The Good The Bad and The Ugly

 
The good was that I made £100 profit on the tennis today, I think I'm still down on the week, but it seems some of the players have finally remembered how to play...

The bad was I let a trade go in play and lost £80 on the horses, but in my defense it was because I had a visitor and was distracted about 5 mins before the off and forgot that I had placed a speculative trade out of the money that hadn't been matched. I somehow got into a discussion about ski boots and left the PC to get my boots, I only realised what had happened when I went back to the PC and saw the market closed and the loss! My bet had obviously been matched and then the horse went and won !!! Doh!!!

Apart from that the horses went really well again today, I've had a really good week on the horses.  Only a few hours a day between working but has been good.  I'm getting on really well with the traded prices bars showing to the left of the ladders, and also having 4 or 5 ladders open at the same time.  Is much easier to watch multiple horses and spot opportunities with all the info in the same place on one screen.

Have cancelled my Racing Post and Racing UK subscription though as I'm getting fed up of watching American/French repeats instead of the races I'm trying to trade.  I haven't really used it apart from making sure I close before the off and I can do that by closing at the scheduled off time, if I miss a few mins trading I'll get an extra few on the next race instead...

I've also started trading more tennis and I think that is where I'm going to focus most of my attention January to October, so the horses has become a bit of a hobby at the moment, which is probably one of the reasons why I'm finding it easier, there's less pressure to make profit, so I'm making profit...

The Ugly was the traffic trying to get out of Cambridge this evening after work... It took me 45 minutes to get 2 miles...

Some people drive at that time every day, imagine what it's like when it's not half term...  At least I know to not bother trying to get home if I ever finish at that time again, I'll just have a few shandy's (obviously not enough to put me anywhere near the drink drive limit unless I'm cycling) and pie n chips in the pub then come home after it clears.

When Tennis Swings Go Bad

 

I tried out my "don't worry" exit strategy for Tennis trades that go wrong today, and although I wouldn't necessarily recommend it I've posted a video of how it works...

The first trade went exactly to plan (well I like to think it was a plan), even to the point of closing on the best possible price.

The second trade went very Pete Tong... very quickly... was > £30 red hedge figure at one point

There wasn't much I could do once it had happened so just had to resort to patiently sacrificing goats and chickens until the price came back down again. I think I was slightly lucky to get out of this one with a profit, especially as not much later on Beck retired.

If it doesn't play very well (stops/jumps/stutters) then download it first (right click save as) before playing.

Compare the Meerkat

 
As promised I have done a couple of compare videos
(both files are 10Mb)

First one is Toy v Bet Angel and Toy v Gruss and I did this one last week.  The refresh is set at 200ms in all applications and uses one ladder in The Toy and the enhanced ladder in Bet Angel.  I also tried to compare The Toy with Gruss but had problems with it not accepting mouse clicks, and I don't use Gruss so didn't spend much time trying to resolve it.



The second I did this afternoon and is just The Toy v Bet Angel both running 3 ladders at 250ms refresh



As expected (since they both use the same API) there is not too much difference.  But the Toy sometimes shows bet placement and cancel quicker.  It's reassuring that they both seem to give the same numbers for LTP, market depth, traded volume, hedge figures etc.

Is a pity Gruss wasn't working properly to get a proper comparison of that as well, but I'm assuming that's something to do with my system/install rather than the software as many people use it successfully.

If I wasn't overloaded with work at the moment I'd spend more time trying to sort it out.

As they say in the movies... That's all Folks... hope you found the comparisons interesting.

£1 a day

 

Tennis weekly P&L	-48.45	Monthly P&L	-22.91
Horses weekly P&L	12.50	Monthly P&L	51.14
		Total	28.23

Busy again today, so no horses
But I did lose another £15 on the tennis

P&L for last 5 days shows a profit on the horses and a loss on the tennis. Overall I'm still in profit for the month, by less than I hoped at the start of the month. The tennis is still experimental so could be worse... and the horses have been doing ok given the amount of time and size of stakes that I've been using.

One big plus this month (and I say this in great fear of angering the trading gods and causing it to go Pete Tong tomorrow...) I haven't had any significant loses on the horses and my hit rate has been good.

