Disclosure - I own shares in Dybala, De Ligt, and A.Gomez

With Ligue 1 curtailed months ago and the Bundesliga already drawn to a close, only the Premier League, La Liga, and Serie A remain as PB leagues still being played.

With 6/7 match days in the Premier League and La Liga remaining, Serie A stands out with 10 full match days remaining. With the provisional fixtures dates currently, Serie A teams will likely get 2 or 3 rounds of fixtures as the only PB earning teams in FI.

This is further compounded by the upcoming dividend increase on July 9th with which Serie A is set to gain an early advantage from 7 match days set to occur after the dividend rise. Compared to Premier League teams only benefitting from 4/5 match days of the remaining 19/20 season overlapping with the dividend increases, and La Liga teams only benefitting from a crossover of 3 or 4 matches.

The cherry on the top is that Serie A fixtures are so compacted for the remaining match days that you could buy shares in a player in the next few days and be eligible for IPDs for up to 9 match days.

Personally, I think this provides a fantastic opportunity to purchase Serie A players. Benefit from the natural moat of Serie A being the only PB league for 2/3 match days, receive the most short term benefit from the PB dividend increase, and finally benefit from the IPD 30 day blanket covering up to 9 match days.

The matching engine isn't a matching engine, its a buying engine. Matching requires two equally able sides. Until it is possible for sellers and buyers to dictate prices, it is not a matching engine.

Once they introduce the selling side, I think we'll see a tumultuous correction in prices as spreads reach their true market-dictated levels, not the current artificial spreads where sellers are handicapped.

That is HUGE.

Its a plaster on the problem, its not the final solution. Low liquidity without limits would be utter carnage, far worse than what we've already seen. However the stagnant market is also a problem, although the lesser of two evils. The real problem is that FI are seemingly taking far too long to introduce other measures in order to allow the limits to come off or be eased.

Personally I think its the right approach. Implement limits, slow down the slide, buy yourself more time to solve the bigger issues and to allow everyone to calm down so sentiment can stabilise.

Given that FI are often accused of being irresponsible, I think its the responsible thing to do. There is a huge amount of traders who would sell up for awful prices at the first opportunity, when prices will be far, far better in 3-6 months time. FI are protecting those users from themselves. Thats how I see things currently.

@howsthebacon said in Time to say goodbye rev 2!!:

So...how about those Adil Aouchiche shares ey

Fuck off you cunt!!!!

FI should've led with messaging of perspective, rather than £1bn market cap and so on. You can't blame people for being excited by FI's own messaging.

Is it being banned for a "different opinion" or using the forum as a parasite for a rival company?

Making it sounds like he disagreed with the MB system, rather than constantly posting manipulative pro-FS/anti-FI drivel.

Does make me wonder. That is a pretty standard visualisation of a product roadmap - why does it need one of the company's users to flag the concept on Twitter for FI to realise it would improve comms?

Okay, lets go full-on-mental and dissect the announcement...

Over the past few weeks, we have been working hard to provide a better customer experience for you all.

Pretty clear cut so far, nothing to interpret from this intro waffle.

We are pleased to announce that we have a number of exciting new features which we will be announcing this Friday, 13th November, at 12 noon.

The keyword here is new, in my mind that either means new to the platform, which could include features that have already been announced or made public in some form, or (and this is the more interesting interpretation) it means new in the sense of the never announced or mentioned previously. Given that they've also used the word exciting I am expecting this means new features in the latter sense.

We will also be explaining how these new measures will be put into place on the platform next week.

Another sentence with dual meaning. When they refer to next week, does that refer to the explanation or the implementation? I think it refers to explanation, otherwise its a clunky way of phrasing the sentence.

In summary, what does this mean? If we take the interpretation that they will be announcing features that have never been announced or mentioned previously and they will be further explaining how they will be added to the platform rather than any immediate implementation, then I think it is pointing towards an announcement of product updates which will be exciting but lacking any concrete deadlines or possibility of immediate implementation.

I hope I'm wrong but considering recent updates and the wording, it seems like the sort of shitty kicking the can down the road announcement that FI specialise in.

Why would someone who sells training videos and pdfs for betfair trading be so persistent at engaging in bad faith arguments with FI and its community at a time when they're disgruntled and wanting to get their money out of the platform? Hmmmmmm, that is a tricky one.

It must be because they have the best interests of everyone at heart and absolutely no other reason. A hero! A knight in shining armour!

@o_O said in Hard to argue...:

@Rocky-Raccoon said in Hard to argue...:

@Bamford-s-Armpit It was a massive market bubble, not a ponzi scheme. Doesn't make any difference to people who lost money, but they're not the same thing by any stretch.

