John Reid backers make the most in the new spread-betting market

My first experience of the new IG Index weekly spread betting market on how twelve leading politicians would rate over the week in YouGov’s BrandIndex surveys has proved to be a costly one.

I had thought that David Cameron was having a bad week with all the news of UKIP defections, a poor showing for the party in a Yorkshire poll and a couple of Tory donors getting very critical. I was also unimpressed by his performance on Wednesday at PMQs.

Well I got it wrong. I “sold” at 89 and he’s finished up on 91.5. So I lose the difference (2.5) multiplied by my £50 stake making a total of £125.

Each week more than 11,000 on the YouGov panel complete surveys asking them to rate a range of different brands. In addition politicians names are mentioned and people are asked to tick boxes against those they feel positively about and those where they have a negative view.

For this betting market YouGov is subtracting the negative data from the positive and adding 100 to create a form of index.

This week’s betting has been settled on what had happened by Friday. I have now got the figures which are below.

William Hague UP to 97.3 from 95.4
Boris Johnson DOWN to 92.3 from 94.2
Hilary Benn UP to 90.7 from 89.2
David Cameron UP to 91.5 from 88.3
Alan Johnson UP to 84.9 from 83
Harriet Harman UP to 78.2 from 76.9
Sir Menzies Campbell UP to 79.9 from 75.5
John Reid DOWN to to 73.2 from 73.6
Jack Straw UP to 72.4 from 71.7
Gordon Brown UP to 68.8 from 67.7
Patricia Hewitt UP to 68.4 from 67
Tony Blair DOWN to 60.7 from 60.9

So all told nine of the twelve saw their ratings increase on the week and three saw them going down.

The reason that John Reid backers, including me, did well was because the bookmaker’s opening “buy” level was 69.8. He came in at 73.2 so backers made 3.4 times their stake level. Alas I only had a £25 stake unit so this did not offset my Cameron losses.

The most unsatisfactory part of this new betting venture is the time punters have had to wait to see the BrandIndex moves. These really need to be published on Saturday mornings.

Mike Smithson