Le Pen reached her betting peak just before the end of voting
With £5m so far traded on the main Betfair French election market alone this looks set to be the biggest political betting event of the year. Only the US midterms in November might top it.
As can be seen by the chart Le Pen reached her betting peak just before the first projected results came in. Since then it has been downhill.
Compared with the final French polls Macron appears to have done better than that predicted by almost every pollster while in the main Le Pen has done worse.
The big surprise was the 20%+ by the left wing leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon who topped 20%. In his post-results speech last night he advised supporters not to vote for Le Pen and my guess is that a large bulk of them will do so which will make Macron pretty hard to beat in the runoff in two weeks’ time.