What Is Liquidity?
In Matched Betting, Liquidity is the maximum amount of money that you can stake on a lay bet at a Betting Exchange.
The Liquidity is displayed underneath the lay odds at a Betting Exchange and can constantly change.
In this example from Matchbook, you can see the liquidity is £501:
Anytime you are Matched Betting it is always useful to consider the amount of liquidity that is available at the exchange.
Ideally, the liquidity available on the lay odds at a betting exchange must be at least the same or higher than the lay stake you want to use for your Qualifying or Free Bet.
If the liquidity available is greater than your lay stake your lay bet will immediately get fully matched (taken) at the exchange.
If the liquidity available is less than your lay stake your lay bet will not get matched (taken by the exchange) or only get partially matched (i.e. only part of your total lay stake will get taken by the exchange). If this happens to you, you don’t need to panic; instead, you just need to follow our guide on how to fix partially matched and unmatched bets.
Betting Exchange liquidity tends to be lower when a game or race is still some time away from starting and/or when a game, race, or specific betting market, is not very popular to bet or trade on. In football, Goalscorer markets tend to have much lower liquidity than popular markets such as the 90-minute winner market or both teams to score market.
To avoid low liquidity when Matched Betting we recommend only betting on popular sporting events, such as Premier League football.
For Horse Racing we also recommend placing your bets on the day of the race - not before, otherwise, there will hardly be any liquidity available.
Unless you’re experienced in Matched Betting, we’d also advise you to avoid placing your bets in the hour before the start of a race as at this time both lay odds and liquidity can change rapidly, making it difficult for us to place our lay bets successfully.
On our Oddsmatching Software, the liquidity available at the betting exchange of the bet you are considering to do is shown in the column named ‘Available'.
Liquidity available at the betting exchange is also shown in our Oddsmatching Software pop up Matched Betting calculator so that you can easily see if there is enough liquidity available before you place your bets:
Or if there's not enough liquidity available:
You can read more about starting liquidity when Matched Betting here:
https://www.outplayed.com/news/matched-betting/matched-betting-liquidity/