Question to the Midas Oracle readers who trade event derivatives on BetFair

3 Responses to Question to the Midas Oracle readers who trade event derivatives on BetFair

1. Medemi says:

   August 31, 2008 at 5:43 PM

   “Did the BetFair website fail many times in the past?”
   
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   They’ve had their fair share of outages. After the first couple, I predicted things would get worse before they got any better. It did get worse after that, although I have to say not as bad as I thought. 
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   “Did the Betfair website experience loading problems under some circumstances (political elections, national team wining a game, etc.)?”
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   I don’t think it was related to traffic. One would happen on a friday evening, another on a monday afternoon, when trafic is light. Also keep in mind betfair offer a whole range of sports markets, so peaks are less evident.
   When I witnessed the first outages, alledgedly people were able to clean up through the API. Betfair had to learn a few things which they should have anticipated IMO.
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   The lessons for intrade should be:
   1) prepare, because it will happen again
   2) make it clear to your customers that these things can happen. It’s a risk they simply have to take into account. Where possible and if applicable, open an account with another operator.
   In general, this will keep coming back to Time. Close your markets when they should be closed. Or pay the price.

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2. Medemi says:

   August 31, 2008 at 7:14 PM

   Scaling up IT infrastructure is what caused most of the problems with betfair.
   I should always say “IMO”, to give them the opportunity to deny everything.

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3. Adonis says:

   September 1, 2008 at 3:41 PM

   It is my opinion too that scaling the system to accept more transactions (scaling up) was the preoccupation at betfair.  But might focus have been better shared (at least) with other important areas? You might think so, but I couldn’t possibly comment….
   .
   Let me tell you a little Fairytale……some might say COMPLETELY UNCONNECTED WITH REALITY…

   We’ll create a hypothetical exchange; one that is concerned primarily with increasing the number of transactions per second (and thus commission-earning opportunities) it can perform. And not much else.
   .
   It is well-established that EXTREMELY powerful “back office” systems can deliver thousands of “transactions per second” yielding a pseudo-realtime granularity (aka Integrity vulnerability) of a few milliseconds. Virtually all of these systems run on a breed of Unix, and as such are NOT realtime OS’s. So all operations run in sequences and if pipelines fill, the perceived response Time slows down. That makes more Customers input EVEN MORE transactions in the hope of getting to the head of the queue first (with the intention of cancelling “redundant” requests).
   Unfortunately, for the theorists who believed that this might be “secure enough”, cheap, single-user PC’s available to all can EASILY do huge processing tasks within such granularity – and decide if there’s profit there; and offer if it is (or even if the chances are that it will be!)…. because servers are NOT thousands of times faster than PC’s IN REAL TIME…….and even if neither run RealTime OS’s!
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   THEN, some of those customers start to discover the holes in the Integrity of such systems (ALL of them are Time-related, repeat ALL of them!) so they gum up the traffic even more with “creative” strategies to maximise abstractions from the system. They become Time Lords.
   And the Exchange reveres them publicly!
   Calls them (perhaps) “honed minds”…….
   Happiness for all involved is infectious.
   How could the model for such success possibly be flawed????
   How could this Emperor in actuality be NAKED????
   Surely not??????
   .
   Then, the exchange itself, seeing the huge sums available to these “fleet-footed” opportunist Time Lords (I call them CHEATS but some might call them spivs!) takes an important decision: “if you can’t beat their achieved abstractions, take theirs instead!”
   .
   So, the goal changes further to “Don’t join them, stop the clock and bankrupt them!”
   A few see the flaw.
   A few speak out.
   A few are silenced.
   This might even be legitimately (if not perhaps morally) justified via the proclamation that such things are part and parcel of the behaviour of anyone owning a Bookmaker’s Licence (though I’d expect many bookmakers to be somewhat upset at such public airing of such logic!)……. and “if you don’t like it, you can take your business to wherever you can find that has even THIS poor Integrity level!
   Better yet, we’ll close your account anyway… BECAUSE WE CAN AND BECAUSE WE SEE FIT TO!”
   Of course, such grandiose charades cannot happen in real Life, can they?
   Nah, it’s just a Fairytale afer all…..
   .
   Adonis

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