Originally Published October 1st 2023 for For Green Fields clients
The Famous Tommy Thumb's Little Story-Book:
This pig went to market
That pig stayed home
There are a whole array of key inputs to traders committing to market positions in which they have privileged knowledge (or insider trading, as it is known).
Despite allegedly being illegal in the City of London for over half a century, we know of numerous FCA-regulated entities which benefit from insider trading.
In the US, they have the Commitment of Traders Report to prevent insiders financially benefiting from insider knowledge although it is hardly onerous to avoid detection via the use of proxies and other carefully structured trading etc.
In an entirely non-regulated financial market like football betting, insider trading defines the interactions and the match outcome(s).
Owners, managers, agents, players and the criminal fringe all benefit from this corruption as do the market makers who enable such information to reach market - insider trading from a horse's mouth (or a pig's) is gold dust at the trough of crime.
There are many ways to analyse insider trading dependent on the depth to which you can reach in the market hierarchy - the largest positions (and the most dominant money) is in the Dark Pools and the South East Asian underground in football.
Cricket depends on South Asian crime syndicates in Dubai.
You get the picture.
An analyst can monitor the route to market, the proxy trading being used to disguise the corruption, the volume as an indication of strength in a position, the selective use of market disinformation and other such inputs.
These are then correlated with other non-market inputs to deliver a holistic of corruption on an event.
In today's Premier League game between Nottingham Forest and Brentford, there are two very distinct approaches to matchfixing and / or insider trading.
The Nottingham Forest approach is very unsophisticated and relies on linkage to other criminal infrastructures e.g. agents and match officials to enable insider pranks to be landed.
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The Brentford approach is altogether more professional and requires significant analytical inputs to determine the reality of the outcome being traded. Matthew Benham was educated at the feet of Brighton owner Tony Bloom and some of the stardust has evidently rubbed off.
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The real difference between these two routes to market is strategic - Forest's strategy is short-term while Brentford's will evolve into the future.
We believe that there are even more subtle routes for pigs to get to market so that the corrupting forces can bring home the bacon without analytical disclosure.
But that is a narrative of neural nets, machine learning and artificial intelligence and is not for this space.
Finally.
It should be remembered that Nottingham Forest are only in the EPL through a fixed Championship Play-Off Final versus Huddersfield Town where Jonathan Moss was evidently on one.
Moss is now a manager at PGMOL.
While Huddersfield hover just above the drop to League One after the 'mysterious' and 'non-publicised' reasons for Neil Warnock's removal from the club.
Behind the 'good fortune' of some is a crime and a victim.
© 2023 Football is Fixed