Not at all.

A market bubble is where prices in a market become over inflated, then crash, for no other reason than that they were overpriced...

This was an intentionally over inflated market, engineered that way by the company, then crashed, by the company for no other reason other than that they changed the mechanics of the market to their advantage.

Its entirely possible that the way it has been done goes against gambling regulations at best,... And at worst, isn't even legal..

I still think there's a case to answer to and they may find themselves in a lot of trouble...

FI didn't force people to buy at price x and FI didn't force people to sell at price x. Standard bubble behaviour from the market. Standard bubble reactions after too.

@Bamford-s-Armpit It was a massive market bubble, not a ponzi scheme. Doesn't make any difference to people who lost money, but they're not the same thing by any stretch.

@Dan-The-Man I'm hoping the reference to incentives and the trials/promotions for rebates in the past mean they re-instate something permanent on this front. If we are the platform and the liquidity providers etc then they need to help us!

It's whatever is supposed to directly replace IPDs and the "opportunities" referenced that is leaving me scratching my head. I think threshold PB, like SportsStack, makes perfect sense but it seems like a too obvious and sensible change. However if they did introduce some form of threshold PB, depending on the levels and payouts, then I think we could see the sort of crazy market surge that people have been hoping for over the past 6 months or so. It would be an incredible addition to the platform.

Quite disappointing to see that no dams were reviewed, the rest of that hit piece is similarly stupid.

FI has risks (more visible than ever now) and is terribly managed, but it's fundamentally not a ponzi scheme.

The "death by a thousand cuts" analogy was peddled frequently when the narrow bid zone was instated and the market ground to a halt. Now we have another version of death by a thousand cuts, every time there is a slight period of positive sentiment and market growth, FI steam in and drop a turd on our collective lap. The market does not have a chance of recovering if every time there is a slight recovery, FI make an adjustment.

I was hoping that based off of what Mike Bohan had been saying that he had realised that the frequent updates and changes to the platform, regardless of whether they are sensible or not, had become flags of toxicity to the market. I was hoping announcements would be used far less frequently and that they would be used far more sensibly when they were used.

Friday was glaring in its lack of vision and strategy from an isolated viewpoint, from a broader perspective, it once again killed market recovery and confidence. It's almost amazing how good they are at bombing the market when they do something, yet when they do nothing, the market slowly grows and confidence begins to grow again. The fact they still don't seem to have grasped the lessons in that is unbelievable. It's either naivety, stupidity, or removing IPDs in the way they did was their best option. None of those scenarios are comforting.

Football is fundamentally volatile as it is, more than enough to keep the market moving constantly. We do not need another and greater layer of volatility from the product as well. I'm long on FI, the product is sound, so sound that it will succeed regardless of how shit the management are, however its tiring to see a company repeatedly put speed bumps in its own path.

The negativity is not about what this announcement is but what it isn't.

Any announcement that isn't dividend increases, liquidity, media monitors, NASDAQ will result in negativity in the market. It's naive and immature but that seems to be the way of it.

We know that they aren't announcing NASDAQ or liquidity etc anytime soon (despite what they've said previously) so why the negativity after this announcement and not before?

This is something that a very small mechanic change would fix and would provide a marginal improvement to liquidity.

If buyers had the option for their offers to be automically filled if sellers list within 2% of their price, instead of the current odd looking scenarios repeatedly happening. Allow buyers to pick or not pick this option.

@Dan-The-Man said in November TOTM:

@Rocky-Raccoon said in November TOTM:

FI really don't help themselves. They clearly stated what they would do in situations like this and they haven't done it, so not sure why people are confused why others are annoyed and are questioning the decision.

Really is poor that they've encountered this scenario and immediately taken the "actually we're not going to do what we said we'd do" approach, its painful to try and understand FI at times.

I honestly don't understand their logic.

There's so few Cuadrado holders prior to the 21st, it wouldn't cost them an arm and a leg to pay them the 9p per share owed (he was paid 1p for being a mid) and let's face it, the money gets pumped straight back in anyway.

They owe me just shy of £80, so far, there's been a bunch of emails back and forth, it's gone from me contacting the Live Chat guy, to another team member and now it's escalated to the complaints team, they'll have spent £80 in staff wages by the time they've paid me.

Exactly. They'll end up issuing the correct payouts eventually but now with the added customer support headache and loads of unnecessary bad feeling for users they've tried to ignore.

Should say I'm not going to receive any TOTM payments as it stands or if there are any corrections, I just find it baffling how they're fucking up something quite simple, and are ignoring their very own previously stated process.