Do Betfair want to save the exchange?

only one thing will boost liquidity instantly (apart from seeding the markets)

Nearly 600k matched in the 9.05 dundalk. That does not seem like a shortage of liquidity.

Unless your one of those people who want to bet overnight or 5 hours before the race then there is no problem.

acc , that figure is only a guide really .

the shorter the favourite is in the market , the higher that figure will be due to traders trading larger ammounts the shorter the price of a horse .

also , if just 2 people kept trading the same amount between them , that figure will go up so it can be misleading .

pre-race does not seem as bad as in-running though

There's more matched on each race in the British Isles than there was 9 years ago. Of course I have no idea how much was/is trading.

A few times again today Betfair were SHORTER than the bookies . Greed will KILL them ,worrying time ahead . I'm cutting right back on my betting on here , hardy ANY advantage in the FRONT of the markets...

salmon , when I first joined in 2008 , there was regularly around £1m matched every race , give or take a 100k , regardless of the price of the favourite.

I don't think it is the same as that level now .

^ far fetched, joined 2014, cant fool us ...

Workrider i think the exchange is just following the books these days,it used to be the other way round.

I'm not sure i'm 100% accurate but wasn't there a Swedish company that was responsible for over £500million worth of seeding in 2008 alone?
Who owns that company?
Is there even more provided these days as that was rapidly expanding then?
Does this company pay premium charge? I have my doubts.

The individual lone wolf market makers were killed off through pc,that is the main problem.

This from someone who's frequented this place for only 2 years.You are not qualified to contribute until you have experienced the ups and downs of this site for at least 10 years in my humble opinion.
And for the record,I have seen not too much of a difference that makes me want to leave since I have subscribed to this firm

Pa,The new co/owners have a bookies mentality , i.e. take take and take again, and its starting to show . In the not too distant past Betfair were NEVER lower the the books , at ONE meeting alone today they were lower in TWO races . If it keeps up and their bots keep playing they were they are at the moment plus comm , why would anyone in their right mind bother backing on here . The ball is firmly in their court and if they fail to correct or contain their greed , I can see the demise of this once great exchange.

paddy power bought the exchange to strangle not save it.

I agree WR though the greed was there ever before new owners.
All very orchestrated now, you may get 4.3/4 on your 3/1 shot,but pay your commission and a drift and it is a bad bet.
The forums are a good guide to the demise,they are all but dead.

theres no probs 10 mins before every race...in running is dire.

Pa, just had a quick look at todays results , as you rightly say with comm etc very little difference . Shock horror , have a look at this.
Bath 2.20 -2
Ayr 4.55 -1
Ayr 5.25- e
Kemp 6.25 -13
South 5.40 -4
South 7.15 -2
War  4.30 -2
I make that SEVEN races were Betfair are LOWER than the books ,scary or what ...

I am not at all au fait with the PC facility, but am surprised at the hoo-haa on here considering it must affect very few people, for it is widely known that the % of winners on here is miniscule and wouldn't apply.
It was my understanding, rightly or wrongly, that it was a tactic aimed at on-course Bookmakers who shovel money on here to reduce their on-course liabilities whilst robbing their on-course clients.
If this is the case, I applaud Betfair for imposing prohibitive penalties on these operators,as this was surely not the raison d'etre of the Exchange.
Purely my opinion,for what it's worth.

Good post that workrider. For years, the Betfair exchange drove value. The bookmakers had to compete or die, and the fixed odds market was buoyed by the "free market" mentality of the peer to peer model.

Should the exchange model retreat, it's not hard to envisage that waters plentiful of offers from shiny new fish, would soon become muddied as the sharks move in and gobble them all up.

Pa, this place will never be dead.
Where else can you LAY to win on every race, every event.
Simple

There's definitely a future for exchange betting but it's clearly not botfair that will take it forward.

^ far fetched, joined 2014, cant fool us ...

fair point

Straight questions Roida,i honestly don't know the answer,you can put me in the table if you want.
do you think for that 10 minutes they are all punters trying to get bets on?
Is it possible most is made up of a "super bot" just churning and trading?

And where else can you bet place only.

but they are trying to get rid of losing punters ,as YOMOMMA says paddy is trying to destroy the exchange and when their work is done they will reopen it buy there will be no laying and backing will be course prices.

Don't think so.If Betfair did that,liquidity on **** would explode and fill the gap left.

It's the model that's at risk RothmanMike. Not the operator. Are new gamblers adopting it at the same rate as they were in the early noughties?

Rothman fair point with laying,though disagree with your view regarding on course books and pc(most use daq i believe), it was simply a move to boost profits under a guise of targetting bot users and paying for advertising to get more users.
The amount paying it is a small percentage but growing and most are then lost as they cannot operate at a 20/40% deficit.
They were two main market makers in golf a few years ago,one fella was called Eddie the Eagle,he seeded the markets but had an opinion and a stance,cracking prices where there. They are poor now as any sucessful person gets saddled with pc.

