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.

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Kayak, OK, that's reassuring :-)
To which other sources should the FTSE lelvel be compared?
I need to check my sources to make sure I was comparing like-with-like.

axdpc - quote from Betfair's rules for this hour: "This market will be settled on the first 13:00 price stamp taken from Bloomberg."

It seems to me that it would be fairer for the settlement to be the last price of the hour, not the first of the new one. Many news reports come out on the hour, and could influence the next ftse update.

Piptrader; I think they use the 1 minute price, the price is used to close out the previous hour and to open the next one

Piptrader, thanks.
Wonder whether the Bloomberg has the same timestamp as the LSE for the same trade?

In our house, no two clocks and watches show the same hour, minutes and seconds.
Often they don't even show the same minute!

Mike !!!! You should be drinking, making merry and enjoying the turkey now ??

p.s. what do your mean by '1 minute prices'? Examples? Thanks.

Bullshare - thanks, that's a relief.

edit - that's what I thought too, axdpc. Such devotion to duty :-)

Betfair ping Bloomberg for the 13:00 price which is delivered to them at 13:01, hence it takes about 3 mins for the new hourly 13:00 to 14:00 intraday to be opened.

Bullshare - very useful info. - thanks. Do you know how close is the correlation between Bloomers and the Moneyam streaming graph tag?

Should be the same, in theory. Remember who might benefit from a late swing in price at close of event, its not just Betfair clisnts(- IGBinary bets, Binexx. BlueSq etc). I always try and green up on hourlies but weight the profit against the FTSE price 10 mins before expiry if the FTSE is within 5 points of the expiry price. So a FTSE 10am -11am at say 4699 expiry, 10 mins to go(so 10:50am) and the FTSE is at 4696 I would weight it to expiry positive(above 4699) but greened up.

Bullshare - thanks. Third day at betfair but pleased I'm in exhalted company with my tactics as the contrarian in me seems suited to this game. Watching the racing on C4 and having very small punts. 2 x 1 so far. Another 25k races for the merc :-)

I was looking at some of the betting information facilities available at

http://www.betbrain.com/

kernow/axdpc, the tick that Betfair use to close the hour and begin the new one is as Bullshare says the minute tick on the hour from Reuters. It is the tick that appears on MoneyAM's streaming chart less than a second after the hour. On some pedestrian sites it appears 2-3 seconds after the hour :-)

If you're going to trade on Betfair, particularly the FTSE, it is essential that your PC clock is synchronised with the correct time. I use Atomic Timesync but there are plenty of other programs that do the same. I also use AttachClock which displays a moveable clockface superimposed on whatever window you place it on.

script would it be possible for me to have the workings for the binary bet calculations, i have been trying to work it out basing my calculations on the black schole formula for options/warrants but it only works when the underlying is plus or minus 2 points fron expiry price , i also have a bug in the time line value,

Kayak, thanks. We hope most AM posters will have at least a small edge
over the other betters when it comes to FTSE and the DOW. Will keep watchign next week.

shogun, you KNOW Black-Schole formulae?! Must have a degree in mathematics :-)

shogun the bots are milliseconds behind the LSE using the same formula so unless you have a time machine it really isn't worth trying to be faster than them IMO.

axdpc , i,m not bad at the old maths its just a pitty i can not spell,

scripophilist, i,m not trying to be faster than the bots ( its not possible) just trying to work out what angle they are trading from and what they see as true value , do the bots trade to the 4.30 close on the ftse or do they leave the playing field early.

you can not win at a game if you do not know the rules and the bots make the rules.

Liquidity on the 3pm to close is much lower than the rest of the day because of the lottery of the auction. I studied the auction movements for a year and often used to nip it to take advantage of that but the market is much closer to mark now.

Kayak - re time - I use my watch and radio 4 :-) Dabbled with a couple of horse races and footie matches over the weekend. Came out even because I wasn't watching when Chelsea equalised to 1-1. I guess you veterans would tell me how important it is to concentrate.

Anyone know of a web site that's a good source of historical football statistics ?

I've found out that so far this season 7.2% of premiership matches have ended in a 0-0 draw, but I want to find out how many matches were 0-0 at half-time.

Does anyone know the time delay of Bloomberg data (1 min? 5 min? 15 min?). Thanks.