politicalbetting.com

Your chance to help predict the next 12 months

Instead of our usual prediction competition for 2008 we have “The Big PBC Prediction” where everybody is asked to give their views on a range of political and associated economic events.

Please fill in the questions below and let us see if our combined wisdom can get the next year right.

Also please can you write comments in the normal way on the thread below and not on the individual poll result pages.

Mike Smithson

Is anybody bold enough to call the Iowa caucuses?

Leaving aside the probability of a very major shock then the next resident of the White House will be one of the seven contenders featured above. And for each next Thursday night could be crucial. For one or two victory in their party’s caucuses is absolutely central if they are to stay in the race. For others a convincing performance could be a knock-out blow to other challengers.

• But how can you call such a complex voting system where not only do you have to get your supporters out but they need to be involved in a public act, in many cases amongst friends and neighbours, in order to make a difference?

As we saw in 2004 with Howard Dean a candidate can go into the Iowa caucuses with big poll leads and come out in third place. It was that night that propelled John Kerry into a position where he quickly became unassailable. The contender in second place then, John Edwards, has clearly learned the lesson and has devoted himself almost totally for several years to his Iowa campaign.

What about Obama? Could Thursday night be the moment when he demonstrates that the colour of his skin will not be a handicap to electoral success? Again he has put everything in and the stakes are very high. If he does not win then his aim, surely, is to ensure that he is the only viable anti-Hillary candidate.

At the moment the latest polls have all three pretty close but with Hillary having a small lead. There’s one bit of good news for Obama and that is that some surveys have shown him ahead amongst those who have been to a caucus before. The bad news for him is that a lot of his support comes from the young who are the least likely to go through the bother of actually attending.

The GOP race is equally fascinating. Huckabee’s polling leads are being squeezed but he does have considerable support amongst the state’s evangelical Christian communities and my guess is that they are probably going to be more likely to caucus. For Romney a good performance is absolutely crucial.

In the betting Clinton and Giuliani remain the favourites.

Mike Smithson

Politicalbetting.com - The Political Website of the Year

Tory lead down to 5% but nearly 60% say Gord is doing badly

A new YouGov poll reported in the Sunday Times this morning has, with changes on the last survey by the pollster nearly a fortnight ago CON 40% (-3): LAB 35% (+4): LD 15% (-1).

There’s very little other information in the paper except that “six out of 10 people believe the prime minister is doing badly”. We don’t know when the poll was carried out or any other details. The shares for the main two parties are fairly similar to the ICM survey in the Guardian before Christmas which had C39-L34-LD18.

It is very unusual for a survey to be carried out bang in the middle of the Christmas holiday period and clearly Labour has benefited by the lack of bad news and the fact that the opposition parties have been relatively quiet. The media has been focussed elsewhere. There is a general theory as well that polling over holiday periods can be suspect because of the number of people who are away from home.

Over the past two years there has been a pretty close correlation between the amount of media coverage that Cameron has enjoyed and Tory party ratings. A key driver of the Brown polling bounce in the summer was that the Tories were almost totally blanked out of the news.

The Lib Dems might be a little disappointed to see their share drop particularly after their leader change. But choosing to have the election result announcement just as the holiday season was starting was always going to make it challenging for the new man to get coverage. Not smart - but typical of a party where having an effective media strategy is not seen as being terribly important.

One snippet of political news in the Observer suggests that Brown has “offered to hold talks with the new Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, on constitutional reform”. The report says that there’ll be a government paper on the subject next month.

This could pose a danger for Clegg - for if he is portrayed as getting too close to Gordon that could impede efforts to win back the party supporters who have switched to the Tories since the general election.

• If the new poll leads to a move back to Labour on the commons spread betting markets on the number of seats I might start selling. This is the form of betting where the number of seats the parties will get at the next election are traded like stocks and shares. The great joy is that if your predictions are right then you can close down your position and cash in your profits immediately. There is no need to wait for the election itself.

