I don't think any data on this has been published and there's no easy way to look it up yet. The data is available for a short time after betting on each race completes though. I tracked the betting on two races last night around 6pm Eastern (and looked at final data for several other races right before these). I found a number of interesting things, which I'll share over the next few blog posts.
The first thing was that volume is generally a lot higher than I expected. The lack of discussion of exchange wagering since it launched has given the impression that it's not going well. The results I looked at definitely caused me to rethink that. The 5th race at Louisiana Downs yesterday had $39,878 of matched bets, while the 2nd race at Presque Isle Downs had $72,597. The other two races I looked at were in the same range. That's about ten times what I was expecting to see, although it also includes bettors in the UK (who I believe have been able to bet at these tracks for years).
The other big surprise to me was that basically all of the betting happens at the last minute. I assumed that with fixed odds, bettors would be more willing to place bets in advance. That couldn't be further from the truth. For example, the Louisiana Downs race was showing only $428 matched with 10 minutes to post time and $5,835 with 1 minute to post time. Almost 99% of the matched volume happened in the last 10 minutes and more than 80% in the last two minutes. I think that tells us a bit about how people are betting and what strategies are likely to work well. I'll talk about that in future posts.
These numbers from Louisiana Downs and Presque Isle might seem like reasonable liquidity, but it is actually pretty weak at this early stage. As a previous regular user of Betfair in the UK, I can say that as the liquidity grows you will see a lot more betting earlier - as markets formulate earlier - due to higher volume. The spreads will then be far less and it will be easier to get bets matched early, rather than last minute as it is now. Run of the mill races in the UK regularly generate the equivalent of $500,000-$1 million in handle per race. Major races can generate 5 to 10 times that.
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