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Politico Series Part 5: Trump dominates before Super Tuesday
In the fifth of my series of US Election articles, I look back on the dramatic market movements following the New Hampshire Primary, through South Carolina and Nevada. Betting-wise, this was a quiet period for me, as Donald Trump continued to confound my expectations. Nevertheless, a small profit was bagged out of the frequently fluctuating…
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Rubio takes fight to Trump, but is it too late?
The question, posed immediately after Thursday’s CNN Debate by so many pundits, is why on earth did Marco Rubio wait until the tenth debate to truly take the fight to Donald Trump? There is no doubt that the longstanding GOP front-runner emerged more bruised from the Texas debate than any to date. Constantly attacked from…
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Is Texas debate the last chance to derail Trump’s bandwagon?
I’ve long lost count of the number of Republican debates we’ve seen in this extraordinary cycle. They have all been entertaining – in ways never seen before in politics, closer to a celebrity cage fight than measured debate – and in my view, catastrophic for both the image and electoral prospects of the party. Tonight’s…
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Politico Series Part 4: Rubio in freefall after NH debate disaster
This piece was written a few days after the New Hampshire primary, ahead of South Carolina and Nevada. Here, I document the dramatic rise and fall of Marco Rubio on betting markets. First, the market loved him in response to third place in Iowa and the media hype that followed. However as he famously stumbled…
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Bet update: Taking cover as Trump nomination looks inevitable
There is no two ways about it – the scale of Donald Trump’s third consecutive, overwhelming victory, in the Nevada Caucus, sent an ominous signal to his rivals for the GOP nomination. The window is closing on any attempt to stop him, and the logistics of uniting behind an alternative look impossible. With that in…
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Clinton v Trump is rated likelier than ever
From being wide-open when the nomination process began three weeks ago, if the betting is any guide, the race for the US presidency increasingly looks like a three-cornered contest. Despite widespread concerns about her campaign, slippage in nationwide polls7 and the ongoing investigation into her e-mails, Hillary Clinton remains rock-solid, odds-on favourite to become the…
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SC reflections: The state of play after wins for Trump and Clinton
From a betting perspective, the latest round produced a decent night. One winner, one loser from two small advised bets, yielding a small 2.2 units overall profit. My predictions were pretty close to the mark. Longer-term, a mixture of disappointment that long-range prediction Ted Cruz looks less likely than any point since the start of…
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New bets, SC and NV predictions
Forgive the lateness of these updates – I am in the UK on family business before flying back to Las Vegas tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll be joining a fellow British political gambler for an all-night session, trading the GOP South Carolina Primary and Democrat Nevada Caucus – and we plan to go live on Periscope. Follow…
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Nevada Caucus: The Sanders surge gathers momentum
The Democrats may have been consistently rated as odds-on favourite to win the presidency, but their primary process has been left trailing a poor second to the Republicans in both the entertainment and betting stakes. A polite head-to-head debate, in which defining your opponent as a ‘moderate’ rather than a ‘progressive’ becomes a talking point,…