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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Just when you thought June 23rd couldn’t get any more excit

Hedge funds and investment banks have commissioned private exit polls in an attempt to make profits from the result of the UK’s referendum on EU membership next month.
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This time it's fear about possible fear!
But really, who's going to pay attention to the currency? Will news organisations actually report that the pound is tanking? And will they have prepared the public for this? It's one thing geeks like us watching the currency markets and understanding what's going on. But the vast majority of people - many of whom will be generally well informed - won't have a clue about this unless the media go out of their way to tell people about it.
Edit: Well, why not the other way around?
In fact, is it possible to cease trading on the pound for 24 hours?
Someone's been on the sauce early.
When? I hear you cry. Yep. I think it's all over. If Remain were going to win it's like Dave Bedford running the 10,000 metres. Should have been one lap ahead at this stage, not starting to drop behind.
On the point of suspending trading in Sterling. I don't think that's possible? At least not totally.
And yet another day of papers dominated by this Channel migration crisis. Think this doesn't play out into voting intentions ...?
Farce.
I wonder if leave is concerned about peaking too early and giving the establishment time to cook up a Scottish style "Vow" charade?
I'd imagine they'd look to just get over the line, late.
Certainly anyone reporting any such move in the markets is going to have to be really careful how they make such reports. Any hints in the report that the shift is down to the possible election result could get them in hot water.
1. The pound has dropped already based on a poll showing Brexit ahead. To say that nothing will happen if the country really does vote for Brexit must be wrong:
"The pound dropped after a new poll showed a jump in support for the campaign to take Britain out of the European Union, spooking some investors who had thought that the result was a foregone conclusion.
Sterling fell against all of its 16 major peers as ICM opinion polls released Tuesday by the Guardian showed a lead for the ‘Leave’ camp. "
2. As someone who worked at the time on preventing Y2K problems, I can tell you that the reason nothing happened is that many companies prepared for it and worked on it for eighteen months or so before the end of 1999.
3. Some polls still show Remain way ahead and some don't, the problem is knowing which are correct.
ICM did an online poll as well as a phone poll yesterday. They, less widely reported, did an online poll two weeks ago at the same time as their previous phone poll. The online poll two weeks ago was 52/48 leave - exactly the same as yesterdays. It is only the phone polls that have moved dramatically.
This isn't a shift, this is a dawning realisation of reality.
It's in the nature of exchange betting that the amounts wagered are large, since to a very substantial extent the same bettors are placing bets on both sides of the equation, i.e. back and lay, seeking to secure tiny margins of profit by doing so. In this way, an individual punter might have matched bets of say £1000 or more on a game, whilst at any one time his maximum exposure never exceeds say £100. The amounts placed with bookmakers are therefore likely to be very much smaller by comparison.
After all the herding that went on last May, I'm very sceptical - no matter how honest the pollsters' intentions to fix the discrepancy.
It's a funny thing - it's uplifting to see Leave with any poll lead, but I almost wish Remain were. It's the hope that kills me.
See
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/653057/Black-Asian-voters-key-winning-Brexit-EU-referendum
Seconds since epoch is my favourite time measuring unit
£50 yesterday was mine, and £150 of the £17m - if there were 100 PB posters all putting £50 on that's still only £5,000. I guess this shows that political betting is now very mainstream.
Liz Kershaw on Sky paper review really articulating the emotional reaction/outrage at illegal immigrants. She lives in Dymchurch and has had gangs of young Albanian men climbing over her garden wall en route from the beach.
Now, she's just mentioned Chipping Cameron and how it's not a problem for him and his friends.
If I were in Number 10, I'd be holding my head in my heads.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
So far on this thread 2 people have expressed outrage when I point this out
Neither of them live here.
Sometimes, you just have to feel sorry for pb's resident Dervish.
It's unlikely that any hedgie is going to make a 'bet the farm' investment on the basis of an exit poll, so at most you may get a few billion staked.
It's not going to cause a run on the pound - rumours might, but that would be purely unsubstantiated and not related to the exit polls at all
By 1999, I'd moved and a colleague spent New Year's Eve in the Bunker with other bigwigs just in case the world did end. Thankfully largely non-event, but the tee-total trepidation in the run up was something.
Throughout that campaign the Yes side rubbished every No warning and talked about Project Fear. Independence, they said, would set Scotland free to plot a path to prosperity that Westminster - which took far more from Scotland than it gave back - would never deliver. When No said that the Scottish economy was too reliant on oil revenues this was dismissed. Oil is just a bonus, the Yes side said; and, in any case, we are heading towards a new boom. The experts are talking Scotland down, they are never right, this is just the establishment seeking to protect itself and its vested interests.