I've made £28 in 25 days, which is more than £1 a day, so I'm looking forwards to next week at the end of October when I'll hopefully have over £30 profit to spend...

Well it's only going to be about £15 after I deduct my Racing Post and Racing UK subs, but it's still a couple of pints...

Work Work Work

 
Not had any time to trade many horses today as I have way too much work on at the moment.

It's good to be getting some regular money coming in, and with my slow progress in this 'making millions out of trading' lark, the boost to my bank account is welcome so I can't complain too much.

Monday afternoon is going to be my next chance to trade. That's if I get back from my morning meetings in time (I don't like going to meetings, but for some reason people like to get feedback on what they are paying me for, so I sometimes have to do them)

I made a few tennis trades today and lost about £20 hopefully the finals tomorrow will go better...

Thursday

 
Not getting much time to spend on the blog this week, I'm getting up at 6am and then working to lunch time. It has advantages in that I get the afternoon free to trade, but I then work again in the evening, so by the time I'm finished I don't always (i.e. yesterday) want to spent too much time getting screen shots of P&L and writing my blog entries.

Horse trading is going well, I'm in profit every day this week, small amounts but they are green. Still trading the 2nd / 3rd favourites mostly, and using small stakes. Am enjoying it and not really keeping track of hourly P&L, aiming to get a few ticks each race and haven't had any big reds for a while.

Tennis is up and down, but is working out at about break even so far this week. I made a profit on the Wozniacki game without understanding Polish Yesterday overall I made a small loss, today a small profit.

Will put up a multi-day P&L at the weekend, and then probably do only one or two a week instead of daily for a while while I have lots of work on.

Will also try and find time to get those side by side application comparisons done at some point soon.

In the meantime here's a short educational documentary about King Agamemnon



You can find more (should you want to) at rathergood.com

Chewsday

 

Tennis Daily P&L	26.62	Monthly P&L	25.54
Horses Daily P&L	3.60	Monthly P&L	38.64
		Total	64.18

Using small stakes again today for the horses, managed to get 9 races (all green) in between being a taxi for the airport and going to work.

The Tennis went ok today as well which is good after last weeks results.

Racing UK was a bit strange today, it seemed to be just playing repeats of French and American races, not sure what that is about, so I put some music on instead.

Will hopefully get some horse trading videos sorted later in the week.

You win some you lose some...

 
I finished adding the Tournament data to my tennis database and after applying filters to my analysis I've concluded that the loses last week were nothing more than luck, there is no significant variance in expected results depending on tournament prize money or surface.

The one slight exception is that there is a better hit rate on clay than on hard courts in one sub set of the men's matches, but it's only a small variation and not enough to suggest changing any of my strategies or to not trade the hard court matches.

My original filters still seem to be the ones I should use and last week was just a bad week.

I've got 12 months of historical betfair data where I would have made good profits, and the analysis was done after I had the idea, it's not a case of making up criteria to match the winners in the data. So I just have to be patient and stick with the plan and see what happens... I did say there would be losing weeks... that was one of them

Maybe I could have started with a slightly lower bank/stake but that wouldn't be as much fun...

Also hope to get back in time for some pre race horse trading this afternoon...

Weekend

 

Tennis Daily P&L	-55.00	Monthly P&L	-1.08
Horses Daily P&L	0.00	Monthly P&L	35.04
		Total	33.96

Weekend results show a loss on the Tennis taking the monthly total down to -£1.08.

Still adding Tournament/surface data to my database, in the meantime until I finish and can analyse it I'm not trading any tournaments where the prize money is less than 1/2 a million as I lost a lot on the Linz last week.

Horses feel like the trades are going much better than the last few months, despite less hours trading, and possibly has something to do with being more relaxed due to them not being the main focus of my trading this month.

Have been ill last week which has been annoying, and also makes everything else more hassle and more difficult, being self employed means that I can't just stay at home and not go to work if I want to get paid. Luckily there's nothing on this morning and I have just woken up from 14 hours sleep, and although I'm still tired I feel a lot better...

Also the yellow stuff I have been coughing up for the last 7 days is now green, and I'm sure that's a good thing.

P&L from Saturday/Sunday

Bandwidth 2

The spikes on the Toy bandwidth chart were interesting and on investigation seem to be to do with updating/refreshing the betfair graph as you move between ladders. This should be fairly easy to resolve (and I think this would not be an issue unless you move the mouse constantly between ladders like I apparently do...) so I have repeated the tests without doing this.

