UK Election - Constituencies

One of the things that makes the UK Election so interesting to me is the ability to bet on individual constituencies, and the very infrequent constituency polling data.

For many constituencies, there will be no polling during the duration of this election campaign. So the support levels must be completely determined based on a model.

There are over 300 constituencies that can be bet on, and each constituency is often available for betting on at least 3 different sites open to Canadians. You really require some form of automation to be able to handle this amount of data, just to be able to get a nice view of the markets.

Furthermore, in some of these very uncertain constituencies, there may be a poll released all of a sudden. When this happens, there can be a huge swing in odds, because we now have some certainty about the result, which may or may not have been in line with what the markets / models were previously expecting. Since there are multiple sites, any swing in odds can be taken advantage of by arbitraging between the leading and the lagging sites.

These are the exciting days for me - and today was one of them.

There were a series of constituency level polls released covering much of the swing constituencies in Scotland. These polls showed more support for the Scottish National Party (SNP) than previously expected, and odds swung very drastically from Labour to SNP in several of these constituencies. I was able to get a large number of value bets in before the odds started moving on some sites.

Best Value


I think your best bet in light of the recent polls is East Renfrewshire offered at 2.25 on Bet365. SNP support has been surging across the board and this has been confirmed in two recent polls within this constituency. In February SNP was 1% behind Labour, and the poll from today now finds them 9% in the lead with less than 3 weeks until the election. I got in at better levels, but I think the market will move to SNP being the favorite here in the next couple days, and anything 2.0 and up looks good to me here.