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.

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!

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.

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.

Overall even with a couple of unexpected results the Smarkets team did reasonable well. Only three members lost any money, Jason falling falling prey of placing all his eggs in the Man Utd basket. Daniel nearly broke even betting on a Draw in each game and could turn a profit if tonight’s game ends a draw, and Jamie came a cropper when neither his long shots or his safe bets came in.

Brad, Russ and Scott turned a small profit, with the Everton result and Aston Villa loss pulling profits down. I managed a reasonable +2.4 units considering a 4 unit loss on the Villa game, and hope the Reds can earn me a few more this evening.

However the winner by a far is Alex with his emotional hedge unfortunately coming off against the Hammers. His team may have lost, but at least he has undisputed bragging rights.

So in conclusion either bet against your team, or bet against West Ham!

I also wanted to mention something I observed watching one of the markets for these game.  When the prices for this competition were taken on Friday morning Newcastle were at 3.26. At kick off they were around 2.5, which is quite an extreme swing. Punters gave Newcastle a 30% chance of winning on Friday, yet by Sunday they were seen as 40% likely to win. The crowd moved for Newcastle, and they were right! Wisdom of crowds can be a very powerful prediction tool, especially when there are large swings towards an outcome in a short space of time.

The first thing I check when I notice a price swing like this is whether a piece of previously unknown information has now been factored into the new price, for example an injury. Though sometimes it can just be the increase volume of bettors placing bets before the game moving the price. They don’t necessarily know something no one else does, but just want to bet on their team or the favourite!

You can profit from these movements through a risk free trade (if you buy and sell at the correct points), or just get better value by timing the placement of your bet. Patterns can often be seen from 3 days before a game to kickoff, with one of the most commonly occurring the favourite shortening. This makes sense, as the event nears and more bets are placed they are generally placed on the favourite pushing prices down. So you often get the best price for a favourite on a Friday before the weekend. Though this can also be explained by the fact there is more time for something unexpected to happen the further you are from the game, so it is harder to accurately predict what will happen. So you are at risk if you place an early bet on say Man Utd, and Wayne Rooney catches the Flu last minute!

Whereas profiting from these movements is very difficult using a bookmaker, with betting exchanges you can, using techniques ranging from simple to very complex. This is one of so many advantages of a betting exchange!

Each of the team were given 10 units, and assigned them to any Premiership game they wanted. The return is then calculated based on the current odds (we’re showing it in decimal here)

Jason and Scott have gone for a straightforward approach, with Jason risking his entire bankroll on the Man Utd game, which is fairly safe but will only earn him 6.61 units profit. Scott decided to hedge his risk between Spurs and Aston Villa, for a greater return than Jason of 13.7 units.

Alex went for the emotional hedge against the Hammers, with bragging rights a consolation prize if West Ham lose.

Myself, Brad and Hunter have gone for a few teams to try and spread the risk. Brad has gone for the safer picks hence the lowest potential return of any of the team. Hunter has some controversial picks, with Newcastle and Stoke going against the majority of the team.

I went for where I feel there is value, even at a greater risk. Both Spurs and Aston Villa had superb opening games, and even though Tottenham had a bit of hiccup midweek in the Champions League I feel both teams have a good chance. West Ham were thrashed last week, so I’m hoping Bolton can nick a win while moral is down. Finally I went for Liverpool, as I wasn’t that impressed with City last week and I feel on our day Liverpool can have ‘em!

Russ decided to spread his units across all the favourites, which will earn him a idy 9.86 units if they all come in.

Jamie went for an interesting strategy of 2 of his units on long-shots to look for that big win, but covered him self with 8 of his units on sure bets.

We’ll see who arrives at work victorious on Monday…

We’re now focussing on market depth (we’ve sent some concepts to members to see what they think about what we’re planning) and we’re about to massively expand the number of events we cover and the number of markets within each event.

Our new bonus and refer-a-friend schemes have gone down well but we’re going to continue to experiment with the best scheme to attract members who actually want to bet rather than people who are only in it for the bonus!

Feedback is really important (I know every company says that, but we mean it!) so we’ll be running more surveys, emailing members with concepts and thoughts and conducting tests of new functionality. Please get in touch with us and let us know what we could be doing better.

And the lucky fellow to be picked out of the hat to win a £100 risk free bonus was Robert W. from London. Congratulations!

We’ve also added a twitter invite button to the refer a friend page so you can tweet all your admirers with your referral code. Your follower will get a £5 risk-free bet when they make their first deposit, and you’ll get a tidy fiver for yourself. You’ll be the most popular tweeter in town.

While we’re on the subject of Twitter, you should follow @smarketsdaily if you want to be notified when we open brand new markets. Our main account (@smarkets) is for all our news, random musings and announcements. Follow both! Spoil yourself.

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.