Smarkets's skullduggery

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vide0star
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Joined: Thu Jul 07, 2011 8:19 pm
Location: London

I love the positive feedback guys. I'm really happy we're able to be giving the market more choice, which keeps the competition honest.

Joking aside, I am here to help. I know forums are easy places for people to log on and complain. I think only one person on this forum has been in touch with me to ask me a question in the last 12 months. If you think Smarkets is up to no good, you can always start by speaking with our support or emailing me (jason at smarkets do com) or sending me a DM on this forum.

There are no issues with posting your qualms or feedback on a public forum of course, but I'd suggest trying to find some more answers before going broad with a complaint.

Lastly, I do appreciate Euler letting me post on here. I know most of you aren't customers. I'm not here to advertise my business. I'm here to advocate for exchanges and be a resource to you guys to give you answers from the operational side. Running an exchange is hard and complicated and a lot of the nuance won't be obvious unless you speak to somebody on my side.
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SeaHorseRacing
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vide0star wrote:
Mon Oct 08, 2018 8:10 pm
I love the positive feedback guys. I'm really happy we're able to be giving the market more choice, which keeps the competition honest.

Joking aside, I am here to help. I know forums are easy places for people to log on and complain. I think only one person on this forum has been in touch with me to ask me a question in the last 12 months. If you think Smarkets is up to no good, you can always start by speaking with our support or emailing me (jason at smarkets do com) or sending me a DM on this forum.

There are no issues with posting your qualms or feedback on a public forum of course, but I'd suggest trying to find some more answers before going broad with a complaint.

Lastly, I do appreciate Euler letting me post on here. I know most of you aren't customers. I'm not here to advertise my business. I'm here to advocate for exchanges and be a resource to you guys to give you answers from the operational side. Running an exchange is hard and complicated and a lot of the nuance won't be obvious unless you speak to somebody on my side.
Firstly. Nothing but respect that you are personally responding to messages.

What I can’t seem to understand is how betdaq,smarkets and the like are unable to compete any where near to the levels of betfair. Betfair was created on a great innovation nearly 20 years ago. How has that company that charges pretty much 40% to high earners in premium charge able to control such a big chunk of the market without competition even coming close.

I know foreign legislation is an issue at that they are trading in different countries to you, but i still and have done for a long time scratched my head as to why you haven’t become serious competitors?

I don’t mean this disrespectfully but just a direct question. I know it’s not that straightforward... but why?

Are you in the business to pick up the missed nuggets or are you serious about being an exchange?
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northbound
Posts: 737
Joined: Mon Mar 20, 2017 11:22 pm

Also, it seems that Smarkets have been around for 5+ years now. Why haven’t you launched an easy / open to all API long ago?

I recall you had one which was for selected market makers only. That alone makes me suspicious.

This goes for those sad people at Betdaq as well btw. I asked for access and they told me I need to fund my account with £200 to get access.

Which is not a problem, but ffs platforms that thrive on liquidity MUST welcome any interest with open arms. Not put stupid barriers to entry.

Crypto exchanges have free, open to all APIs. You open an account and 1min later you can play with your programming language of choice and interact with the exchange. Simple.

Betting exchanges such as yours have lots to learn from that approach.
vide0star
Posts: 50
Joined: Thu Jul 07, 2011 8:19 pm
Location: London

SeaHorseRacing wrote:
Mon Oct 08, 2018 9:07 pm
Firstly. Nothing but respect that you are personally responding to messages.

What I can’t seem to understand is how betdaq,smarkets and the like are unable to compete any where near to the levels of betfair. Betfair was created on a great innovation nearly 20 years ago. How has that company that charges pretty much 40% to high earners in premium charge able to control such a big chunk of the market without competition even coming close.

I know foreign legislation is an issue at that they are trading in different countries to you, but i still and have done for a long time scratched my head as to why you haven’t become serious competitors?

I don’t mean this disrespectfully but just a direct question. I know it’s not that straightforward... but why?

