Hi,

not exactly a great start with my Championship tips with only 1 out of 4 doing the business.

West Brom v Luton   : Home win @ 1.63
Cardiff v Southend : draw (low stake) @ 3.70
Colchester v Leicester : Home win @ 1.94
Stoke v Wolves : Home win @ 2.22

Not what my model predicted, but in this game you have to take the rough with the smooth.

Cardiff v Southend was a long shot - in the end Southend got the away victory. They did too much! Also, Colchester's amazing run of consecutive home wins came to an end, and Stoke couldn't find a way past Wolves. Still, it is early doors.

It would have been a pretty poor weekend for the fund, but it was saved with some good fortune on the Spurs v Newcastle game. I had Spurs to win, and when they were 2-1 up, noticed someone had offered 66-1 on Newcastle winning with about 20-25 minutes left. This offer was understandable given that Spurs had been rampant and could have been 3 or 4 up, but it seemed too long. So I had a 50p on the Newcastle win, and luck was on my side today.

That brings me on to the main point of this post, which is evaluating pros and cons of Betfair and Betdaq.

From the point of view of those who play with small stakes, Betdaq has an advantage, since it allows trading with a smaller minimum stake (50p), albeit at slightly less favourable prices. As a player with small stakes, many times I have been frustrated with Betfair's £2 minimum bet as it has not allowed me to trade out from winning positions without adopting statistically foolish positions.  Same thing with post-ante bets. An adopted market position can have been proved correct by a change in the market in the backed direction, but if constrained by the minimum bet, then it is not possible to "trade out" without taking the opposite of the opening position.

Maybe the reason for the Betfair minimum bet is to dissuade people who don't have lots of money to spend on gambling. Perhaps it is because small stakes gamblers are considered to be such small-fry that they are not worth catering for. Perhaps it is because it gives an advantage to players with large banks. Perhaps it is because nobody at Betfair has really considered this issue. Perhaps it is none of the above. But Betdaq does allow me to do trade with lesser amounts. As a consequence, I am placing more bets with Betdaq now.

There also seems to be a higher liquidity on Betdaq at the moment than there was a few months back, at least on in-running football fixtures. Quite a lot of football gamblers/traders have been pretty noisy on the Betfair forums recently at mysterious interruptions to in-running games suspending for the duration of a game when advertised as in-running, and also other issues, such as screen freezes following site upgrades. I have been unable to trade on Betfair several times because of such issues, and it has cost me several times. Betdaq has not, to my knowledge suffered these outages. Maybe the increase in liquidity is a consequence of some traders deciding to put their money where their mouth is and use Betdaq.

A downside from my point of view with Betdaq is that it does not have the Betfair "what if" feature which calculates the results of hedging. I feel that if Betdaq were to offer this, then they would win significantly more custom. For the newcomer especially, this is a barrier, though I'm I've gone so many rounds in the last few months that the arithmetic is becoming more automatic for me, and is not such an obstacle. However, if Betdaq do work on this feature, then please don't bring it on-line until any bugs are sorted.

Betfair obviously has other advantages, such as the forum, and the live video. However, Betdaq has been responding with some pretty nifty features of it's own, such as support for accas, and recently, an in-running Asian handicap market.

I recently read a book "guide to the betting exchanges" (or something like that), which contains a chapter indicating that there was only room in the betting exchange market for a single player, analogous to there being just one stock exchange. I think that is just plain wrong. Just as there is no high street monopoly on bookies, I can't see a good reason why there should not be space for competing betting exchanges.

regards,

FT

good luck,

FT