Betfair's best way out of this

I am pretty confident whatever they did someone would be outraged by it.

I would be outraged if Betfair squandered their cash reserves by paying punters any portion of their £23M in winnings!

What a stupid idea. Feck living up to his username

What's stupid about it stupid?

Feck N. Eejit - what a silly idea.  Why should Betfair try to look after the small losers, the ones who keep the entire show on the road?  Why should Betfair make any goodwill gestures.  You don't have to do this like this anymore once you are a FTSE company.

A free Betfair fleece is the correct answer

Personally, I wouldn't settle for anything less, than a Betfair Diary and a signed photo of Steve Morana.

what is the "this" they need to get out of, exactly?

what do you think's going to happen if they just do nothing?

Their share price is falling as a result of them doing nothing. They will lose losers as a result of them doing nothing.

...and their share price will recover when people realise this has no implications for the profitability of the company.

as for losers (or anyone else), why on earth would this make them leave if they've stuck through the saturday crashes - which recent results indicate they clearly have?

or could it be, heaven forfend, that feck's using this issue to bang his usual set of drums?

There can't be many companies in the FTSE 250 less 'loved' by their customers than Betfair.  It urgently needs some of the savvy and slick PR from paddy power which Breon Corcoran should be able to bring.  Tony Calvin's efforts were excruciatingly bad.

that mark davies piece on his website basically reads like an "I'm still here" pitch to me, ballabriggs.

They should pay out at whatever the genuine odds would have been if there hadn't been a ****-up (which they could agree with someone from IBAS). It would cost then less than a million and would be a fair settlement all round.

viva el presidente! - It's obvious how proud he is of Betfair (and how much he misses it).  When he wrote a few months ago how (I think) only one of the board bothered to say goodbye, and whoever it was, it was someone brand new to the board, then there is something deeply wrong at Betfair.  Betfair is still operating at a funny part of the curve (the name of this type of curve escapes me), where they have had a bubble in their valuation, fuelled by cross-matching, PC, and all sorts.  This inflated the share price and has led to the subsequent collapse.  It is only a matter of time before Betfair starts to become a company again which realises that looking after its valuable customers (mostly the losers) is the key to safeguarding its own future.  As it is, there are too many people who have big share options deals etcetera, who want to keep a very tight control of the small trickle of information which is allowed to come out of BF HQ.  This in turn led to the "Senior Executives Incentive Plan", chucking another couple of million quid to the top boys if they could help keep the share price up as high as possible. 

Something is (obviously) wrong in Betfair's culture.  This will (inevitably) change in the future.  How and when that happens, who knows.

...and their share price will recover when people realise this has no implications for the profitability of the company.

When will they realise this and what made them think it would in the first place if it was never going to cost them custom.


as for losers (or anyone else), why on earth would this make them leave if they've stuck through the saturday crashes - which recent results indicate they clearly have?

They could go elsewhere during crashes. The possibility of not being paid when they back a winner is an entirely different level of disincentive.


or could it be, heaven forfend, that feck's using this issue to bang his usual set of drums?

Is that different to your forfending / drum banging?

What if your Bot went nuts and you actually had enough in your account to cover the losses? at what figure do you say thats a Palpable error?...I ask this because I usually keep a minimum of 5 Million in my acount and my Bot is programmed by my 14 yr old nephew.

Only 5m?  Sorry to hear you've fallen on hard times Thin and Crispy.

whenn will they realise this? over the next couple of weeks would be my best guess. no one will leave because they think there's a chance of not getting paid, because everyone affected will have known when they were placing the bets that what they were seeing was a mistake in the system.

and what drum is it that you think I've been banging, please?

T&C - you raise a good point, in a pixyish way.

why should BF be allowed to invoke the palp rule to protect themselves, yet not allow their customers to do the same? in fact, not only that, they allow people to systematically place trap bets to take advantage of the fact that obvious mistakes won't be palped. and take a percentage of the proceeds as commission/PC.

whenn will they realise this? over the next couple of weeks would be my best guess. no one will leave because they think there's a chance of not getting paid, because everyone affected will have known when they were placing the bets that what they were seeing was a mistake in the system.

As far as no winners leaving I say as much in the opening post. Do you think the shares dropped because they thought winners were going to leave? Why would that make the shares drop?

and what drum is it that you think I've been banging, please?

Same question to you stalker.

the shares dropped because markets commonly overreact to events the people playing them don't understand. that particularly shouldn't be a new concept to anyone on here.

