The money piles on Labour

The spread-betting prices on the number of seats the parties will win at the General Election has moved even further away from the Tories as punters assimilate the recent bad polls and the effect of the Robert Jackson defection.

In new market shifts tonight the latest spreads from IG Index have LAB 359 – 366 (+5): CON 184 – 191 (-5): LD 70 – 74 (+1).

In just seven weeks the Labour buy price has risen 13 seats while the Tory buy prices has dropped 11. There”ve been no major poll changes that support this big move – it all comes down to market sentiment.

Punters believe that Michael Howard’s party is going to get a pounding.

The current Tory sell price is just 19 seats above what William Hague won in 2001. This is in spite of the fact that the “poll of polls” margin between the Labour and the Tories is 4.8% – which is about half the winning vote margin that Labour secured in the last election.

We are getting very close to the point where there is huge value backing the Tories. We are not there yet because we believe sentiment will continue to be against Michael Howard.

All these market moves were predicted here just five weeks ago. Then we said that “we expect the general market move to Labour to certainly hold firm and most likely to be magnified the closer we get to the actual day.“Those who took our advice then could get out now at a profit.

Keep watching the markets closely. The time to make winning General Election bets is not so far away because if the polls are overestimating the Labour margin by only a fraction of what happened last time then a Tory buy bet will make a lot of money. There’s also the decline of UKIP that could affect the Tory total.

Mike Smithson
“….a gambler, not a prophet” (Nick Cohen – Observer)