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The behaviour of betting and currency markets on the night of the EU referendum

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  • Auld, Tom
  • Linton, Oliver

Abstract

We study the behaviours of the Betfair betting market and the sterling/dollar exchange rate (futures price) during 24 June 2016, the night of the EU referendum. We investigate how the two markets responded to the announcement of the voting results by employing a Bayesian updating methodology to update prior opinion about the likelihood of the final outcome of the vote. We then relate the voting model to the real-time evolution of the market-determined prices as the results were announced. We find that, although both markets appear to be inefficient in absorbing the new information contained in the vote outcomes, the betting market seems less inefficient than the FX market. The different rates of convergence to the fundamental value between the two markets lead to highly profitable arbitrage opportunities.

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  • Auld, Tom & Linton, Oliver, 2019. "The behaviour of betting and currency markets on the night of the EU referendum," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 371-389.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:intfor:v:35:y:2019:i:1:p:371-389
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ijforecast.2018.07.014
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    2. Erdinc Akyildirim & Oguzhan Cepni & Shaen Corbet & Gazi Salah Uddin, 2023. "Forecasting mid-price movement of Bitcoin futures using machine learning," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 330(1), pages 553-584, November.
    3. Wiśniowski, Arkadiusz & Bijak, Jakub & Forster, Jonathan J. & Smith, Peter W.F., 2019. "Hierarchical model for forecasting the outcomes of binary referenda," Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 133(C), pages 90-103.
    4. Auld, T., 2022. "Betting and financial markets are cointegrated on election night," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 2263, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    5. Paolo Manasse & Graziano Moramarco & Giulio Trigilia, 2024. "Exchange rates and political uncertainty: the Brexit case," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 91(362), pages 621-652, April.
    6. Wael Bousselmi & Patrick Sentis & Marc Willinger, 2018. "Impact of the Brexit vote announcement on long-run market performance," Working Papers hal-01954920, HAL.
    7. Facundo Albornoz & Jake Bradley & Silvia Sonderegger, 2020. "The Brexit referendum and the rise in hate crime; conforming to the new norm," Discussion Papers 2020-12, The Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, School of Economics, University of Nottingham.
    8. Facundo Albornoz & Jake Bradley & Silvia Sonderegger, 2022. "Updating the Social Norm: the Case of Hate Crime after the Brexit Referendum," Working Papers 203, Red Nacional de Investigadores en Economía (RedNIE).

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