ELECTION SPECIAL
“The most unusual wager on our books is for an MP
hoping to hold on to his seat who has backed himself
to the tune of £50 at 10,000/1 ever to become Prime
Minister. He will cost William Hill £500,000 should he
achieve the highest office.”
Graham Sharpe, William Hill
2015 election interest is that the outcome
looks too close to call, and hence the prices
are very attractive to political bettors.
The view that betting markets are more
accurate predictor of political outcomes
than opinion polls has been gaining
credence of late. How does this tally with
your past experiences of offering markets
on political events?
Ed Fulton: Polls are snapshots. Many
people, including pundits and the press
corps who should know better, forget this
and shape a narrative around a single poll.
Not all polls ask the same questions in
the same way, or use the same methods to
contact people. If a poll uses only calls to
landlines to canvass opinion, how many
18-35 year olds will they reach? Not many.
Sporting Index’s political markets were
very accurate in the 2010 GE. Our seats
market implied 36.8 per cent support for
the Conservative Party, which was just .2
per cent off the final tally. Closer than any
opinion poll.
Matthew Shaddick: The last UK-wide
election was the Euro elections in 2014,
and our odds on the party vote shares
got closer than any of the final polls, a
subject on which I wrote a short blog
piece. In the Scottish referendum last year,
the media were constantly telling us the
result was on a knife-edge; the betting
markets always had ‘No’ as the reasonably
strong favourite. In essence, polls are just
snapshots of opinion, not forecasts, unlike
betting markets.
The most notable market of late was the
Scottish referendum, where all markets
were predicted pretty accurately by the
betting markets. The general betting
markets correctly predicted from the start
that ‘No’ was an 85% chance to be the
final outcome, that the percentage of those
voting ‘No’ would be 55% and even the
voter turnout was predicted to within 0.5%.
Graham Sharpe: Opinion polls are a
snapshot of opinion on the day they
are carried out. The betting markets are
predicting what will happen on a specific
day. There is no useful comparison
between the two in terms of forecasting
accuracy. What is an accurate forecast,
and at what stage do you regard the
odds as a forecast? You could argue that
an accurate forecast is one successfully
predicting an outcome, but a bookmaker’s
odds only really reflect their opinion of
outcome on the day they are released,
after which they reflect money gambled.
How many markets are you offering on
the UK election, where has most activity
been concentrated, and what is the largest
or most unusual trade/wager you have
received to date?
Ed Fulton: We allow punters to back and
lay on over 500 General Election markets.
Our General Election seats market (betting
on the precise number of seats won by
each party) has seen a phenomenal amount
of activity since the markets went live in
November 2014. We have also fielded huge
interest in our ‘Name the Government’
markets, as well as predicted turnout and
even size of smallest winning majority.
Dale Tempest: Political betting markets
have been very accurate in recent times
and our traders consider them as the key
indicator, much stronger than the polls.
“Sporting Index’s political markets were very accurate in
the 2010 GE. Our seats market implied 36.8% support for
the Conservative Party, just .2% off the final tally. Closer
than any opinion poll.”
Ed Fulton, Sporting Index
Matthew Shaddick: Hundreds of
markets, as we have odds on all 650 UK
constituencies, although the big one is
probably going to come down to which
of the Conservatives and Labour will win
more seats. Based on what we’ve taken
so far, the Tories will be big losers for us
on that measure and vice-versa. We are
also seeing a lot of money on the make-up
of the next government, with a Labour
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