Thursday, August 27, 2009

Odds On

Many traders really like to trade Odds on favourites. These horses attract nearly all of the money in the race and therefore provide good liquidity. In this race in Ireland the liquidity was not as good as many UK races but I was still able to use £250 stakes to make a decent profit. In the video you can at times see several £250 stakes, I was using these in case of some large orders going in and also to be first in the queue if the horse trades at that price. These types of markets can be very profitable although I think they do take a bit of practice.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Liverpool Price Doubles during one Game

After tonight's disappointing result for Liverpool their price for the title has doubled. Is this a case of the market overreacting or is this a true reflection of the odds of Liverpool winning the title? Personally I think it is an overreaction and expect the price to contract from its current value of 11. One thing that is true is that this kind of unexpected result throws up some trading opportunities. I backed Liverpool with 100 @12 and layed off at 11 within 15 mins of the final whistle.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Betfair V Betdaq

Betfair have announced that they will be making changes to the premium charge and probably charging successful traders even more of their profits. My thoughts again turn to Betdaq. So this afternoon I was able to compare the markets of the two exchanges on this video. If you can't tell Betfair is on the left and Betdaq is on the right. It is probably best you watch the video to make your own mind up about which exchange suits you better.

As you can see the lower liquidity helped me to make a tidy profit (9%) on Betdaq using only £50 stakes. However if I was using bigger stakes on Betfair I might have been able to make more money but sometimes it is not easy to see the direction of any move on the favourite.

It has been suggested several times by several people (me included) that traders and punters should all move to Betdaq. However no-one wants to lead us there for fear of turning around to see no-one behind them. The ideal situation would be for everyone to trade on Betdaq but I thought that would happen last year but it didn't.

On the Bet Angel forum it has been suggested that new traders should try starting on Betdaq because it is a little less hectic and they can use Bet Angel Professional for free. Hopefully a few people will take this advice and things will start to change.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Fast Pictures not Always an Advantage

I have been away for a few days to visit a friend and he gave me back my copy of A Definitive Guide to Betting Exchanges. This book is a very good introduction to Betting Exchanges although it may be a little bit dated now. I found the section about tennis very informative as I had little knowledge about these markets.

My favourite section is the one that lists all the strange things that have happened on exchanges. The best of these is the time a lady placed a 500 bet @1.01 to back a favourite that was cruising to victory in a hurdles race in Ireland. The bet was placed just as the horse was approaching a hurdle on her pictures (At the Races). Now as you probably know if you have SIS or are at the actual race course you have a perceived advantage. Someone with this "advantage" saw the horse make a mistake and the price shot out to 95. Next thing to happen was Ruby Walsh clung on and made a miraculous recovery and the horse promptly went on to canter home netting the lucky punter a £47000 profit when she was hoping to make£5. So just remember the guys with fast pictures don't always win.

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Bot Problems

As a part time trader I am thinking that my time might best be spent designing a bot that can trade for me when I am at work. So currently I am in the process of trying to design one that will work on the Bet Angel Spreadsheet. I am making a bit of progress however my biggest problem is that I only want to trade in the last 5 mins of racing and then clear the status cells for the next race.

At the moment I have copied this bit of code from the Bet Angel forum and this clears the cells every time a bet is placed.

Private Sub Worksheet_Calculate()

Dim i As Integer
For i = 9 To 67 Step 2
If Range("O" & i).Value = "placed" Then _
Range("O" & i).ClearContents
Next i
End Sub

However at the moment this will fire too many bets into the market for me. So I am trying to write a macro that will clear the cells when cell I5 shows true. I have tried several things so far but they don't work in practice. I am sure it is possible so I will keep trying because if I can get this to work then I hope it will be profitable.