..and the PB Index moves just 2 seats
PB “The Money Says Index”: CON MAJ 55 (+2)
However much excitement there has been over the past four days it’s perhaps worth reminding ourselves that “Smear-gate”, or whatever you want to call it, has failed to persuade the serious political punters who play the spread markets to pile onto the Tories or to sell Labour seats.
The latest SPIN spreads shown above have just advanced one seat forward for the Tories with the Labour spread falling back by a similar amount.
When we last covered this a week ago the mid-points between the buy and sell levels suggested a Tory majority of 53. This morning that’s moved to 55.
I think it’s going to need bigger Tory leads, perhaps to the levels that we saw in June – August 2008, before we can expect market sentiment to move much beyond the current numbers. If you are risking what could be thousands of pounds you always look at the upside and set it against the down-side.
Part of the problem is the slightly contradictory evidence that we got in the last two polls – now nearly a week and a half old – and we probably won’t see a new survey until the weekend at the earliest.
Those two polls, from Populus and YouGov, were both taken at almost the same time with the former on C43-L30-LD18 and the latter at C41-L34-LD16. Thus one is pointing to a whopping Tory majority while the other suggests a hung parliament.
If you get a bet wrong it could be very costly. However bad the weekend events have been for Labour it has not persuaded me to change any of my positions and I guess that other gamblers feel the same.
General Election individual seat betting.
