Smarkets Blog

“We will give the betting industry a real run for their (your) money.” – Jason Trost

A year ago, Smarkets took its first online order for the Fulham vs. Everton fixture. Fulham pulled off an against-the-odds victory and now Smarkets is achieving a similar feat in the betting industry. The company has expanded from an early stage start-up to become one of the fastest growing and most exciting global online betting exchanges with markets covering football, tennis, golf, current affairs, politics and entertainment. Horse racing, cricket, rugby and many other markets are coming soon.

TODAY, TO CELEBRATE THEIR 1ST BIRTHDAY, SMARKETS IS LAUNCHING AN UNPRECEDENTED FLAT 1% COMMISSION RATE TO ANYONE WHO DEPOSITS £100 OR MORE.

At an event at their offices in White Bear Yard – the London hub for start-up enterprises – Jason Trost, CEO and Co-Founder of Smarkets said:

“I am proud with the growth Smarkets has demonstrated in its first year. It has exceeded all expectations. We are delivering an exchange using revolutionary trading technology coupled with market features that punters have been demanding for years. If our current user base is anything to go by, we will be the first company in ten years to give the betting industry a real run for their (your) money. While we have immense respect for the original betting exchanges and the way in which they pioneered peer-to-peer betting over a decade ago, customers are demanding a new and innovative way to bet online. We intend to deliver on this.”

Hunter Morris, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder added:

“We have spent a lot of time with disgruntled punters who have been searching for another trading platform that offers them reliable peer-to-peer betting with quick order executions. Smarkets understands what is required from a sophisticated financial exchange and we have sparked widespread excitement among customers who are cheering on our latest developments.”

Key milestones achieved in the past year include:

• Established as the only online betting exchange to allow instant in-play betting.
• Month-on-month double digit growth in the amount traded.
• The freedom for punters to bet using their own odds format.
• Social features including leaderboards and live commentary during in-play markets.
• Users can trade in and out of markets more easily by seeing their current cash positions.

We conducted a survey a few weeks ago and one of the top features you asked for was market depth. So we’ve built it!

Rather than over complicate our standard interface, at the top of every market you’ll see a link to ‘show market depth’. This will take you to a new, more advanced layout. The market depth view is a way of seeing exactly where the money is in the market so you can see exactly how much will be matched. We’ll be putting together a video to explain the market depth view in more detail once we’ve ironed out any kinks.

We’re showing three levels of depth for both bids and offers (‘for’ and ‘against’ in Smarkets terminology) and, differing from other market-based betting sites, we show the amount of money you need to place to match the bet. We’re also showing your profit and loss for each market so you can see exactly which positions you have and how much you’d stand to win/lose depending on different outcomes.

We hope you find this view useful and, as ever, we’d love to hear your feedback.

Welcome to our newest team members Scott, Chris and Daniel.

Daniel‘s been working with us for a while now re-engineering our Erlang architecture. He previously worked in Sweden for e-commerce payment company Klarna.

Chris recently graduated with a economics degree from Durham University and has joined us to experience life in a betting exchange start-up. He also moonlights as the Smarkets Tipster, with dubious success!

Scott is leading our business development and marketing. Previously he worked in at UBS and the BVCA in research and strategy.

Welcome to the team chaps!

August is a great month for sports betting, the football season has just kicked off across Europe and we have just launched hundreds of new football markets to guarantee we have your favourite team covered (hopefully!). Next month is political conference season and all the parties will be revving their spin-machines this month. As we already run the widest range of political markets in the UK we’ll be keeping an eye on the action and providing you with unique markets to bet on.

We’re jam-packed full of betting opportunities in August. Here’s a few more highlights:

New Football Markets

We have added lots of new football markets including the Carling Cup, Europa League, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch, French, Portuguese, Turkish & Greek leagues. We’re also working on more betting opportunities such as total goals, first goalscorer and half time score in the near future.

Moneybookers

As we talked about in the previous post, you can now deposit with Moneybookers. We’re pleased to offer another way of depositing to Smarkets but let me know any feedback.

Coming Soon

We will be rolling out a view of market depth very soon and have a couple of big offers in the pipeline to celebrate our 1 year anniversary. Watch this space!

Tipster Offers

If you’re interested in betting tips and exclusive offers follow the new Smarkets Tipster on our blog, Facebook and on Twitter.

And Finally… win a £50 bonus

Just a bit of fun this, but guess the time of the first goal for the Blackburn v Arsenal game for a tidy £50!* All you need to do is place a £5 bet on any football match before midnight on Sunday August 29th and email the minute you think the first Blackburn v Arsenal goal will be scored to chris.needham@smarkets.com.

