UK Election 2015

The next big event for me is the UK general election coming up on May 7, 2015.

The political landscape in the UK is vastly more complicated than Canada, and you can't even compare it to America's 2-party system. There are at least 5-6 parties that you have to consider if you want to forecast the UK election. You have vastly differing parts of the country (Scotland, Northern Ireland, England, and Wales) which have very different political support. In Northern Ireland, for example, you don't even have Labour or the Conservatives expected to take a single seat - and these are the frontrunners to win the election.

Currently the betting market says it will be a Conservative minority. Most forecasting sites predict this as well, though some say it will be a Labour minority.

As usual, I don't want to be the one doing all the leg work, so I'm looking for sites that do the majority of the forecasting for me. My value is in aggregating all the available information, translating this into odds, and finding value bets based on the information that I have. Market making is not as easy on this one as Pinnacle is not offering odds, so this will be a pure value play.

So far I've found a few good sites out there. Nate Silver is working with a couple PhD's who are producing the forecasting here - http://www.electionforecast.co.uk/

Normally I would put a lot more faith in anything that Nate touches - but I've been using these numbers and some of them just seem off to me (normally the problem is that the predictions are too extreme).

Electoral Calculus has a shitload of great stats and very transparent forecasting here - http://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/orderedseats.html

Electoral calculus is a great site that has tons of info, and they do constituency level forecasting that seems relatively in line with the betting markets.

May2015 maintains a poll of polls, and forecasts each constituency here - http://may2015.com/category/seat-calculator/

This site is fine as a check, but it doesn't provide the probability to win for each constituency (just gives the prediction, but not the probability with it). So it's hard to get a feel for the model, and more importantly, you can't compare the model win probabilities vs the betting market odds.

Elections Etc and The Guardian also offer forecasting, but I don't think they are forecasting individual constituencies (just using the top-line national numbers), and this is not good enough in my opinion to get an accurate picture.

I've set up some spreadsheets that will pull constituency level info from Nate's site and Electoral Calculus, and also pull in current odds posted at Bet365 and Betfair (this was not a simple feat). My current play is to find where the models both show that there is at least 10% value in their forecast vs the betting markets, and then I will bet appropriately. I'm also currently long Labour for most seats as the polls have looked good for them, and the odds are attractive.

That's it for now. If you are interested in constituency level bets then hit me up - otherwise I think the value right now is in going for a Labour Most Seats win (decimal odds of around 2.9 on BetFair).