Turns out, though, that the establishment was right. That the experts did know what they were talking about. That the data and the stats the Yes side produced were completely wrong. That all the assurances they gave and the claims they made were false. It turns out that if Scotland had voted for independence it would now be embroiled in financial and economic catastrophe. It turns out that Yes was completely and utterly wrong.
Let us hope that Leave aren't wrong. Because if they are, it is going to get very, very unpleasant for a great many of this country's people very quickly.
Edit: check the electoral commission website, they say you can register online with NI number and passport number until June 7th.
https://www.gov.uk/register-to-vote
Are you a muppet or what? They could just as easily have half the level - they have control.
In fact I have a number of Labour-supporting friends, but not as many as Her Indoors, who, from her earlier days knows a number of people living in Red in Tooth and Claw Blackburn.
Although clearly not nearly a large enough sample to be in any way representative, she reports that virtually every one, ranging in age from being in their late twenties through to their seventies, intends to vote LEAVE.
It was on receiving this intelligence a few days ago, that I really started to believe that the betting markets had it all wrong.
Print off the form, sign it, scan it and email it for her to print it. That's what I did. Took me about 2 minutes. Not the slightest problem whatsoever. You still have time.
I'm concerned that Remain will pull some dodgy Vow II rabbit out of the hat at the last minute. All we can hope for is that Leave spikes this option early. Cameron's bust his own credibility - Osborne couldn't guarantee tampons, but such a move could hoover up enough floaters.
Do you hate foreigners enough to Vote Leave?
http://www.aboutmyvote.co.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/177405/FORMS-Particular-Election-Proxy-MAY16.pdf
You work in IT you say?
There's a big redevelopment of the town centre being planned & I'm trying to get the museum to be a key part of the story. Fingers crossed we are going to get there, but every little counts & they have a fantastic collection!
Happy now?
And happy that you support a party where roughly half the MPs are racist too?
Equally, the Remainer Establishment's assessment of a "There be dragons!" post-Brexit apocalyptic landscape is irresponsibly pessimistic. They chuck a whole bucket of "if it might go wrong, it will go wrong" over there assessments, without any possible provision for the inescapable truth - that for hundreds of years, we as a sovereign nation have been pretty damned good at this business malarkey..
It appears despite the ongoing attack of the alphabet soup of international bodies the country is edging towards leave and control of its own destiny. Fear will be dialled up to 11 in response because this is all remain have.
Almost no one likes the EU as it is right now, let alone what it is likely to be like in another decade. To vote remain people need to be persuaded that the alternatives are even worse. The problem they have is that Remains attacks have been so over the top already that they invite ridicule rather than apprehension. But things may well get turbulent over the next few weeks. The staff of the plane will be strapping themselves in in a most ostentatious manner.
I doubt that very much. Should LEAVE win, that certainly wouldn't result in the UK leaving the EU any time soon - in fact I don't see it happening in less than 4-5 years minimum.
Furthermore, I would dare to suggest that on the balance of probabilities, it would still be more likely that not we would remain a member of the EU for the foreseeable future, it's simply in the nature of things.
I fully expect the betting markets to reflect this prospect before very long.
Immigration really is causing the Remainer's to lose all coherency. They don't have any treatment programme to limit the cancer, which is at risk of metastasizing throughout the whole body of their campaign.
The risk of this Referendum for Remain has always been that it would boil down to the voters deciding a slightly different question: Who do you want to control our borders, Britain or Brussels?
Truth is perception.
EDIT Apparently TUC Frances O'Grady will be claiming workers will be £38pw worse off by 2030.
Saying that, I'm all for using our EU subscription to pay for a stonking navy.
http://www.migrationwatchuk.org/press-release/398
Many of us on PB are fortunate enough to be in a position where we are protected against the possible economic downsides of Brexit; we are well paid with good jobs, or we no longer work, or we do not live in the UK. Some of us, most notably the lawyers, will actually do extremely well from it. Most of our fellow citizens, on the other hand, are in more exposed positions. Leave just has to be right if they are not going to face a very challenging future.
There is nothing in your answer that reassures me on that front. I would, for example, dispute that for the last one hundred years or so we have been "pretty damned good at this business malarkey". From where I sit, we have been pretty damned bad at it - poor productivity, low investment in R&D, relatively poor exports, and so on. That's one of the reasons why we wanted to join the EEC, as was, in the first place.