Aug 23, 2012 -- 11:27AM, frog2 wrote:
Its a difficult one. The Betfair business model we all knew and loved was flawed. A few big players making huge demands of the servers trading making big steady profits was sucking the pot dry. For those that complain about the charges tell me an alternate solution that would work.It was only with the Premium Charge coming in and the logic of it being explained to me that I realised how much easier it is to make money trading (gambling on price movements) rather than gambling on outcomes. The basic commission structure coupled with steady rather than big up and down profits still massively favours trading to outright betting on here.The charges are extremely complex. Its a matter of optimising your activity on here to minimise charges.If you are on 2% commission you should be able to end up paying a long term commission rate of 33% on gross profits with no transaction or data request charges. But in order to do this you have to be willing to do your bit putting real liquidity into Betfair. By real liquidty I mean leaving open bets until the conclusion of events and bet enough so your overall ROI is very low.It makes sense now to place very marginally profitable bets or even slightly loss making bets in order to get rid of the extra charges. This in turn should bring more liquidity to the exchange. I am surprised no one is matching those bets if they are 'fair value' as it would reduce fees elsewhere. The big problem is the ever moving goal posts. Having invested 6 months in building a model to price Australian racing a 49 market per week limit came in. So that had to be binned.
spoi on. betfair have to ban all big winners, say above 50000 a year. and encourage medium winners to provide the necessary liquidity