You may have heard the rumor that BetFair do access customers’- trading details and do use that intelligence.
From what I gather (the re-phrasing is mine):
- BetFair does never seed markets or take proprietary positions against its customers.
- At BetFair, taking advantage of customer information would be considered grounds for summary dismissal.
Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:
- Do BetFair understand the “statistical concept of expectation”?
- Towards an anti-drugs and anti-corruption body for all sports? — BetFair’s proposal…
- TOTE Tasmania has entered into an agency agreement with Betfair Australia that will provide it with access to Betfair’s global customer base of more than one million punters.
- Do InTrade allow financial scams to be published on their web forum?
- The BetFair Starting Price is such a phenomenal success that their MSR-like system melted down under pressure last Saturday, April 5th, 2008, for the British equivalent of the Kentucky Derby —the Grand National at Liverpool.
I know that Betfair are on record (see Hansard) as saying that they have seeded their smaller markets, for what they call "marketing purposes." Is it officially the case that they no longer engage in this activity?
Rab,
Excellent question.
I won’t ask them right now, coz I’m a bit tired. I want to move on other topics (prediction market journalism, other exchanges, etc.).
However, we should keep a list of questions to ask them, and then, the next time, we would ask them all at once.
They sacked at least one member of staff recently for frontrunning accounts. A good question to ask BF would be how many accounts were affected, have they notified the owners of the accounts that were frontrun, and do they have any plans to compensate the people whose bets weren’t matched that would have been, had the internal member of staff not been peeking under people’s cards to see what they were betting on, and then frontrunning them for his own personal betting.