I agree with Arilou that MatchBook's fee structure is much better for market makers on events like these. You can still do well with TS, but you have to have sufficient volume so that even if you wind up paying expiration fees on a few hundred contracts, you've traded a few thousand so your fees per contract traded are still low.
Some dogs may be priced too high, I don't know. As I've said before, I'm not a fundamentals guy. But if you want to make a play like that, you're probably best to buy a few solid favorites (5-10) than to short a bunch of dogs (20+). You're making the same "bet" either way, but buying the favs is probably a better strategy when you take expiration fees and liquidity into account. Volume on the main guys will be sufficiently high for you to get in and out of a pretty decent sized position no problem.
Another trading strategy I forgot to mention that was probably my most profitable for live trading is this:
Say it's the results show. There's a market on who will be eliminated. A is about 60%, B is about 20%, C-F are about 5%. In the show, they will tell you who is safe in either groups or 1 by 1. Obviously there's a lot of info given away. I set up a spreadsheet to automatically re-calculates the FV of people being eliminated given a contestant is said to be safe.
In this case, if they told you contestant A is safe the new mkts should be roughly:
B = 50%, and C-F = 12.5%
If you already have FVs calculated you are likely to be able to pick people off before the mkts re-establish themselves. I could easily see someone wanting to sell A for 40% b/c it feels too high, but you already know you're getting the best of it paying 40.
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