Smarkets's skullduggery

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Derek27
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ShaunWhite wrote:
Wed Oct 10, 2018 9:00 pm
Dallas wrote:
Wed Oct 10, 2018 8:20 pm
Right or wrong that's more info than Betfair have provided following all their outages combined.
But to be fair you could assume these are their likely weaknesses. They're fairly standard issues with systems that have to remain live, there's no easy opportunity for housekeeping. If anyone has had experience designing exchange systems then they're massively impressed with just how reliable betfair are, especially in the implementation of the ESA. The moaners really ought to look at what's involved. I wish the Smarkets guys all the best because bullet proof bespoke systems don't come cheap, that 3.5mil will get burnt pretty quickly.

Interesting to see that they link their horse and football exposure. Exposure? On an exchange?
A several years ago I had a lot of sympathy for Betfair when they had outages given the complexity of the system they're running, but the sympathy well has now run dry. :)

Regarding exposure, I think Jason was referring to the customer's exposure. I always just assumed that their data centres would have a central database of all the customer's transactions and unmatched bets so exposure can always be verified regardless of what sports are traded.
spreadbetting
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ShaunWhite wrote:
Wed Oct 10, 2018 9:00 pm


Interesting to see that they link their horse and football exposure. Exposure? On an exchange?

I think he's talking about customers exposure, Shaun, rather than the exchange's exposure.

I'd basically like to know why we're still waiting for an open API despite smarkets saying they'd be one ages ago. It's no surprise prices aren't available when people try to take them if they're limited to a web interface. I'd imagine the Market makers with API access are more than happy with the current status though as it almost forces players to adopt a mentality of jumping prices in order to get matched.
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ShaunWhite
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Fair point about the interpretation of exposure but as I've never even contemplated linking those two (and can't see why I would) I made a hasty assumption that he wasn't talking about me aka a customer.

An open to anyone api is vital, and access to it should be free to encourage 3rd party developers plus attractive pass thru bonuses. Yet another gambling web site won't set the world on fire, a plethora of innovative apps, with each publisher pushing them like crazy is the way to rapid growth. The current business model seems really dated.

Or go a stage further, the value in this business seems to be the machinery rather than the brand, so hosting the exchange would seem to much simpler and more lucrative than aping (no pun intended) the Betfair model, perhaps in the same way dozens of poker and casino sites are just skins over handful of game servers. Then allow privileged access to it for the trade customers to benefit from the pooled liquidity. The challenge is making 'Powered by Smarkets' the trusted badge of approval.

At present I can't seem to get exited enough to invest any time, effort or money into what's on offer, "I'm out". And if they've only raised 3.5mil in 7 years then I'm probably not the first to say that.
pythonic
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I appreciate the fact that Jason takes the time to write here and answers lots of questions.
Still, as the first poster said, the fact that smarkets runs its own in-house market maker and derives a large part of its income from that creates an obvious conflict of interest. This combined with the fact that they don't provide an open API looks like they don't really want smart action.
If you take liquidity and win, then you cost them money directly. And if you provide liquidity and win, then you compete with their own market maker.
Maybe they appreciate increasing activity on their platform so much that they are fine with competition to their market maker, but the fact that they still don't provide an open API looks to me like they prefer the status quo: Their own market maker and then a few others that maybe fill some gaps where their own market maker is not so good at providing liquidity.
pythonic
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LinusP wrote:
Wed Oct 10, 2018 9:12 pm
Skullduggery is a great word.

On a side note Betfair have added a few tech articles to the forum:

https://forum.developer.betfair.com/articles

And here (was surprised to see Betfair know what SRE stands for...)

https://ppb.technology/
Thanks for the link, Liam! I thought betfair had shut down / outsourced developer.betfair.com.
bmz4
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Important question to Smarkets. Is it true, that you have blocked multiple countries. Like Finland, where i live. And if thats your policy, reasons for that.
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globi166
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Well Its perfect for Match betting. Members of famous matchbetting website (like me) have 0 commission for a year!!
spreadbetting
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Those new limits would catch just about every horse race trader when you consider there's around 800 races a month so just one closed bet per market would force you into the new tier.

So not only do smarkets not have an open API they're now charging to place losing bets also :) I'm actually surprised they reckon it's only hit 0.2% of their current users as the limits aren't particularly high. On one hand they talk about attracting market makers yet the new charges seem to be introduced to limit anyone new entering their market place to compete against the current MM's with API accesswho simply get charged 20% of pnl.
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Naffman
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So what 1% commission on every bet placed? If so that's worse than a transaction fee!
foxwood
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From the FAQ it applies where "more than 1500 bets or stake more than £1m in a calendar month"

Applies to placing of bets "whether they are unmatched, partially matched or fully matched" - so cancels / scratches all count and incur commission it seems.

Guessing that many on here would easily break the number of bets limit
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Dallas
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foxwood wrote:
Mon Nov 12, 2018 6:44 pm
From the FAQ it applies where "more than 1500 bets or stake more than £1m in a calendar month"

Applies to placing of bets "whether they are unmatched, partially matched or fully matched" - so cancels / scratches all count and incur commission it seems.

Guessing that many on here would easily break the number of bets limit
about 2 weeks ago Peter did over 1/2million in matched bets on a Saturday afternoon
spreadbetting
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The fact it applies to unmatched bets is one way of protecting their current market makers from any competition so few people will litter a market with prices other than their own market making operations.
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LeTiss
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RIP Smarkets
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Naffman
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More short sighted than Betfair and Matchbook :lol:
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