Betfair to broaden cross matching in football markets
I’ve been aware for some time, but now it’s official; Betfair are widening the cross matching net to crossover into related markets.
What exactly does this mean?
Betfair have coined the development ‘Cross market liquidity pooling’ and it’s taking place on football. It’s not due till November and will roll out if everything goes ok.
The bottom line is if you place a bet in one market it will appear in another and vice versa. This will have the effect of providing liquidity in secondary markets that are seeding by activity in primary markets. Betfair offer the following explanation: –
“To improve liquidity Betfair will shortly be trialling improved matching technology. The goal of the project is to ensure that if you have an unmatched bet, we advertise it to other customers in every way possible. Perhaps the simplest example would be the home team in Match Odds, and the same team -0.5 Asian Handicap. Currently if you place a bet on the Match Odds today, and if it’s unmatched we will only advertise the bet in Match Odds. The same is true of Asian Handicap. With the new bet matcher, if your bet is unmatched in Match Odds we’ll also show it in the Asian Handicap -0.5 line for customers to match there. The reverse will also be true: if your Asian Handicap -0.5 bet is unmatched, we’ll make it available for other customers to match not just there but in the Match Odds market too. Note that your bet will still only be matched once, with whoever requests the bet first.”
Practical upshot for traders
(1) The first thing to note is that if you are are looking at related markets to have some clue on how a main market could be likely to move that will be pointless going forward. Because one market will be an exact replication of another. If you take a price on one you will affect the other and neither will be a pre-cursor to that. So you wont be able to look at one market and trade another.
(2) People have often tried to work out where they are in the order queue, this has always been nigh on impossible and at best very unreliable. Attempting to take into account bets place on other related markets, will make this completely impossible. So your position in the queue will be harder to read full stop.
I guess we can wait and see the impact on the markets and some of this will depend on your trading style. For some, like me. It will be a negative as I have already effectively been providing liquidity across these markets already so the cross matcher will step in my way.
But as always when it goes live I guess I’ll adapt again and tweak a few things to take advantage of any favourable characteristics I see. I’ll keep an eye on things.
Category: Betfair, Football trading strategies