Are you in the business to pick up the missed nuggets or are you serious about being an exchange?
This is actually a smart question, so no worries about asking it. I am 100% serious about an exchange. I'm a tech geek. I'm actually not that passionate about sports betting at all. I'm passionate about making event trading an asset class, sports certainly being an important event that people trade.

While we're not at BF scale yet, I think we have about 15% the exchange market share, which I don't think is all too shabby considering where we came from. We certainly are not satisfied with only 15% market share.

There are two reason's it's hard to compete:

1) it takes a long time to build an exchange tech stack
2) it takes a long time to unwind network effects

We raised £3.5m investment over the first 7 years of Smarkets's life. It's not a lot of money when competing against BF (They raised $50m or so), and it simply has taken us a long time to get a tech stack that can be at par, and in some cases, more advanced than BF. I'm happy to say, we're close to surpassing BF from a technical perspective in most aspects. I wouldn't have said that two years ago.

Secondly, lots of people are used to using them, they have many avenues to capture liquidity in far off places in the world, and their API is widely used. Exchanges become more valuable as more people use them. It's possible to move customers to a new exchange, but it takes time. If it does happen, it usually goes very slowly at first, then as adoption hits critical mass, it goes faster. I think we're close to this inflection point but it's hard to predict.
PolicemanPrawn
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I assume vide0star works for Smarkets. Can I ask who you are? It might be good that they're replied, but I don't believe they're doing it with good and honest intentions. I don't find their response humourous at all.

By artificial, I mean from non-customers; ie from the exchange and their partners. Artificial might not be the best word but the meaning is pretty clear.

Having market-makers on an exchange is fine. I'm a 'market-maker' on quite a few exchanges. The problem is when the market-maker is a partner company of the exchange itself or working on their behalf, as is the case with Smarkets. It creates a conflict of interest because customers are winning directly from Smarkets (or their partners), which presumably is not something Smarkets wants, and in most cases when this arises, there is an incentive and actual actions to hinder these winning customers. Look at the softbooks. Even Asian bookmakers have minute limits for many of their markets, and may even restrict themselves. Why would Smarkets be any different? Your reply very disingenuously ignores this key part about the market-maker being in business with the exchange itself, as opposed to being an entirely separate and independent entity.

(1) You say "We don't mimic anything", but this appears to be a falsehood. It's pretty clear that Smarkets's market-makers mirror Betfair prices quite a lot. (It is, in fact, one of the appeals of Smarkets.) This is obvious to anyone who has used them briefly. What is your policy when it comes to winning customers and the market-makers? By default, when it comes to orders provided by the employed market-makers, orders on a price that gets cleared out get replenished (iceberg orders, they are called), so that you can keep on hitting and lifting: will they change this for certain customers? More generally, are there plans to treat winning customers differently to losing customers?

(2) What happened was I was betting on an event that wasn't due to start until weeks later. After a few bets, suddenly I had an 'in-play' delay of about 8 seconds, and future bets on that market were subject to this in-play delay. You claim that it is an error, but how can such an error even come about in the first place? Perhaps you are correct about it merely being an error, but I doubt it.

(3) Another claim of an error. What is your policy on showing prices when logged in vs when logged out? Are they the same? Do you show less prices when logged out than logged in? Do you show prices when logged off that are unavailable when logged in (this is the case right this very moment with at least one market)? Is this explained by Smarkets on their website?

(4) So you have admitted that you do stop customers from placing bets (under certain conditions). What is your policy on "throttling" bets? Where in your terms and conditions is this explained, whereby customers cannot trade temporarily if they have traded too much? When this happened to me I couldn't trade on that market for about ten minutes.

(5) I'm not sure why you think asking Smarkets about their problems is a better idea than posting on a neutral forum, but I think it's because you don't want your skullduggery to become public. I find your reply pretty dishonest and evasive. I think you are used to being able to BS people, but be warned that that doesn't work on me, and I'm pretty tenacious when it comes to seeking out the truth.

