What the index counts

Every spread market is a formula that turns countable events into one number. Understanding a market means reading its formula, not its name: the same match produces a dozen different indexes, and they do not move together.

Open the partner account Start with how the two-sided trade works

Direct answerA spread index is a published formula that weights countable events into one number — goals at ten points each, yellow cards at ten and red at twenty-five, a scorer's shirt number at ten times the number, the minute of the first goal as itself. The formula, and the source that decides each event, are published with the market.

One match, six different numbers

Suppose a match ends 2–1, with four yellow cards, one red card and a first goal in the nineteenth minute. Each of the following indexes is compiled from exactly the same afternoon, and each would be quoted separately with its own two-way price.

Illustrative weighting of the shape firms publish — the weights themselves are the firm's and are set out with each market
Index	Formula of this shape	This match makes up at
Total goals	goals × 10	3 goals → 30
Total bookings	(yellows × 10) + (reds × 25)	(4 × 10) + (1 × 25) → 65
Bookings, home side only	same weights, one team	2 yellow, 1 red → 45
Goalscorer shirt numbers	{sum of scorers' shirt numbers, own goals 0} × 10	{9 + 10 + 4} × 10 → 230
Time of first goal	the minute of the first goal, or the full time if none	19th minute → 19
Corners	corners × 3	11 corners → 33

Nothing here is arbitrary in a way that matters, as long as the weighting is published and the events are countable. What matters is that a position is a view on one of these formulas. A firm that prices all six is the other side of six different trades, and a reader who thinks “the match will be quiet” is taking a view on goals, on bookings, on cards and on the first-goal clock at the same time only if they deliberately trade all of them.

Compiling the events is the whole job

Two questions decide every index, and both are answered in the market's own rules rather than by common sense.

Question 1 · what counts

Does a goal credited as an own goal add the keeper's number or nothing? Does a booking shown to a substitute on the bench count? Does a goal that is later reclassified by a panel still count at the moment it was given? Does a card shown after the final whistle count in the match market or in a separate one?

Each answer is a sentence in the market's definition. Where the sentence does not exist, the market has a gap, and a gap is a reason to read the definition before trading rather than after.

Question 2 · who decides

A market names the source whose result settles it — usually the competition's official result or an agreed data provider — and the settlement follows that source even when a broadcaster, a newspaper or a highlights package disagrees.

Where the source later corrects a result, the market's rules say whether the correction is applied and by when. That deadline, not the correction itself, is what decides the make-up.

The arithmetic of a made-up index

A make-up is not a score, it is a multiplication. Taking the same match and a sale of the bookings index at 44 for £3 per point:

compiled make-up = (4 × 10) + (1 × 25) = 40 + 25 = 65 points
you sold at 44 for £3 per point
loss = (44 − 65) × £3 = −21 × £3 = −£63
the same four yellows with no red, sold at 44: (40 − 44) × £3 = −£12
the red card alone moved the index by 25 points = 25 × £3 = £75

That last line is the point of the page. A single countable event — one red card in the eightieth minute — changed the position by £75, which is twenty-five times the money per point; nothing in the mechanism was gradual about it. Markets whose index can move in one jump are the ones where the distance between the quote and the worst plausible make-up is a real number rather than a theoretical one, which is what the risk page works through.

Time-based indexes behave differently again

Not every index waits for a discrete event. A first-goal-time index is quoted as a minute, and before a goal is scored it is by definition the current minute — so it marches upward, minute by minute, with no event at all. A seller at 34 may be in profit at 33, 40, 55 and 89 without anything happening, because the underlying number is the clock. This is also why such markets have a defined end: if no goal is scored, the index makes up at the full allotted time, which is why the definition must say whether that is ninety minutes or the actual playing time added on.

The commercial link below is disclosed and is the only such element on this page. Nothing on it is a market, a price or a tip, and the site makes no claim about any firm.

Open the partner account

Where this sits in the desk

Buying and selling a price — the two sides, the break-even, and how the pair is opened.
Running profit and loss — how a mark is calculated before the make-up exists.
Settlement and the make-up — what happens when the formula is applied for the last time.
When the loss outruns the stake — what a jump of twenty-five points costs at a given money per point.