ELECTION SPECIAL
“Political odds are increasingly used by people standing
for office to suggest the big momentum is behind them.”
for far too long. I’ve lost a lot of money,
and made a lot of money. I think spread
betting lends itself to politics; how many
seats are they going to get, what’s the
turnout level going to be. It’s all about
numbers. I did a deal for them to sponsor
the site for the election. It’s a good deal,
which enables me to cover the costs of
running the site, and hopefully make a
profit as well. We have affiliate deals with
most of the other big bookmakers, and
that’s obviously a big source of income
but for the General Election, which is my
big opportunity, we’ve gone with Sporting
Index. They particularly wanted to be
exclusive.
Prediction markets were often criticized
for their potential to shape public opinion
ahead of an event, in effect becoming selffulfilling prophecies. Could the same be
said for betting on political events?
Indeed, and it’s increasingly used by
people standing for office to suggest the
big momentum is behind them. At the
moment, we have Nigel Farage standing
in Thanet South to become an MP for the
first time, and there’s been a lot of money
going on the Labour candidate following
very strong polling, and he’s promoting his
betting price to make the case.
With political betting, you also get
people trying to artificially create that
momentum by betting on a particular
option in order to show that their person
is doing well. There was a massive case
in 2012 around the American election,
when a group of traders spent at least $5m
to $6m supporting the [Mitt] Romney
price on what was then Intrade. This was
simply designed to try and keep Romney
in the race; based on the Intrade price
being treated as some other indicator of
popularity, so I think you have got to be
careful about that with political betting,
that people might be trying to manipulate.
Five years ago, you stated that only 20%
of the visitors to politicalbetting.com
were gamblers, is this still the case today?
I’ve not done any surveys, but my guess is
that it’s about that. Betfair or Ladbrokes
said they reckoned there were about
17,000 people they could identify who
were regular gamblers on political events.
So that’s not a lot, but gambling on
political events outside of elections will
now be many more than that. I do know
that my site gets many more than 17,000
people coming onto it each day, so I think
that the site itself has a greater broader
interest, partly because it’s looking at
politics in a very different fashion. We
focus a lot on outcomes, we focus a lot on
statistical elements as you try to forecast
outcomes, and I think that’s why it does
reasonably well.
So, how have you bet in this election?
Which particular outcomes have you put
money on?
I’m a trader. My current big spread bet,
which I’m quite pleased about, is that the
Tory margin will be less than 12 seats. So
if it’s a Labour margin of 30, then I make
42 units, and so on. I just think the current
marks are overstating the Tories,