Feck,

Can you explain exactly how your envisaged auction process would work? Obviously, there are many types of auction process (in fact, the current set up is a sort of auction, where users are constantly putting up back or lay 'bids') and I don't know what you're proposing.

Contrarian, it's a bit like the betfair sp inasmuch as you can request a min/max acceptable back/lay price or request auction sp. Big difference is the offers are hidden and there's a series of auctions that increase in frequency the nearer we get to the off. The only information showing is the auction sp from the previous auctions (guide prices for the first auction). IMO this would accomodate lower and easier to understand commission, better odds, fairer RF's, allow offers of any size to be put into the market in a oner without spooking the market, more stable prices, no middlemen, no front running, much harder for insiders to monopolise the market etc.

That would be more difficult contrarian but not impossible. I've got my own ideas about how that would work but I doubt any fairly run ir market could compete with betfair's cheat based, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't liquidity on the likes of the flies-round-sh1te markets. I'm not going to put up those ideas, or several others I have relating to auctions, up here. The auction idea originates from abetx

http://www.betting-school.com/bet/
2006/04/28/abetx-temporarily-close/

who tried to start up circa 2006 but never got off the ground. I think their idea consisted of a single auction for each event and (as far as I know) there was no auction sp.

If the spread on betfair is 3.5-3.6 then anything between 3.5 and 3.6 is better odds. On an auction everyone is matched at the same price. As far as hiding information goes, the tumbleweed in the early markets should be enough of a reason.

Feck, as regards auctions or the poss. of putting up offers and risking unmatched bets ever catching on with the people we want to be betting against, I have my doubts.

People may need to take a price and know that they have taken a price. Further, losing punters' reaction to price movements is often the opposite of what one wd think it shd be: instead of pressing when on a drift, the punter thinks of the bet as already lost, and instead of considering hedging when the price tightens past what must be an estimate of fair value, the mug punter goes in again.

My positions are too small and too much split across many runners until late that I don't fear front-running in the way you do (or perhaps I am just more naively trusting). I wd have no prob. w/ bf being understood by the public, govt., regulator etc. as no diff. from a standard back-only bookie, nor with their standing liabilities in a structured way at certain times to certain increasing takeouts.

The investor, the reason that Ladbrokes removed itself from oddschecker is surely the opposite of what you suggest: that they were only getting non-loyal custom from price-sensitive punters for whom their profit margin, if not negative, was a fraction of what they were getting from their regular users.

Taking your closed room scenario, what it seems to suggest is that traders can only step in to offer a not-too-painful price to the general market once the price has been determined for them by the balance of opinion-pricers-up. Since these two groups--traders and pricers-up--are in competition for the same money, it is easy for me to understand that the opinion people are aggrieved that the traders have taken a ride ('a free ride') on their coattails. Of course they wd prefer a series of one-on-one w/ any potential counterparty in which they either do a deal or otherwise. Traders wd presumably be absent from these tete-a-tetes.

Sorry the Investor, I see you were saying that the very small minority of players who checked oddschecker were bad business for Ladbrokes.

I think it may also be that they wanted to match the prices of bookies on bestbetting b/c their most likely competitors on price wd find it harder to be there too or b/c of commercial relationships.

askari1

[...]

Taking your closed room scenario, what it seems to suggest is that traders can only step in to offer a not-too-painful price to the general market once the price has been determined for them by the balance of opinion-pricers-up. Since these two groups--traders and pricers-up--are in competition for the same money, it is easy for me to understand that the opinion people are aggrieved that the traders have taken a ride ('a free ride') on their coattails. Of course they wd prefer a series of one-on-one w/ any potential counterparty in which they either do a deal or otherwise. Traders wd presumably be absent from these tete-a-tetes.

Yes, that's right. Although I would add that many pricers up will be trading, simply  because it is the optimal thing to do, so there is no clear deliniation between traders and pricers up.

Because I work to minuscule margins, traders jumping in front of me is only a problem in asian handicap / total goals markets, where if I put up a lay 10.5, someone can jump in front at 10.51 which is a little annoying.

the number of people that have contributed to this thread shows how delusional you guys are about your claims and arguments

Betfair has found the golden eggs and if they move it much more than what they already did...then the eggs WILL rotten...NAP

we are socially connected and if the "non-expert" spread the word (that either by pure luck or shrewd choices or whatever) they made money here trading and because of that they will make more people to join in, by simply passing the word

what makes people like me (in my case, that 6 years ago, knew nothing about gambling) come here and a grand majority is the feeling that things are open and more or less clear in terms of betting, if you guys change that there will be no renovation, whats wrong if a recreational punters win?? its what makes the wheel turn, if in casinos only the experts won there would be no casino, period

the world is heading to total globalization so on that basis the numbers will keep growing and growing (and they wont grow on the basis of experts, thats for sure) and i suspect and hope that is the main objective of betfair, grow by the numbers of non-expert people but at the same time keep things more or less clear and straight forward

the more people are here the less the importance (or claimed importance) of people like "feck" will have, they will be nothing but a "tick" in the overall scheme of things

Lusitano, if you're saying that w/ bf the people winning at gambling are not the people who won more than 10 yrs ago, I don't think that's strictly correct. I'm of an age where I couldn't have started gambling more than 15 yrs ago and I've been able to increase my profits (but only by spending increased and not-necessarily-value-for-money amounts of time).

Nor is it the case that a recreational gambler is more likely to take money off a trader than a gambler as a price moves towards an equilibrium level. In fact the reverse is true when the two styles of player have the same bank and expected return per market (i.e. the tissue player will win more infrequently).

I bet by 1) making a book through about 16 hours until the off on 65% of the market when I have the time and 2) arbing and 3) taking standout bets around 150-200 times a year when I don't. Clearly my m.o. depends on many features of the exchange. I'm in broad but not tota agreement w/ feck b/c I understand the point that small-denomination trading away from value prices constrains early liquidity, limits bf's comm. and unfairly advantages traders in relation to gamblers.

The argument is about how (if at all) to reduce traders' capacity to benefit from the information contained in offers already up on the site. It applies exclusively to early prices on horses. Indeed, someone who has found a way on win on football will likely find the reasoning arcane to the point of incomprehensibility.

You are almost certainly right that bf won't be moving to an auction system soon. But they are a bookmaker; their profits are 'wins from punters - losses to punters + costs'. There are many ways they can take more from result-invariant winners. the pc came as a shock to many on here too.

askari1

The only reason why BF might ever change their present platform is if it dawns on them that their business model is stalling because they are not attracting big players, especially in the horse racing markets where the obstacles to such players have been listed many times.

Personally, I am not convinced that the large sums seen in the football markets are anything other than from big traders otherwise I'm sure that we would have seen much faster profits growth overall and from that segment. Compared to the "under-the-radar" success of BM's like B 3 6 5  who are delivering £100m from a standing start 10 yrs ago, the traditional BM model still has the legs of the exchange model.

Hiding the queue might attract bigger players, who don't want their hand to be seen, and if this assumption is correct, that would be a reason for BF to adapt. Personally,I can't see BF ever adopting the traditional bookmaking model as their culture is now set as a zero operating risk business, with their risk being instead in the infrastructure needed to run an exchange designed to encourage trading. I truly believe that this is their main strategic mistake which has led them to top-heavy costs in technicians and computer assets and a user base which is too good at skimming profits for them ever to be where the growth in profit will come from. That said, I wish I had thought of the idea first!