Category: Betfair
Betfair crash
Quite a serious outage this evening, or outrage as some will nickname it. The site has been offline for nearly two hours now. We hope you are not too badly affected by the crash.
We do have some clever things built into Bet Angel such as connection modes that can help during certain types of crash, but this seems to be a complete outage on Betfair’s behalf. We look forward to learning what the cause was.
Betfair widen cross matching net
Today will see the launch of cross matching on pre-off horse racing markets. Having studied the markets for a long, long, time, I think I can guess the impact that this will have, but I am open minded. Change will occur though, so keep your eyes out.
In-play cross matching produced a curiosity which we hadn’t thought of, so it may be that pre-off does as well. We have collated data over very long time frames and can see at …
New Betfair charge?
Seems like a lot of people received an email from Betfair yesterday evening saying they will charged £4 a month if they have an inactive account. Even I got one!
My inactive account was an account I used to test Euro configurations of Bet Angel and now, despite my activity elsewhere, it looks like they want to charge me unless I actively use it. I’ll be on the phone this morning to withdraw funds and close it down. I suspect …
Betfair results fail to impress
Betfair announced their maiden results yesterday. You can view the full regulatory release here: –
https://www.investegate.co.uk/Article.aspx?id=201012140700098801X
Or a more concise BBC report here: –
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11989347
The upshot was that the city didn’t like them and sent the shares down 16% to below £10 for the first time. Quite some way from the £15.50 reached on the first day of trading. The results always contain some interesting reading material and now they are public, we will get to see a formal …
Betfair widen cross matching again
Betfair have gone for the big one and are going to ‘trial’ cross matching on pre-off horse racing today at Lingfield. Cross matching was initiated to ‘improve’ the fill rate on markets and eliminate the possibility of the book going over broke. As users subsequently found out, the first iteration also improved Betfair’s bottom line.
As you know, I am a keen market watcher and given enough races will be able to see the exact impact that this change …
Cross matching goes live on inplay racing
See Betfair announcement. Looks like they are planning to go live tomorrow on all racing: –
“Following a previous trial earlier this year, we are now running another trial of in-play cross-selection matching (‘cross-matching’) on the win markets at Lingfield Park on Tuesday 23rd November. Cross-matching will only be activated after the markets are turned in-play.
Cross-matching was introduced
Set back for Betfair Australia
Scott reports on his blog that Racing NSW has won an appeal on what is clearly a discriminatory tactic against Betfair. Unless Betfair can overturn the ruling it’s a game changer in this territory for exchanges.
https://www.sportismadeforbetting.com/2010/11/racing-nsw-wins-racefields-legislation.html
No false start for Betfair float
Betfair shares got off to a good start last Friday on the London stock exchange. I am sure there will be plenty of excitement and speculation around the shares for some time. Betfair is a ‘new’ business, has good competitive aspects and is one that has seen rapid growth. Surely a ‘hot’ stock.
As you may be aware, I have been brought up on a diet of long term investing on the stock market and not speculation. My focus has …
Betfair’s LMAX up and running
It looks like Betfiar’s financial markets operation, LMAX, is up and running. I am on their mailing list but haven’t received anything yet. However, if you visit the following site you can read about LMAX and sign up for an account and browse the site.
The first thing I tried to find was charges. It appears Betfair are going to adopt a normal financial market model of charging for a buy and sell, there are some example trades here: …
Fat fingers crucify punter
I see lots of strange things in the markets but few stranger than what happened just a moment ago at Newbury. While I realise we all, in some way, take money of each other now and again. I feel a great deal of sympathy for what they did, we all screw up from time to time. I can’t imagine how they felt after this error.
The long and short of it is that they backed a 400/1 shot down to …
Betfair set float price
Full news release here: –
https://corporate.betfair.com/media/press-releases/2010/2010-10-07.aspx
But here is the important bit: –
“The indicative price range of the Offer has been set at between £11.00 and £14.00 per Share, which is equivalent to an equity value for Betfair of between approximately £1.16 billion and £1.48 billion based on its issued share capital2. This indicative price range is expected to make Betfair eligible for inclusion in the FTSE 250 Index in due course.”
Four years ago
It was back in 2006 on this Friday and Saturday that I attended the World Money Show with Betfair.