I think the advent of handicap races,6 or 7 in an 8-race card has been detrimental to serious punters,who prefer non-handicap races.I have noticed that even a poor maiden with a short price fav attracts well over £1m punted,whereas most impossible handicaps have only £5-600k wagered per race.
This is because of the undue influence of bookmakers on Race planning in recent years.
So blame them not Betfair on this occasion.

mike , any race with a short price fav will have much more matched ( apart from the big meets ) as the traders use higher stakes to trade with .

Rothman you are spot on on two counts - first of all its a win win for betfair exchange for any new punter coming into the game wont even have heard of the opposition due to lack of advertising - secondly why would they throw away a company that "wins regardless" of result - aint gona happen  in the short term thats for sure

Hiya PaddyPower please let me bet wiv u again cos i luv ya ads (not)

Stick this in ya ads PP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRPOiLc_xBY

GUYS,believe this or not , failed mergers in business are higher % than divorce.96% of business mergers fail.
Paddy will run the betfair exchange into the grave,then he will buy betfair lock stock and barrel ,and open it up again under the paddy power banner.and betfair shareholders will be delighted with their healthy profits while paddy will be delighted to have expanded and increased his percentage share in the global betting market.

the unnamed champagne drinking lobster eating paddy power share holders have had talks with the crooks for a possible takeover and I expect deals behind closed doors with the walker family over billys are well underway,while joe will be an after thought as they capture their monopoly .I stress this is my opinion and I can not support it with facts,but the steam roller has started to roll.

Why wud they run a profit making - and always profit making company into the ground iyo - doesnt make sense and wont happen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL7-CKirWZE

apologies for the ad .....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2cMG33mWVY

its done to get share holders to sell.its happens in all take over bids in business.and in property deals.the fat cats in both companies end up with large bowls of cream.the rich get richer and the small guy ends up with nothing.governments do it all the time.
but at the end of the day usually the pie is divided with the 20 to 30 fat cats getting big slices while the rest fight over the crumbs that is left,if you know what I mean.

And  it has happened to betfair once already,The guys that started the once worlds largest betting organization turned into fat cats and left with their bowls of cream.

HE WAS on the waltzer.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJWIbIe0N90

just my opinion

unfortunately betfair in its position as best gambling company in the world(my opinion)do not have the assets of property that the others  have,When the crooks were on top with their empire they masses 2000 billion in property assets buying hotels,casinos,houses,shops,and so on,When we think of the ladcrooks days we remember them as bookmakers but behind the scenes all they were was property agents and filling up their property port folio with every corner shop in every town and village,cleaning out the public to pay for the property.paddy billy and joe also have their property while betfair have a few towers and a web site.

you have your views brassneck ... but ask yaself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpYeekQkAdc

correction=200 billion (crooks)

Workrider : In the not too distant past Betfair were NEVER lower the the books , at ONE meeting alone today they were lower in TWO races

Every horse?

Or you just handpicking 1 or 2 form 1 or 2 races?

I heard betfair were advertising the exchange again.

Now I've seen them too.

That's a positive in itself.

I don't know as much about this as a lot of you lads on this thread but I think from a Horse Racing betting point of view Betfair will continue to exist as Bookmakers don't want to take bets so where else does everyone get on. If they did start taking bets there'd be a resurgence in ARBERS and where would they lay for their FREE MONEY Betfair of course as before.

brassneck so called property assets aren't necessarily all they're cracked up to be especially if they're leasehold properties in secondary/tertiary locations where if the business declines the property costs at best stay the same but probably increase.
I've not checked however wouldn't be taken aback to discover that the freehold properties originally owned were sold off at the time of flotation.

Last ten minutes.com has become last fiveminutes.com - have a look at the place market ten minutes b4 a race there might only be 5k matched. 5k amongst the whole country. Laughable. Some people at Betfair must be worried because they've rung people and asked why they stopped using the exchange.

There was mention on this thread of the forums dying on Betfair.Well,when you read the garbage that gets posted,no wonder the sensible posters don't bother to put up threads anymore.
As for liquidity dropping,that is garbage too.What has changed is the style of playing by members.So overnight liquidity is poor,so what!It is the last few minutes before the "off" that count,where liquidity is still good.The better the race,then the higher the liquidity.
  If I was running the forum I would warn all the posters  that want to continually denigrate the company,like when the shares dropped to under £7,and then climbed to over £32.Where were all those doom and gloom merchants then,that got it totally wrong?.Did any of them invest in Betfair?Probably not,just continued to moan and moan about it.Not sharp minds!

Do you own any shares unbiased? You seem a bit defensive. The forum has major competition from the likes of twitter so it's no surprise less people post, if they indeed do.

Of course I did.Bought when Betfair got listed,hung on,then whoosh.I had the privilege of being invited to see how Betfair operates when they first started in Parsons Green at the end of 1999 approx.,and couldn't believe what I saw,and couldn't take it all in at the time.Have watched it steadily grow over the years,and seen how it has become the first port of call for many players.Couldn't begin to guess how many account holders they have.
Re. the forum,it is an extra,people ranting and raving,many of them with nothing to say of any worth.Many pocket talkers,bad losers,posters with grudges.You name it,it is all there.Yes,there used to be far more sensible posting,but the standard has dropped badly,so many now don't bother,but that has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with liquidity,betting etc.It is an extra for members to supposedly swap intelligent views.

