Brexit betting

[Lesleyfool]

Does anyone have any recs for betting sites specialising in the above topic please? I am a non betting person but am trying to get an indication of people’s thoughts on if we are staying or going.

[mc2fool]

Does anyone have any recs for betting sites specialising in the above topic please? I am a non betting person but am trying to get an indication of people’s thoughts on if we are staying or going.

You mean like that from the bookies having remain as the odds-on favourite right up to the 2016 vote?

Bookies odds measure the weight of money, not the count of opinions either way. One punter betting £1000 one way outweighs 100 punters betting £5 each the other, and that's what happened with bets (and hence the odds) on the 2016 vote.

"...the bookies all agreed that while three-quarters of the £40 million eventually gambled on the referendum was placed on Remain, when it came to counting individual flutters, bets on Leave far outnumbered punts on staying in the EU." https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/eu-referendum-brexit-how-the-bookies-got-eu-referendum-odds-so-wrong-40-million-bet-a7100856.html

The same weight of money not punters effect applies to the stock markets, currency markets, etc.

[csearle]

Moderator Message:
Please note posts of links to gambling sites are expressly forbidden on this site and will be deleted. - Chris

[Lesleyfool]

Thanks for your responses. It seems that opinion polls are more the way to go then.

[brightncheerful]

Bit late now (market has closed) but another possibility is/was to buy shares in companies whose sp is depressed only because of the Brexit vote uncertainty. I've taken a punt on Lloyds Banking, my cost price was £0.5276 whereas sell now £0.5554. I've read that a win for TM's deal would/could up LLOY's sp by 15-20%. A defeat would probably leave LLOY sp unchanged or slightly lower.

[chas49]

Moderator Message:
Posts which are off-topic for DAK have been deleted. Please stick to factual responses to the OP (chas49)

[Julian]

Bit late now (market has closed) but another possibility is/was to buy shares in companies whose sp is depressed only because of the Brexit vote uncertainty. I've taken a punt on Lloyds Banking, my cost price was £0.5276 whereas sell now £0.5554. I've read that a win for TM's deal would/could up LLOY's sp by 15-20%. A defeat would probably leave LLOY sp unchanged or slightly lower.

From reading the post I'm pretty sure that Lesleyfool (the OP) wasn't actually looking to place any bets though, rather wanted to proceed on the basis that the bookies, with significant money at stake and decades of being in the business of trying to second-guess uncertain outcomes, might have a good take on how Brexit might unfold. I had had the same thoughts so it was interesting to me to see the arguments that the bookies might not be as well positioned to be as interesting an opinion as I had hoped.

As for relating market price movements to the outcomes of external events that seems to me to be a hiding to nothing. Admittedly the following relates to currency not equity markets but for hours before the vote on May's deal the predictions were that if the majority against was over 200 then the Pound would take a real hammering in the markets and currency traders really were watching, the outfit that I use extended its trading hours for retail customers especially for vote night, but in the end a majority of 230 against ended up boosting the pound. I long ago gave up trying to correlate shortish-term market movements with external event outcomes.

Nothing above is intended to belittle your trade by the way, rather a personal comment on my predispositions. Congratulations on the courage to follow your instincts and on the nice profit that followed from that.

- Julian

[brightncheerful]

Bookies do not attempt to predict outcomes for what is being bet on, but the outcome of the bet on the bookie. For example, the more that is staked on A the more the bookie stands to lose if the outcome were A. By shortening the odds, the bookie is protecting itself from losing too much. However, the shorter the odds the more likely other 'gamblers' are likely to interpret A as the favourite to win.

With something like the Brexit referendum, I think the reason that the result was not predicted was not that the pollsters failed to ask enough of the right people or asked the wrong questions, but that the media interpreted the polls as a reliable indicator of the likely result. Had the media focussed on what the pollsters would stand to gain or lose depending upon the outcome, the media could/would have picked up on what was actually going on.