Help and FAQs

Robots FAQs

What are web robots?

Human users of the web use browsers such as Internet Explorer. They read what is presented and act by clicking somewhere on the screen. Those clicks send information back to the web server computers which cause the web server computer to do stuff — usually send back more information. On WhiskyInvestDirect the user's click sometimes means 'trade some whisky'.

A web robot - or "bot" - is a computer program which effectively does the job of the human clicker automatically. Bots - for example - are often used by internet search engines (they call their bots "spiders"). Spiders are computer programs which look for hypertext links and follow them visiting hundreds of websites. They can do this far quicker than people can, and they can organise the information they find there into indexes which the search engines use.

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What are trading bots?

Trading bots are web robots which automatically execute trading activity on an internet trading site.

They are a bit like search engine spiders, but instead of visiting hundreds of different sites they tend to be dedicated to a single web site. Someone - usually someone who knows quite a lot about computers - will have worked out what their computer sends to the web server when they click in Internet Explorer, and they will have programmed their computer to act like a fairly dumb but very fast human web-surfer on that site.

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What do they do?

Trading bots monitor any combination of data which can be sent to and from the web client [you] by the appropriate web server [us]. They ask for data, and work with it, and make decisions based upon it, and then automatically issue orders back to the server by sending messages in the same form that would be sent on the click of your mouse in Internet Explorer.

Bots have no privileges over ordinary users of the system — i.e. no extra data. They have to log in like normal users, request and review the information available to them, and make their trading decisions on a combination of web site data and whatever other information their designers make available to them.

From the WhiskyInvestDirect server's perspective in all material respects the account of a bot works exactly like the account of a human. When the server is processing orders it is not able to differentiate between those sent in by a bot and those sent in by a human being. In fact a bot is in many ways a proxy human being, because it belongs to a real human being and manipulates positions of whisky and money in the accounts which belong to him too.

So everything the bot does it does on behalf of a real person. It just does it quickly, and (unless the bot developer is very careful) sometimes not very intelligently. Computer programs are often like that.

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Does WhiskyInvestDirect use bots?

Yes. To ensure fairness our bots see absolutely nothing extra from the exchange; they run on separate machinery from the exchange; and they connect to it across the internet via exactly the same protocols and networks as other bots and human users of the exchange.

WhiskyInvestDirect bots manage our own inventory of whisky and cash. Our bots can make prices all day long. They are not necessarily good or bad traders, but they are fast and incredibly cost effective.

We set them up to execute different types of trading strategy.

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Is there an API I can use to run a bot?

Yes. If you email us at making it very plain that you accept full responsibility for your use of it then we will tell you more about the XML interface.

Please be aware you are not entitled to assume that the data you see - either via XML or on the standard human interface - will always be working in the way they currently work.  Any data and formats may change without notice to you, so you should build in checks to your own program logic to make sure your program has fully validated such information as it may use from these sources.

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