Betfair want you to use Sportsbook end of thread.

unbiased , you say liquidity is not dropping , what dates are you comparing that too ?

"SIR_Bond • May 19, 2016 12:24 PM BST
Betfair want you to use Sportsbook end of thread."

...but only if you're a mug £20 footy acca merchant

Liquidity not dropping? It may not be a couple of mins before the off but before that it is a complete joke. Years ago the night before/early morning you could easily get a couple of hundred on a 10/1 poke (same or bigger price than the books). Now stick 30 quid up and a 2 quid bot jumps in front, someone goes in front of that and nobody gets matched. The books then shorten their price to line up with the asking price on here. They then go blue on oddschecker and it's now officially 'a gamble'. You only have to look at what has been matched to see the liquidity is non existent until the off.

The only one posting rubbish on the forum is unbiased as per usual.

I have all the BF price files for Racing loaded locally at home; if pablo thinks liquidity has dropped markedly since 2008 won't take me long this evening to pull the pre-pay and in-play matched amounts for last Saturday's racing and the corresponding meetings in 2008 and see how different the numbers are.  I'll try to remember to give that a go when I get home from work.

geoff m . I gave a list of yesterdays results , 2 - at one meeting .

longbridge , thanks.

will be interesting to see .

I don't think I said markedly though , just seems not as much.

could you do a whole month april 2008/april 2016 ?

could you also do 2013 - 2016 april ?

cheers

Whole month will probably have to wait for the weekend.  The way I have the data stored is designed for getting to the prices easily rather than the matched amounts, for one day I can pull it into Excel for a month I'll need to write some queries.

Will be instructive so I'll give it a go.

I see , thanks .

I'd be suspicious of todays "liquidity" figures,whether right or wrong.
What i find happening in nearly every race is say for example 25 minutes before race a horse gets backed from 3.6 to 3.1,it then drifts out to original price near off. I don't know what it is but it almost seems pre fabricated to me.
Be interested in the figures though in any case.

@ Unbiased, maybe the standrad has dropped on forums but often rather than the pocket talkers etc you are highlighting, there was also legitimate "moaning" by people that had two sided bets and lost money due to the almost weekly crashes,people who were promised they wouldn't be hit by pc(know of 2 people,one +7k and 1 +10k who had no advantage and are paying it).

Don't dispute the forum is an extra but having a vested interest yourself financially in the company you probably would like to see the back of it.

Yomamma,I wonder where you get your knowledge from.You love to give out the abuse,but most of the time you are wrong.Show me where anything I posted is "rubbish".Maybe in your limited view,but that certainly doesn't make me wrong.Unlike you I give thoughts to posts,and am not in the habit,unlike yourself,of trying to malign forumites,and spoil the forum.
   Try to accept that betting habits have drastically changed,and will continue to do so,over the years.Giving away information for a few pounds on the overnight liquidity is now seen as a poor exercise,and understandably so.
  Racing is only a part of the large betting groups turnover,as shown by 365 figures.Check out the turnover on other sports on here,like T20 cricket,grand slam tennis,televised top football matches etc.
    Pa lapsy,I sold out pre merger,but will defend Betfair,because without it myself,and many others,would soon notice the difference,as betting life pre Betfair was a great deal harder,and a lot less fun.
Genuine posts,and humorous ones  are always interesting to read,but they have become few and far between.Yes ,there has been some crackers over the years,but the abusers,and pocket talkers appear to be the biggest posters nowadays.

Yes Unbiased,a lot to be thankful for with the advent of the exchange, but you had the feeling you were a valued customer then.
Talking about crashes in last post and there you go,no doubt some people got "caught" with that,what will they get but a fobbed off response yet again(if lucky) while through no fault of there own they are out of pocket.
That is the difference now,the treatment of customers is poor,like it or lump it, i think that when the exchange was "better" that transfered to the forum also.

@pa lapsy:

"What i find happening in nearly every race is say for example 25 minutes before race a horse gets backed from 3.6 to 3.1,it then drifts out to original price near off."

So why aren't you laying it @ 3.1, backing it at the original price and cleaning up?

Because every bet on here is now -22.5% before i press a button Longbridge.

The more betfair continues to push every new customer on to the Sportsbook, the more exchange liqudity will decline. It is as simple as that. That at the inorexable decline of public interest in Horse Racing as a betting medium will render the markets moribund (like the USA/French markets etc) within a decade. The only way the markets will improve is with a significant influx of new punters, presumably from overseas.

BFSP(inc 5%comm)diff to ISP for Favs only 2009-now

09 +4.72%
10 +4.32%
11 +4.53%
12 +4.32%
13 +4.48%
14 +4.14%
15 +4.17%
16 +4.23% ex Jan

not my data, from twitter :-)