Position in Queue and Last Trade

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Euler
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I put a poll up on the blog about this to test the water in terms of peoples interpretation of things and it's pretty resounding so far, though not many voters.
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kelpie
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Euler wrote:I put a poll up on the blog about this to test the water in terms of peoples interpretation of things and it's pretty resounding so far, though not many voters.
100% say betfair are active in their markets :lol:

Unsurprised - I think everyone sense what's going on these days

Suggestion on the question, perhaps? "Do betfair trade against their users?"
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LeTiss
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Peter, your question asks "Are BF active in their markets?"

It doesn't ask "Are BF using their position to jump queues when trading their own markets?"

That's what's being discussed here!
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Euler
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We started looking at PIQ many years ago. The key problems we saw were:-

Cancellation of orders. You can cancel an order and there is no way of working out that this happened.

Scratched orders. If you scratch a trade, I scratch a lot, then matched bet volume remains unchanged but the queue position changes.

Then the elephant in the room cross matching. Especially on small markets like football you have no idea which one of three (in the match odds market) is getting matched and where that sits in the queue, so it becomes impossible to work out where you order on your selection is on the queue across all three selections. Almost impossible.

We've looked at a number of solutions over a decade but the only real solution is if Betfair expose the order book properly. In the absence of that it will only be a guess as to where you are in the queue. We've tested all current solutions including our own and they don't retain much more predictive power than WOM TBH. We done some very clever things but they can't overcome the three issues listed above. The last test we did showed if you put two orders and monitored PIQ using the most common accepted way of looking at it, it was random which one would fill first if you applied them to an equally sized queue.

Happy to implement it, but it will come with a warning to not be reliant on it. Rather than a sales pitch on the feature itself!
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Euler
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LeTiss 4pm wrote:Peter, your question asks "Are BF active in their markets?"

It doesn't ask "Are BF using their position to jump queues when trading their own markets?"

That's what's being discussed here!
That can be question 2 ;)
Last edited by Euler on Mon Mar 24, 2014 9:23 am, edited 1 time in total.
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kelpie
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LinusP wrote:I agree Kelpie, the advert I posted the other day basically says that they trade the markets. It would be easy for them to have a team of PHD students working there own accounts and just not charge them any commission.
Agree - that betfair ad revealed a lot
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Euler
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Lets start a separate thread to discuss it and the PIQ stuff.

I'd be interested in get views, feedback and ideas because I am happy to speak to Betfair about it at the appropriate time. I'd also like to bring the wider community into it.
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LeTiss
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Euler wrote:Lets start a separate thread to discuss it and the PIQ stuff.

I'd be interested in get views, feedback and ideas because I am happy to speak to Betfair about it at the appropriate time. I'd also like to bring the wider community into it.
Haha - you'll very quickly know the answer to 'Question 2' if you discuss it with BF and they politely ask you to not implement it ;)
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gutuami
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It would be nice to get some explanations from betfair about that advert. They might have their own version.

Peter can you mention that when you have a chance to speak to someone from betfair. Especially to those that swear that nothing is happening.
LinusP wrote:I agree Kelpie, the advert I posted the other day basically says that they trade the markets. It would be easy for them to have a team of PHD students working there own accounts and just not charge them any commission.
andyfuller
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Euler wrote: Scratched orders. If you scratch a trade, I scratch a lot, then matched bet volume remains unchanged but the queue position changes.
Isn't that only if you self scratch i.e. you back/lay your own order? I.e. You are at the front of the queue and you lay your own back or vice versa.

If you have say laid a selection 1 minute ago for £1,000 at 3.0 say and now decide the market is not going in your favour and so back the same selection for £1,000 at 3.0 the matched bet volume will still go up - I would still call that a scratch trade as the infamous Adam Todd once said, a scratch trade is a winning trade ;)
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kelpie
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Euler wrote:I am happy to speak to Betfair about it at the appropriate time. I'd also like to bring the wider community into it.
I suppose it's always good to talk :D

but honestly, betfair will just lie. There's no way a listed company will fess up to abusing their customer base

The best way is to challenge betfair to explain their accounts line items and especially p&L spikes. They will still try to lie but will be aware the FSA get involved with public deceptions about accounts

A quick peak on their 2013 accounts and I think betfair have already "admitted" they trade against their customers, and report the profits on their sportsbook line

http://corporate.betfair.com/investor-r ... /2013.aspx

"to reflect the risk we are taking, we build a margin into our Sportsbook odds and apply other risk management techniques. Over time, we expect these margins to allow us to generate revenue."

So remind me again how you transfer risk while making a profit? Yup, obvious innit, shit rolls downwards... :lol:

Sportsbook is showing a +33% year-on-year profit in 2013.
pmanso
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Joined: Sat May 28, 2011 9:01 am

We are drifting from the starting issue, PIQ. If other apps can calculate this in a very accurate way I'm forced to believe that it's possible to do this and that BA can do it also. It would be great to have an extra column in the ladder with this information, it could even be a column that you could turn on/off according to your trader needs. What do you say traders?
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to75ne
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leave the ladders alone. i would hate to see any space taken from or extra added to the ladders for the sake of at best an unrelaibale/dubious indicator.
Consty1
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Joined: Mon Aug 15, 2011 2:41 pm

I'd personally find position in the queue an amazing feature, especially for trading pre match football.
Online Trader
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Joined: Wed Apr 21, 2010 7:13 am

I am for having it if possible as Mark says for pre match trading on football it would be very useful.
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