: 3/5

Platforms

Let’s spend some time looking at the platform. As you can see from the screenshot, you begin by selecting the tab corresponding to the type of trade you wish to execute; you are then provided with 2 asset windows which are independent of each other – you can trade on either one. Arguably this is useful for keeping an eye on two assets at once; however, the reality of the situation is that due to the poor charting capabilities which I will discuss further, you will probably be doing your charting on an external application anyway.

Having chosen your type of trade, you pick your asset and expiry from the dropdown boxes, and enter the amount you wish to bet. You then click on the Call button if you think the asset will go up, and Put for down. The potential payout is also listed in a convenient location.

So far, so good. However, there are a lot of shortcomings in the platform. First, when looking at your open positions, you only get to see them listed by type and not all at once (in the screenshot below, for example, I have both a Binary Option and a Long Term option open, but I can only look at one at a time). This is quite inconvenient if you have positions spread across the different types and want to get a quick overview of how each one is performing.

Secondly, charting is extremely rudimentary. All charts are simply a line graph (no candlesticks or bars available). Even worse, the maximum time frame you can look at is 12 hours which is simply useless if you are planning to trade a 6 month option. Similarly, the minimum time frame of 30 minutes is too long to be of much real use for 60 second options. Finally there are absolutely no technical indicators available.

However, the biggest fault with the platform is the one thing no trader should have to deal with: lag. Whether switching between chart timeframes or trade types, or even when sending trade requests, there is very evident slow responsiveness. I would expect a broker that provides 60 second binaries to be much tighter on latency than this.

Platform: 1.5/5

A few words about account types and bonuses on offer. The minimum deposit is $250 which gives you a standard account. For deposits of over $2500, you get a gold account with a 100% bonus. There are two further levels of accounts at $5000 and $50,000 which provide higher priority customer service and trading paraphernalia (signals, books, etc). BDB also claims to provide rebate bonuses for high volume traders, but there is no information specified as to what they are apart from the disclaimer that ‘All bonuses are offered at our account executives’ discretion’.

Overall, BDB comes across initially as a well regulated and well stocked binary option broker; however, key shortcomings in the offering range and especially the platform keep this site short of garnering a whole-hearted recommendation.

Screenshots

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