* If there is more than one winner, the prize will be split evenly amongst winners. The £50 will be in the form of a risk-free bonus. Standard Smarkets promotion terms apply.

We’ve now launched Moneybookers as a new way for you to deposit into your Smarkets account.

Moneybookers is a payment wallet. You can deposit funds into a Moneybookers account (using credit/debit cards or bank transfer) and then use those funds to shop with millions of websites worldwide.

You can make a Moneybookers deposit from the normal deposit page. There’s almost zero processing time from our perspective so (once Moneybookers tell us your transaction is legit) we automatically credit your account. In most cases this is within a few seconds.

Let us know what you think, we’re happy to introduce new payment providers as our members need them.

We’ve simplified our bonus and refer-a-friend schemes to make it both easier to understand and easier to automate.

Bonus Scheme

The new bonus scheme is a £10 risk-free bonus with your first deposit. This means you can lose up to £10 of stake and we refund you your loss. If you win then the spoils are yours of course. For more information check out our FAQs for the bonus scheme.

Refer-a-friend

The new referral scheme is a £5 risk-free bonus for you and a £5 risk-free bonus for your friend. This is credited to both your accounts as soon as your friend makes their first deposit. This should be much easier to see a quick bonus for both of you rather than the old commission sharing scheme.

Let us know what you think about the new schemes, we’re a small company and we’ll continue to experiment to work out what works best.

It can’t have slipped your notice that the 19th World Cup Finals kicks off tomorrow in Johannesburg. 32 nations will battle it out over the coming month (with Spain the current favourite to win) and Smarkets is offering markets on hundreds of different aspects of the tournament.

Of course you can bet on every match outcome, but who will be the dirtiest team? Which brand of boot will score the winning goal? And will anyone score a hat-trick?

Tennis, Cycling, F1, & Mars Missions
Football isn’t everyone’s cup of tea but there’s lots more to bet on with Smarkets. We’re covering the major tennis tournaments, the continuing F1 and cycling seasons and the continuing saga of British politics. We also have some markets unique to Smarkets such as “Who will be the first to leave the Mars500 experiment?“.

What about that free tenner?
We’re still offering a free £10 bonus when you make your first deposit as well as our refer-a-friend offer so get your friends involved.

Keep up to date
Follow us on Twitter and friend us on Facebook to keep up to get access to exclusive offers and news.

Subscribe to the calendars produced by the lovely folks over at World Cup Kick Off and you’ll get the latest fixtures pushed to your Outlook, iCal, iPhone or Google Calendar (or any other applications or devices that support ICS calendar files).

They’ve also added links to the appropriate Smarkets betting market in the notes for each event so you can place your bets straight from your calendar.

So head over to World Cup Kick Off and subscribe. We’ll hopefully be adding live odds to the calendars in the near future too!

We’re looking for an experienced front end web developer for a full time position with an immediate start. Sound interesting? Read on…

Job description

Our front end application is a collection of Django apps built on an exclusively Python API client (to a RESTful Erlang API), and we’re looking for someone to build out user-facing features.

Required skills and qualities

• Hand-written, valid (when required) (X)HTML (although Smarkets values HTML 4.01 Strict, and we’d expect a candidate to be able to explain the difference between XHTML and HTML in practical terms);
• Solid knowledge of Javascript, above and beyond frameworks, but also experience with the benefits of Javascript frameworks, including jQuery and YUI;
• Experience writing cross-browser CSS;
• Demonstrated understanding and experience of how the above things can affect accessibility and performance;
• Experience with Django, Pylons, TurboGears or any other modern Python-based web frameworks. We use Django at Smarkets, so bonus points for that;
• A good cultural fit for a small team that works under intense pressure, short deadlines, and a high workload; and
• A proven history of getting the job done on high quality websites.

Desirable skills

• Knowing your way around Linux;
• Solid Python experience, beyond just Django or Pylons;
• Using Git in a multi-developer environment.

Additional information

• This is a full time, on site job;
• The job is based in Clerkenwell, London, United Kingdom.

If you’re looking for a flexible, agile team to work with; want to work somewhere free of big corporate politics; would like a cool project to work on; and fit the above criteria we’d love to hear from you!

Last week we announced a mini-promotion to give the 1000th depositing user a bonus £50. Well, it didn’t take long, Smarkets members can’t get enough General Election betting.

On Sunday, Patrick from Lancashire became our 1000th depositor and won himself fifty notes. Congratulations Patrick!

It’s a double celebration this week as we’ve passed our £100,000 traded figure too (not bad considering we only passed £50,000 seven days ago).

Back-patting, celebratory cake and high-fives all round.