How would you like to trade a market where you get large regular price swings every 10 minutes in the afternoon, seven days a week. A
market where all prices are set purely by supply and demand, few transaction costs, no middle men and you only pay commission if you win? Where you can freely act as a market maker and where you have direct market access and where you can create a spread for others to take?

Betfair has revolutionised the betting market and created an open platform for exchanging risk on sports events. This market is now viewed much more like a traditional financial risk market than an old fashioned betting market. Smart users have realised that there are huge opportunities on Betfair because they can buy and sell risk in much the same way they would in a normal financial market but without the burden of cost or the restricted access that is usually associated with traditional financial markets.

Click here to learn more

Tim3, the comparison between betting exchanges and traded options is a good one. Some of the characteristics of options are there. However Betfair is much much more liquid than UK traded options markets, with much tighter spreads. The gradual decay in value of an option (which makes any strategy based on buying, rather than writing, options a mugs' game) maps on to the tipping of the odds towards one outcome or the other as the end of the bet approaches and the outcome becomes more certain. However you can easily get onto either side of this movement, and in any case in many/most cases it is dwarfed by the possibility of the event itself taking a different turn, e.g. horses falling at the last hurdle or a goal being scored in the final minute, so that much of the decay will often occur very quickly in the last few seconds of the event when the outcome is very nearly certain.

Just did something funny. Working in some positions for tonights Champions league matches. Laid instead of backing and took a huge chunk out of the Arsenal market. Must have caused some panic after seeing the markets reaction to my bet. Fortunately was able to correct the error without a loss but much fun was had!

I am expecting a bumper night tonight as the liquidity on Champions league matches are great. However I noticed Porto Vs PSG had better odds on http://www.gamebookers.com.

I used to do betfair a few years back, in which I layed on horses in the US but the horse eventually starting winning so gave up, I'd like to know how you can bet on both to win and lose and still make a profit, because whatever happens you still pay betfair a % so dont understand how your doing the bet and win???

Green on all the CL matches this evening. A good afternoons work. Will watch the Arsenal match on the TV now, may take the laptop in doors.

Richgit here's an example :

You could have had a bet say 10 on Wales to beat England in the RWC at 27/1 before the match.

At half time you could offer 3/1 against Wales winning so offer say 70.

Wales win and you win 270 and lose 210 , profit 60.
Any other result and you win 70 and lose 10 , profit 60.

The only way you can do this is if the odds move in your favour after placing the original bet.

PS Wales were robbed :-)

Scrip. in the above screenshot on England v Poland, how much money did you actually have to put on in the first place on all 3 outcomes to guarantee the 500+ payout,ie what was your total outlay at the time of that screenshot?

Dil, thanks ;-)

Mr E , you still got any of the stuff we were working on or any of my emails I sent about it ?

Ruth,

I can reverse engineer the figures which tells me before I greened up I had a profit of 786.93 on England prior to equalising the risk. Some of this would have come from a stake before the kick off intend to run into the match but I would have also traded before kick off and carried that into the match as well.

I'll try and check my records to see if I can figure out what I risked outright. When I see you on the 26th you will see its not immediately that simple to work backwards as you may use more than one strategy on an event.

Scrip, cheers,

Markets predicting a Kerry victory in the US at the moment, 76% chance by the look of it. Will stay up a bit later tonight and see what unfolds. Nearly 8m traded on that market.

BTW a great night on the footy. A rare night in that everything came off, not one error. Had a good win on the Porto match. Watch me get kicked in the teeth now over the next few days!!!

Scrip

well done on the footy tonight

also staying up to see the election unfold

received your presentation cd today - many thanks - will watch tomorrow as a taster for the course in a few weeks!!!!!

Fundy, I have left all the juicy bits for the course!

US election market has been fun. Look at these charts. 16m traded, I am trading out the low odds this morning.

Just looking at tonights champion league

B. Munich v Juventus 2.42/2.44 3.2/3.25 3.55/3.65
Deportivio v Liverpool 2.12/2.14 3.25/3.3 4.3/4.4
Dynamo v R.Madrid 3.2/3.25 3.45/3.5 2.46/2.48
Lyon v Fenerbache 1.48/1.49 4.6/4.8 8.6/8.8
Maccabi v Ajax 4.8/4.9 3.6/3.65 1.91/1.92
M.Utd v Sparta 1.30/1.31 5.8/5.9 14.5/15.0
Olympiakos v Monaco 2.32/2.34 3.4/3.45 3.5/3.55
Roma v Leverkusen 2.2/2.22 3.5/3.55 3.75/3.8

Prices are for Home - Draw - Away

I have so far only backed Real Madrid at 2.48.

Scrip

Did you receive my email?

Thanks
Bones

Bones, I did but 123 are in front of it at the moment :(

Will get in contact.

I'll probably be sacrificing horses again this afternoon to focus on the football.

Last night was excellent with a win on every match. The bonus was the Porto Vs PSG match where I had a bumper win, my biggest on an individual event for some time. I didn't plan it that way it just turned out that the perfect result came in. Usually it would have been covered for a lesser amount at some point. I had some free money to put on the match and added to that as the other results completed. Turned out I didn't need to cover it in the end but took a risk in not doing so. If it hadn't had come in I would have been up on the night but not much.

I would have thought Deportivo vs Liverpool would be an interesting match tonight.