This is where the political betting action is

One or two people have emailed me in the past few days to ask why PBC is devoting so many threads and items to the White House race.

The answer is in the graphic above based on screen clips I took this morning from the Betfair site. Quite simply the US is where the betting action is

Even the London Mayoral contest, which will be completed nearly four months before the first US convention, is only attracting a very small fraction of the money that America is.

Overnight on Tuesday-Wednesday I estimated that nearly £1m was traded with this betting exchange alone on the two nominee markets, the next president and the outcome of the various primaries. Add onto that the spread firms, Betdaq, and the traditional bookies and you have a lot of money being risked on politics.

The nominee markets are particularly interesting because if the bookies do what they did last time then punters will have to wait until the conventions before they can pick up their winnings.

In the Democratic race betting Obama is now the odds-on favourite. The latest prices are listed here.

The site’s second busiest day. Yesterday the were 84,779 page downloads on PBC – a total that was only exceeded after Gordon aborted his November election plan.

Mike Smithson