

Test-drive the public API for our real-time prediction market - jamii

smarkets.com is a real-time prediction market. A prediction market is much like a stock exchange, except that instead of buying into a company you can buy into, say, 'Apple will not recall the iphone 4' (http://smarkets.com/current-affairs/tech-gadgets/iphone-4-recall).<p>We're starting to open up a rest api to allow users to develop trading robots and assistants. Unlike betfair we don't charge you for access or limit the number of requests. The more activity in our markets the better - we know our infrastructure can take it.<p>The core functionality is already up and running at api.smarkets.com . Documentation is temporarily housed at http://apidocs.s3-external-3.amazonaws.com/index.html . If something is broken or doesn't make sense you can get hold of me at jamie.brandon@smarkets.com or jamii in #erlang.<p>Unfortunately we can't accept money from users in the USA due to the rather draconian gambling laws, but you can still open an account and get read-only access to the api.<p>The smarkets backend is built on top of erlang, couchdb, postgres, rabbitmq and mochiweb. I will be writing about various parts of our tech over the next couple of weeks at scattered-thoughts.net . Whilst this stuff gets a lot of hype there is often a lack of real-world experience reports, especially for couchdb. Hopefully I can close that gap a little bit.<p>Also, we're hiring: http://smarkets.com/about/internships/ http://smarkets.com/about/jobs/
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chasingsparks
Do you have any more documentation (other than
<http://smarkets.com/faq/#betting_matching>) on your order matching?

I assume it's like any other call market with price (odds) and time
precedence, but I'm still curious.

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jamii
At the moment all our markets are closed, price-time priority markets and
users can only place limit orders. So your order will be matched against the
best odds available, unless those odds are worse than the limit on your order.
A pair of orders are always matched at the price of the order which was placed
first.

I should probably add some example markets to the docs.

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dtby
Are all of your gaming activities under the Maltese license?

Sorry if this is too business and non-HN oriented. I will remove this
question, if requested.

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jamii
Yes, apparently. I don't know much about our licensing myself.

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dtby
Excellent. Thanks for responding.

For better or worse (for my sake, not yours!) I know what this means in terms
of how I may be able to use it in conjunction with an exotic options platform
with which I am tangentially involved.

