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

Kayak
Thanks, I will try to decipher it.

Managed to get in a win all ways situation after the Norwich equaliser. After the Man City goal I back Norwich at 18.5, so laid some off.

Kayak, that's dreadfully complicated! To green up you simply divide your line P&L by the current lay odds.

Jeffmack, I can send you a spreadsheet if you wish. Drop me an email.

Script
Message sent via MAM, thanks

The formula is complicated Scrip, but it is buried in my calculator and I never see it. It handles partial greening up and also e.g. backing the opposite side rather than laying. All things you could work out by hand but it would increase the potential for errors. Also it forces me to think in terms of top and bottom on the screen which again removes a lot of the potential for errors. I'm sure I'm not alone in having occasionally backed rather than layed or backed the top outcome rather than the bottom.

I think I'll do the degree course first or maybe nightschool-1 day sure as hell won't cover it:)

I do think that, at first, the concepts involved are quite difficult to grasp. I devised for myself some calculations to do as 'exercises'. They helped me to get my head round things more easily.

eg, A 'Bet' has been placed on the Democrats to win the USA Election. After a time the odds change for both 'Bet' and 'Lay' and the following position is resultant:-

Republicans: Bet 1.71 / Lay 1.73
-100.00

Democrats: Bet 2.36 / Lay 2.4
300.00

Starting from a position like this, one can then work out what would be effect made to it after doing various sizes of Bets and Lays to each of the two sides and what would happen with a particular event result.

Next, one can add a third 'political party' (runner, player, etc) and do similar exercises.

Eventually, the concepts become much easier to understand and you begin to be able to spot the potential for the doing of various things. I suppose doing this kind of stuff just made me that bit more familiar with it.

I'm afraid I couldn't understand the two 'points' lists above and Kayaks formula lost me completely. I think they assume the reader (me) has possession of various types of other basic information. For me this assumption was incorrect. :-)

I cant work any of that out.Its seems very complicated for a CSE Maths boy.

Reminds me of traded options.

I spent ages looking at all the diffrent plays buy,sell, write, combis ect,before coming to the conclusion in my view anyway that the odds were nearly always against you :)

Not saying that is the case here though.

Iain; I find it very easy,not, although I have a BSc ( Bronze Swimming Certificate):-)

It would help if betfair was not down today for 5 hours.

LOL.

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.