How do you know people were overreacting? Is there something you know that others don't?

How can "there was a computer glitch, all bets are void, you're not being paid, fk off." followed by a nationwide advertising campaign highlighting the non-payment not be bad for business? The shares have fell at a time when other gaming shares are going up because of the anticipated relaxation of USA online betting regulations. You wonder betfair bothered to respond at all given your thinking. Maybe Stephen Moran should've used the word "delighted" rather than "devastated" given the shareholders are so thick.

vep, how many shares have you bought the last couple of days ?
  You would be stupid not to since you know they will go back up.

I've never bought a share in anything in my life eddie, so the answer is none.

but, exactly why does this detract from the value of the company? it's clearly not something that's repeatable, and there's no credible legal comeback, so what's the concrete reason to revalue the company downwards? a few people will huff and puff for a bit, but no one's going to leave.

what we're looking at here is a spectacular palp, exchange-style. but it's still basically a palp. as I said earlier, the recent saturday collapses would have been more of a rational reason to short the shares.

viva el presidente! - this detracts from the value of the company because it comes on the back of a quick succession of disasters.  Chief amongst them not disclosing they had lost 90,000 of their customers bank details.  Add in the constant trend of jumping into the lifeboats from middle and senior management, plus site outages, plus the either stonewall silence or atrocious Tony Calvin interview, which has been absolutely savaged on the horse racing forum, and all is not well.  There is a bigger picture here, and going back to the earlier point, why would ANY company want to outcast Mark Davies, but choose to be represented in public by Tony Calvin?  It makes no sense.

that's an argument for the shares falling before this happened, but what specifically about this means they should fall further?

either they were overvalued before this happened, or they will recover imo.

What on earth have short term share price movements got to do with anything ?
Are some of you seriously saying that such movements are indicators of fundamental failures and general lack of confidence in the long term future of a company ( a market leader of sorts at that ) ?
In the long run this episode will be forgotten by the markets, and the shares will be priced on more important strategic issues.

And yes as VEP so presciently says, they will go either up or down.

Actually the great JP Morgan used to say that always when asked about future share movements.

Perhaps betfair should just locate the whereabouts of all the resident forum moaning brigade and have the phatom flan flinger call at all of their houses and hit them in the face with a big egg-custard pie, after all it could aal be done with complete success as none of you, and you know who you are would ever admit to having egg on your own faces

Viva - These sort of PR disasters must inevitably have some impact on the profitability of a company. In my view this episode will have upset some serial losers / recreational players - I accept that most will be professional players / opportunists who are making a living on here.

A small company making modest profits with what appears to be inept management is not an attractive proposition for an investor / pension fund. Perhaps it is just as well you have not been involved in share purchasers as you will have backed a lot more losers than winners over the years.

viv, should be working for betfair if he doesn't already. It's strange that a suggestion to look after the losers as the winners have nowhere else to go should offend him so much. Ditto for his "give them fk all, it will blow over" attitude.

if you're trying to paint me as a betfair apologist you really have run out of arguments feck. I just know bs when I smell it, and the bottom line here is, it's going to cost bf a) nothing or b) next to nothing.

no one's going to leave because of this. the saturday collapses impacted far more people and unlike this, people actually lost real money. and where is the evidence of turnover falling as a result?

Where's the evidence it isn't falling as a result? If you had to stake your daughter's life on someone leaving because of this or no one leaving because of this what way would you go? As far as the Saturday collapses go, losers always have somewhere else to go, it's the winners (who have nowhere else to go) who would be impacted most.

You still don't explain your problem with losers being compensated. They are your customers as well as betfairs.

very naive imo for someone to say that 'no ones going to leave because of this' - some will leave and they are the people that BF need and indeed spend money trying to recruit in the first place.

A suggestion that BF should try to help the serial losers in this case is one that should be applauded imo as in the long run it will help the company. Mind you that sort of thinking is beyond BF's management ability and it would appear beyond some on here.

here we go, now its phantom mass exodus time, haven't the masses already found there promised land on here or are the fruits not as sweet to the taste as was on first bite?

Don't think anyone's talking about a mass exodus as most of the winning bets will be down to long term ir winners who don't have an alternative. Doubt the negative publicity will be attracting many though.

it makes the earlier press release this month that the technology is being pushed to ever higher levels seem a little worrying when the current model was exposed to such a chaotic flaw.

reckon the next ceo should tape the server wire with the mains plug to his ankle and keep a close eye on each market in case he needs to kick like a mule at the next hickup.