I will continue using Smarkets because it will be a profitable enterprise. But from now on, I'll be very closely watching them for any signs of skullduggery, and collecting evidence in the form of screenshots and videos, which I may make public once I've gathered enough evidence.
Last edited by PolicemanPrawn on Tue Oct 09, 2018 5:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Dallas
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PolicemanPrawn wrote:
Tue Oct 09, 2018 5:07 pm
I assume vide0star works for Smarkets. Can I ask who you are? It might be good that they're replied, but I don't believe they're doing it with good and honest intentions. I don't find their response humourous at all.
He is their CEO and founder Jason Trost
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Euler
Posts: 24701
Joined: Wed Nov 10, 2010 1:39 pm
Location: Bet Angel HQ

I think we should all respect the fact that Jason is happy to come on here and answer questions, which is a rare thing nowadays.

I think we all realise that businesses also have commercial objectives that need to be met. Ultimately that's up to each business to decide how to meet them. From my perspective increased competition in the market is a good thing. Even if short-term it's not obvious where the benefit is.

It's up to each business to convince each of us to move our business through a range of policies and incentives and generally as competition increases for business that should have positive effects for the industry in general.

That's the theory anyhow!
sa7med
Posts: 800
Joined: Thu May 18, 2017 8:01 am

I applied for api access quite some time ago. Never even recieved a response. ..
weemac
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Joined: Mon Sep 16, 2013 8:16 pm

The fundamental issue isn't technology, API, tech stacks, market makers, policies, incentives or commercial objectives; it's all about trust.

It is indeed good that Jason has come on here to put his side of things, but it's a huge indictment that almost nothing I've read about smarkets over the last couple of years on this forum, the betfair forum, twitter, google, or anywhere else, has given me grounds to feel they are trustworthy.

That's the nub of the issue as I see it.
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Derek27
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Location: UK

I've had a lengthy discussion with Jason about it on the other thread. I wouldn't touch Smarkets unless they had a policy that all bets stand once matched, as opposed to voiding what they or an algorithm decide are fat-finger mistakes.
JTEDL
Posts: 536
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Saw this earlier, skullduggery or user error?

https://mobile.twitter.com/SmSportstrad ... 2836814849
vide0star
Posts: 50
Joined: Thu Jul 07, 2011 8:19 pm
Location: London