It was a tough thing to do, as all around us we had all sorts of sexy stands and products owned by very slick and well funded financial types. The first problem was getting people to come to the stand, I remember arguing with a Forex trader who was critical of Betfair’s presence at the show. I tried to explain that …
Betfair 1/3 for float failure
Credit to the forum poster who found this on the Internet but it’s either a wonderful peice of PR or people are actually betting against the float being a success. An interesting read anyhow. Until I see the price and / or the offer document it’s difficult to make a true judgement as to whether it’s too expensive or not.
Betfair flotation WILL go ahead
Read full details here: –
https://corporate.betfair.com/investors.asp
As an active private investor I’ve been valuing companies for years. When a company IPO’s to fund expansion this is usually seen as a good sign, raising low cost captial to expand. When a company IPO’s to acquire, there is some risk but the rationale can be justified. The final type of IPO is an exit strategy, a chance for shareholders to cash in at the highest price and to sell some of their …
Paddy Powers on
It’s easy to forget in this modern age of betting exchanges that traditional bookmakers are still around and still going strong. Paddy Power just released results which showed that gross win was up 117% to €112m and operating profit up 66% to €36.1m. Online betting accounts for 73% of the group’s operating profit.
Paddy Power said profit before tax for the six months to June 30 grew 54% to €52.5m. In 2009 Betfair earned £42m for the whole year.
Paddy …
Betfair eyes up filipino
Having made its first major move into the Asian gaming market last year with an agreement to provide IT solutions to Interactive Entertainment Solutions Technologies (IEST), operator of a betting exchange in the Philippines, Betfair has now been offered a 40 per cent stake in IEST worth US$15m by Philippines-based Diversified Financial Network Inc (DFNN).
DFNN notified the Philippine Stock Exchange this week that IEST and Betfair had defined an option agreement for Betfair to acquire a 40 per cent …
Betfair API problems
Just a short note to confirm that there were problems with the Betfair API this afternoon. For those that are new to Bet Angel you may be interested to know that we support API and non API connections. In the event of an API issue you can just switch from one mode to another to carry on you activity. There are some differences between the modes so make sure you are aware of those before switching connection mode.
Betfair extend cross matching
Betfair today announced that they had extended their cross matching algorithm to include a trail on in-running horse racing markets. Full announcement is detailed below: –
Improved bet matching algorithm trial on today’s in-running markets at Carlisle and Sedgefield
For the win markets on today’s cards at Carlisle and Sedgefield we will be improving our bet-matching algorithm to include cross-selection matching (‘cross-matching’). Cross-matching will only be activated after the markets are turned in-play. Please note that this is just a …
Biggest ever Betfair premium charge? Pt 2
It was quite amusing to see my previous post a few months ago, suddenly spring to life.
https://www.betangel.com/blog_wp/2009/02/25/biggest-premium-charge/
Unfortunately it seems to have been hijacked into an anti in-running fast pictures debate. This is quite amusing as the charges, note the question mark on both posts, are nothing to do with horse racing and definitely not in-running. I guess people will always try to stir up controversy if it suits their agenda and that’s probably the motivation to incorrectly pin …
Biggest Betfair premium charge?
I was passed some information this morning that indicates that at least one Betfair customer paid fees of some sort somewhere in the region of £200-250k in the last three months of the year! Puts things into perspective doesn’t it? It also makes you wonder just how much money is being generated in premium charges? It will be interesting to see where it ends up on Betfair’s next annual report. If they are spending it to get new customers then …
Betfair Premium charge portal
Just been emailed this link: –
https://premiumcharge.betfair.com/PremiumPortal/portal
By the look of it it appears to generate your last premium charge statement, or at least the front page of it. Despite efforts to reduce the charge mine still makes grim reading. But I suppose in some ways I should be thankful that is the case.
Betfair’s SP mechanism appears flawed
I’ve spent a lot of time looking at Betfair SP and trying to find a useful way to utilise it. Having found a couple of useful ways of putting it to use I also discovered a fairly critical flaw. It turns out that SP or “starting price” to give it its full name is actually nothing like a starting price it should called an “early furlong price”.
The issue revolves around the time delay between a race getting underway and …
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