Mike Smithson

Politicalbetting.com - The Political Website of the Year

Guest slot by Peter the Punter

Ok, 2007 is all but over and it’s that time of year when all good punters cast a critical eye back over their records and ask themselves where it all went wrong. My own soul-searching takes very little time because it’s all too obvious. My total profit from Political Betting came to approximately £10,000, which is about £12,000 more than I made from the horses and other forms of gambling. Since the time and effort I put in to the latter far exceeds what goes into the former, no prizes for guessing where I’ll be redirecting my efforts next year.

This of course raises some interesting questions, most notably… Just How Much Money Can You Make From Political Betting?

This is far from an academic question for me, so let me begin to answer it by giving a rough breakdown of my profits for the year:

Blair Switch £514
French Presidentials £880
Scottish & Welsh elections £400
Labour Deputy Leader £817
Next Chancellor £187
Australia £1,008
LD Leadership £246
Election date £193
Labour seat markets (non-election) £3,400
Miscellaneous 2,355

Total £10,000

The first thing to note is that this list covers nearly all the main political betting markets. The only one missing is Gordon Brown’s ‘election’ on which my profit of about £500 was wiped out by an ill-judged gamble on Charles Clarke (sic), so I netted out to zero on that one, but it was the one and only significant blot on the landscape. The rest was happiness.

Nor do the bare figures tell the whole story. If Blair had held on a few more days, I’d have doubled my ‘switch’ profits, and the Blessed Harriet cost me another £800 by getting home just ahead of The Postman. Moreover, some of these markets were often ‘all green’ which means I was operating in a virtually risk-free environment much of the time.

Nor was there enormous skill involved. Anybody able to log in regularly to Politicalbetting.com might well have achieved similar results and I know for a fact that I am not alone amongst PBers in making this kind of profit. In fact the quality of information here, freely and for the most part honestly given, is such that if you can’t turn a profit, it really is time to quit betting altogether.

So why on earth do I bet on anything but politics? Well, there are some issues.

Markets are irregular and outside election years, the pickings are pretty thin. Liquidity is a major problem, although it’s improving. My loss on Big Ears was due in no small part to the fact that I held a sizeable chunk of all bets placed and couldn’t lay off without severely affecting the market price. This isn’t a problem I’m ever likely to encounter at the Cheltenham Festival.

And then there’s the question of who exactly we are betting against. There’s a real risk that as the Site becomes increasingly recognized as the fount of all knowledge on political betting, we finish up betting with each other. This happens to some extent already and was embarrassingly evident when we challenged Anthony Wells and the IG Index boys over their enterprising but short lived Political Brand Index market. We were too good for them, but there were not enough mugs to create a proper market.

A further issue that has cropped up recently is that we seem to be getting known. Mike now finds it almost impossible to get bets on with Sporting Index and another prominent PBer recently received a warning shot across his bows from one of the Majors. Sidney’s largesse continues unabated but we can’t expect that and similar generosity from his competitors to continue indefinitely. There are indications that the big firms are willing to treat political betting as a loss leader, but unless markets expand to bring in more players, and hopefully more mug-punters of the type that keep betting shops fully engaged, serious (i.e. good) political punters are bound to attract increasing attention.

My guess is that I may have pushed it about as far I can in terms of gross profit for a year but I like a challenge so I am going to set a target of £20,000 for 2008 – but not for myself, for PB.com.

I intend to enlist the support of a couple of like-minded PBers and we’re going to start out with a notional bank of £20,000. Every time we see what we think is a decent bet, we’ll enter it on a score sheet which will be publicly available here on Site. The aim will be to double it by the year end. You can be sure that the notional bets will reflect the real ones which we are having, so if we get anywhere near the target, you can guess that we’re also doing very well thank you.

If anybody is interested in joining me in this venture, please let me know. It will also be interesting to know how you fared in 2007. Was it a profitable year for you too and if so how profitable? (And have you had any accounts closed yet?)

So come on, let’s have your tales – the good, the bad and the gruesome. How was it for you? And do you think you can beat the PB team in 2008? We’ll be posting our scores; don’t be shy about posting yours.

Happy New Year.

Peter Smith (Peter the Punter)