Betfair Down / Betfair site crash

[Grinderman]

Very lucky escape for me yesterday. Could have been a disaster and pretty much cleaned me out.

Backed two horses to lay in the 3:15, £1,500 exposure - drifting.
Backed three horses to lay in the 3:40, £4,500 exposure - 2 been weak all day (Laurens, Le Brivedo) and struggling to lay them.
Backed 2-0, 2-1 and 3-1 in FA cup to lay before kick-off - £2,500 exposure.

I usually have around 75% of my bank in Betfair. So I can call on the other 25% to get out of trouble on Betdaq in an emergency. But with the golf and FA cup, I only had £700 in reserve - idiot.

Crash around 3pm and the 3:15 suspended. So, I put 2 £1,000 lays at 1.7 to leave in running on Betdaq. One was Dazzling Dan, which won, so was matched. The other not matched.

£700 down on Betdaq, but a very nice £2,300 up on Betfair (assuming they settled it ok).

Betfair came back up for 10 minutes allowing me enough time to dump my £4,500 on the 3:40 at a loss of £600, phew. Would have lost the lot.

Then down it goes again and I still the the £2,500 on the footy to lose. Back up it comes after kick off and I dump it to lose £300.

End the day nearly £1,200 up. Best Saturday for ages.


Football: -£189.56 | Golf: £75.00 | Horse Racing: £1,978.42 Total P&L: £1,863.86

Horse Racing Showing 1 - 7 of 7 markets
Market Start time Settled date Profit/loss (£)
Horse Racing / Newb 18th May : 1m2f Hcap 18-May-19 15:00 18-May-19 21:35 83.14
Horse Racing / Newb 18th May : 1m Grp 1 18-May-19 15:40 18-May-19 18:35 -662.08
Horse Racing / Newm 18th May : 6f Hcap 18-May-19 15:15 18-May-19 17:39 2,302.69
Horse Racing / Newm 18th May : 7f Listed 18-May-19 14:40 18-May-19 14:44 20.15
Horse Racing / Newb 18th May : 1m4f Grp 3 18-May-19 14:25 18-May-19 14:28 62.26
Horse Racing / Newm 18th May : 1m2f Listed 18-May-19 14:05 18-May-19 14:08 37.48
Horse Racing / Newb 18th May : 6f Listed Stks 18-May-19 13:50 18-May-19 13:55 134.78
Profit and Loss is shown net of commission.
All times are UKT
?
unless otherwise stated.

[spreadbetting]

Good to see it panned out OK for you, some people do like to forget it's very much a case of swings and roundabouts when the exchange crashes and not every result is going to go against you. I've lost count of the times it's gone against me but they've been plenty when it's gone in my favour too.

[Kai]

It may be naive thinking but I can't shake the feeling that we as traders could be doing more about this, either by helping Betfair or helping their competitors in some way, shape, or form. We claim to be some of the cleverest people around, beating the markets on a daily basis in different and creative ways, with so many quants and data nerds among us, yet we can't even seem to keep a simple track of exchange outages. I'm not having a dig at Peter or whoever, he is probably one of the only people actually doing their part.

I hear people talk about boycotting Betfair somehow after yesterday but that could potentially do more harm than good. If we're not going to do anything about it to make things better, then at least let's not make things worse.

[Grinderman]

What I'd like to see is some kind of insurance scheme offered by Betfair. Where you'd pay in an annual premium (a word I hate!) and they would guarantee to settle your position at the odds available at the time of the crash, to a maximum liability depending on your annual payment. They'd make a profit on it if the bloody thing didn't keep crashing. We would reduce our risk.

[to75ne]

It may be naive thinking but I can't shake the feeling that we as traders could be doing more about this, either by helping Betfair or helping their competitors in some way, shape, or form. We claim to be some of the cleverest people around, beating the markets on a daily basis in different and creative ways, with so many quants and data nerds among us, yet we can't even seem to keep a simple track of exchange outages. I'm not having a dig at Peter or whoever, he is probably one of the only people actually doing their part.

I hear people talk about boycotting Betfair somehow after yesterday but that could potentially do more harm than good. If we're not going to do anything about it to make things better, then at least let's not make things worse.

we do have a track of outages, this thread.

you really believe betfair don't have a record of how often and when it crashed?

forgot to add have a look at linusp reply above

[ANGELS15]

I use the betfair mobile app when I'm away from my pc. I do back to lay trades, place back bet then manually play lay set set to keep in play. Yesterday the app wouldn't let me set a bet to keep in play. kept getting error message 'there has been an error placing your bet'. This was prior to the crash.Since the start of UK racing today I'm still having the same problem on their app.

[Derek27]

You'll all be back on Betfair tomorrow

Aussie traders have no choice tbf

You were right Naffman, it's too wet to trim the lawn anyway. Let bygones be bygones.

[Derek27]

Crap day yesterday, I have just scraped the 'down' threads (there are two of them), here is a quick graph of posts per day:

Screenshot 2019-05-19 at 09.19.26.png

I will do some further analysis later but 2019 is looking bad with 40 distinct days of posts (average has been 59 per year)

And what we all suspected, distinct days where there are posts:

Screenshot 2019-05-19 at 09.22.54.png

Now that really was clever LP, it would have taken ages to do that manually.

[Derek27]

Good to see it panned out OK for you, some people do like to forget it's very much a case of swings and roundabouts when the exchange crashes and not every result is going to go against you. I've lost count of the times it's gone against me but they've been plenty when it's gone in my favour too.

I keep an account of my outage P/L. This year so far I've been unaffected but last year I was up. In all probabilities if you're a successful trader you're more likely to be up long-term, it's just a massive overstake.

[Derek27]

I hear people talk about boycotting Betfair somehow after yesterday...

I'd like to see one of them lead by example.

[Derek27]

What I'd like to see is some kind of insurance scheme offered by Betfair. Where you'd pay in an annual premium (a word I hate!) and they would guarantee to settle your position at the odds available at the time of the crash, to a maximum liability depending on your annual payment. They'd make a profit on it if the bloody thing didn't keep crashing. We would reduce our risk.

That wouldn't put Betfair in a good light, it would almost be like a protection racket!

[Ethanol]

Just had my profits from the 15:00 Newbury taken back from my account.

I placed bets against some other parties who also agreed to bet against me. Betfair facilitated those bets. Just because the Betfair site crashed after those bets were made, should make no difference to those agreements which were correct at the time of placement and acceptance.

Whether I was trading or outright backing is completely irrelevant - the loss is the same regardless.

Check your statements, guys.

[Ethanol]

Wow, no sooner than I post my previous message, Betfair have now made further corrections honouring the bets again. I'm not exactly sure what has been changed until I re-analyse it.

Note to Betfair: it might be a better idea to not take money away from customers for 75 minutes, and instead make all of the necessary corrections instantaneously.

[Archangel]

I see Betfair are actually advertising the Exchange now on TV. Seems to be targeted at the average punter !

[Ethanol]

My profits are now back to what they originally were, but the race no longer shows up on the "Betting Profit & Loss" page. This has been a bug for years, as this page cannot handle corrections to markets. The overall total is correct, though.

I'm going to guess they voided the entire market, then re-built it honouring bets only between certain time ranges. I pity anyone who gets caught out by this. Be sure to complain.