PolicemanPrawn wrote:
Tue Oct 09, 2018 5:07 pm
I assume vide0star works for Smarkets. Can I ask who you are? It might be good that they're replied, but I don't believe they're doing it with good and honest intentions. I don't find their response humourous at all.
I'm Jason, I was born in North Carolina. I studied Computer Science, I'm excited about electric cars, I follow politics closely and I'm very anti-Brexit. I also founded Smarkets and I do think there was some humour in my response.
By artificial, I mean from non-customers; ie from the exchange and their partners. Artificial might not be the best word but the meaning is pretty clear.
You can parse it how you like but our market maker is a customer, like any other. It operates as a separate company. We also have 4 other institutional market makers integrated on the platform.
Having market-makers on an exchange is fine. I'm a 'market-maker' on quite a few exchanges. The problem is when the market-maker is a partner company of the exchange itself or working on their behalf, as is the case with Smarkets. It creates a conflict of interest because customers are winning directly from Smarkets (or their partners), which presumably is not something Smarkets wants, and in most cases when this arises, there is an incentive and actual actions to hinder these winning customers. Look at the softbooks. Even Asian bookmakers have minute limits for many of their markets, and may even restrict themselves. Why would Smarkets be any different? Your reply very disingenuously ignores this key part about the market-maker being in business with the exchange itself, as opposed to being an entirely separate and independent entity.
We are honest about the arrangement, I'm not sure how you take this as disingenuous. Hanson has zero preferential order placement and if you saw our P&L we lose about 49% of our bets, it adds up to a lot of money. We'd be shooting ourselves in the foot if we weren't doing the 'right' thing. It's up to you if you want to use our product or not. I have no issue if you decide it's not for you.
(1) You say "We don't mimic anything", but this appears to be a falsehood. It's pretty clear that Smarkets's market-makers mirror Betfair prices quite a lot. (It is, in fact, one of the appeals of Smarkets.) This is obvious to anyone who has used them briefly. What is your policy when it comes to winning customers and the market-makers? By default, when it comes to orders provided by the employed market-makers, orders on a price that gets cleared out get replenished (iceberg orders, they are called), so that you can keep on hitting and lifting: will they change this for certain customers? More generally, are there plans to treat winning customers differently to losing customers?
Our market maker also market makes on BF. We don't support iceberg orders at this time so it's not possible. Our matching is done with price time priority. Market makers (Hanson included) have no preference in the order book. We plan to charge high volume customers more than low volume customers, not based on P&L.
(2) What happened was I was betting on an event that wasn't due to start until weeks later. After a few bets, suddenly I had an 'in-play' delay of about 8 seconds, and future bets on that market were subject to this in-play delay. You claim that it is an error, but how can such an error even come about in the first place? Perhaps you are correct about it merely being an error, but I doubt it.
It was a bug. They happen from time to time when managing thousands of events and markets concurrently.
(3) Another claim of an error. What is your policy on showing prices when logged in vs when logged out? Are they the same? Do you show less prices when logged out than logged in? Do you show prices when logged off that are unavailable when logged in (this is the case right this very moment with at least one market)? Is this explained by Smarkets on their website?
We offer no guarantee that logged out prices are up to date but they shouldn't be that far off. There are a lot of entities that scrape our website and we delay the prices logged out to prevent people grabbing our data. Logged in the prices and order book will be up to date.
(4) So you have admitted that you do stop customers from placing bets (under certain conditions). What is your policy on "throttling" bets? Where in your terms and conditions is this explained, whereby customers cannot trade temporarily if they have traded too much? When this happened to me I couldn't trade on that market for about ten minutes.
I'd have to find it, but you have to betting a lot or hitting the website a lot to hit this limit. We want high volume customers to use the API. If you haven't been offered, please send [email protected] an email and we'll get you added to the queue.
(5) I'm not sure why you think asking Smarkets about their problems is a better idea than posting on a neutral forum, but I think it's because you don't want your skullduggery to become public. I find your reply pretty dishonest and evasive. I think you are used to being able to BS people, but be warned that that doesn't work on me, and I'm pretty tenacious when it comes to seeking out the truth.
Our annual reports are public, I answer questions on twitter, this and other forums, we have open houses that customers are invited to, 24h support chat, a great customer service team. I wouldn't call that, er, evasive.

I am used to trying to convince people with logic. I'm not very good at BSing to be honest.
I will continue using Smarkets because it will be a profitable enterprise. But from now on, I'll be very closely watching them for any signs of skullduggery, and collecting evidence in the form of screenshots and videos, which I may make public once I've gathered enough evidence.
We are removing skullduggery (I did it again!) from our business plan. Thank you for keeping me honest.
vide0star
Posts: 50
Joined: Thu Jul 07, 2011 8:19 pm
Location: London

JTEDL wrote:
Wed Oct 10, 2018 7:38 pm
Saw this earlier, skullduggery or user error?

https://mobile.twitter.com/SmSportstrad ... 2836814849
I answered the tweet directly.
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SeaHorseRacing
Posts: 2893
Joined: Fri May 20, 2016 7:06 pm

JTEDL wrote:
Wed Oct 10, 2018 7:38 pm
Saw this earlier, skullduggery or user error?

https://mobile.twitter.com/SmSportstrad ... 2836814849
Tbh the price could have just gone when it was placed....
vide0star
Posts: 50
Joined: Thu Jul 07, 2011 8:19 pm
Location: London

sa7med wrote:
Tue Oct 09, 2018 5:19 pm
I applied for api access quite some time ago. Never even recieved a response. ..
If you send me an email jason dot trost at smarkets dot com I can have a look at what happened. We try to respond to 100% of api emails, so I apologise if you didn't get a response.
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