the scottish referendum is STUPID but let's make some £££ off it anyway :)

As I was having a rather rubbish day getting increasingly tired of waiting for the Fed (there are only so many paper balls you can toss at your friends in the office), I stumbled upon a betting platform and I took advantage of the free bet on offer to set up the most perfect hedge.

This deal has a guaranteed minimum return of 20% overnight. If you think of it in per annum terms, it is roughly 8 NONILLION percent! (8x10^30)%! If one did this consistently for 10 days he or she could comfortably retire and be hailed as the greatest money manager of all times.
Believe it or not I actually asked one of our analysts to look up how this number should be referred to (and he indulged me :). 10^30 is a Nonillion and as a bonus, he also told me that the mass of the sun is 1.988 Nonillion Kilos.

So here is the extremely simple set up based on the principle that practically all betting platforms match your first bet by giving you a free bet. I placed my bet and its hedge on the outcome of the Scottish referendum.
Place a bet of size X on a NO vote (current odds 1/5), and hedge this bet by placing the free bet of an equivalent size on a YES vote(current odds 7/2). When the Scottish people exercise their judgment tomorrow, their decision will result in an payoff equivalent to 120% of the original bet in the case of a NO vote and 350% in the case of a YES. The latter is 350% not 450% because for the free stake, you can only collect the winning not the original free stake.

It goes without saying that this doesn't have to be limited to the Scottish referendum, anything with a binary outcome and similar odds will do fine. The only thing worth noting is that the free bet should always be placed on the outcome with the least probability so that should the free bet win, the winning alone can more than cover your loss.