Regulator gets tough on Spoofing
It would be nice if this were a statement related to Betfair, but hey, such is life.
This actually is a statement from regulators in financial markets. Spoofing there is consider a form of market manipulation and therefore is illegal. The deal in financial markets is if you manipulate a market to profit it’s wrong. The rationale behind this is that you are tricking people out of their money. This doesn’t add any value to the market and is a net negative activity.
Imagine you go into the supermarket and try and buy something, but somebody gets there before you and raises prices on every product as you attempt to buy them. On an individual basis that doesn’t add up to much, but on a collective basis the distortion is significant. This is why it’s frowned upon in financial markets. Its considered that this sort of manipulation syphons money off to people how are not adding any value.
Because trading on sports markets isn’t particularly well understood or regulated, then spoofing currently has a free hand. My attempts to flag this as an issue to the exchanges has pretty much been ignored, but I do feel it’s a problem, especially long term.
If left unchecked then it has the potential, wherever this activity occurs, to become a marketplace dominated by people trying to out spoof each other. That can’t be healthy. I’d much prefer a free flowing market without any such influence.
What do you think?
Category: Betfair, Trading strategies
