TRADING
PLACES
Advancements in pricing methods have changed
the role of a sports trader but is the industry heading
towards commoditised pricing?
By Gerard Starkey
T
imes have changed from the
pre-internet days when traders,
or odds compilers as they were
once known, would price up
sports events armed with a blank
sheet of paper, a calculator and a
variety of magazines and books, such
as the football traders’ favourite, the
Rothmans Yearbook.
With little or no reference points
available, the odds compiler would
be wholly responsible for the prices
he or she would set, often resulting
in operators offering arbitrage
opportunities for those willing to take
advantage.
However, rapid advancements in
technology, the birth of exchange
betting in the early noughties, the
highly liquid, low margin football
betting markets in Asia, and the rise
of third-party pricing providers have
all contributed to the changing face of
www.egrmagazine.com
odds making and market creation for
sportsbooks big and small.
Some believe much of the human
element has been eroded from the
pricing up of sports events with traders
now able to call upon these important
tools to guide, dictate or even create
their prices.
“There’s so much available market out
there now – if it’s not driven by the Asian
market you’ve got the exchanges, and
there’s quite a few third-party providers
giving odds platforms too, so the days
of the traditional odds compilers are
numbered,” Jonathan Wright, head of
trading at Boylesports, says.
Aside from golf, tennis and the shorter
forms of cricket, Boylesports now takes
price feeds from a number of pricing
outsourcers for all it sports events, with
Sporting Index subsidiary Sporting
Solutions providing pricing feeds for as
many as 18 sports including football.
In the case of tennis, one of
Boylesports’ core products, it can now
offer more than 18,000 matches per
year on a fully automated basis via a
number of providers including Sporting
Solutions, BetRadar, Amelco and
Betgenius.
EVOLVING ROLES
According to Wright, who entered the
industry as an odds compiler in the late
1980s, traders haven’t become obsolete
but have instead evolved into ‘product
managers’ who now monitor rather than
create the prices. “I can ask two tennis
traders to ‘trade’ probably 14 matches
simultaneously with the comfort of
knowing there’s an algorithm there
working in the background effectively,”
he says.
“As product managers, they can sit on
the ticker and watch bets come through
and ensure bets are settled correctly,
that there are no anomalies with the
prices and there are no delays in the
feed – that’s the major accountability the
individual sports traders will have.”
This changing job spec and
sophistication of pricing isn’t limited
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