I decided to do two more tests firstly just watching the market and then later I'll do some tests trading the markets:

First Test: watching the markets:

I've used the same market for all 3 applications, and I didn't do any trading, all of them had the ladder interface plus one betfair chart. I tried The Toy with 3 and 5 ladders and it didn't seem to make any difference, so left it with 5.

The Toy	110Mb/s
Gruss	120Mb/s
Bet Angel	150Mb/s

 

 

 

Next test - Trading (to follow soon)

Bandwidth

 

Tennis Daily P&L	135.35	Monthly P&L	53.92
Horses Daily P&L	0.22	Monthly P&L	35.04
		Total	88.96

In response to a question on my previous post about The Toy's bandwidth usage I have done a quick and non scientific comparison of bandwidth usage:

I simply loaded up each application, selected the next horse race, displayed the ladder and grid interfaces and a chart, then waited for the bandwidth chart to fill up then took a screen shot of it.

All three apps were set to 200ms refresh with other API settings at defaults whatever they may be...

The Toy	Bet Angel	Gruss
~200Mb/s	~180Mb/s	~170Mb/s

The Toy (in my quick, basic and non scientific test) used about 10-15% more bandwidth than BA and Gruss.

I'll maybe try do some more tests when I have a bit more time.

I also pulled back £135 on the tennis today by not throwing money away trying to trade on the Linz matches

Biggest lesson this week has been market selection. I'm half way through updating my database with tournament info like, prize money, surface, indoor/outdoor so that I can rerun my original analysis on subsets of the data. Is taking a while as I need to hand load a lot of it. I'm suspecting that it might tell me 'don't trade low quality tournaments', if that is the case it may be because the players just aren't interested enough in the prize money or the status of smaller events to fight hard enough for my trade to get a high enough hit rate.

Busy weekend so probably not much time for horses again. The 22p from today is just from trading while I was bandwidth checking, I think there's about 50p still to get settled but have to go out now so can't wait for it to show up on the P&L if I want to post this today

Geeks Toy

New Beta version of The Toy release (limited number of users) today after Betfair updated their API.

So far I'm really impressed

Some nice features that I've not seen in other apps, and a very customisable interface with options to emulate some standard layouts that you might already be used to. And it's FREE!

Ooops!

 

Tennis Daily P&L	-90.81	Monthly P&L	-81.43
Horses Daily P&L	0.00	Monthly P&L	34.82
		Total	-46.61

Feeling a bit ill, and had trouble getting out of bed this morning, Looking at my P&L I should have stayed there... Is not easy posting two big losing days in a row... But I'm still optimistic...

I'm probably making some mistakes in the Tennis, the main one being market selections this week. But I'm still using a sledge hammer, so hopefully things can/will improve.

Not a problem as long as I learn (or it may just be the distribution of probability at work). The historical data has a lot of information missing, e.g. indoor/outdoor, surface, prize money, country, etc. any of which may influence the market/players/odds.

What I am thinking at the moment is that it's possible/probable that low liquidity markets in women's Tournaments that have low prize money aren't good for my bank, so I need to do a bit more research and start keeping track of some extra data.

I could add the missing data to the database manually, but it would take a while. I added things like favourite/non favourite and sex quite easily. Fav is just the player(s) with the lowest odds at the start, and once you put in the sex of one player you can assume the same sex for every player they play and do update queries... so sexing the singles was dead easy, doubles were a bit trickier but still fairly easy.

I have to stick with the sledgehammer at the moment as it's all I've got, but I need to keep refining my data and filters as I go along...

This is one of the reasons why I'm not giving much detail about my tennis trades at the moment. I'm quite happy to risk my own money while I see if this is profitable, but not yours.

No horse trading today, just lots of coughing and sneezing and drinking Lemsip (which isn't anywhere near as good as they make out on the adverts)

Hopefully will be able to try out The Toy tomorrow

Tennis Balls

 

Tennis Daily P&L	-127.40	Monthly P&L	9.38
Horses Daily P&L	1.66	Monthly P&L	34.82
		Total	44.20

Biggest losing day on the tennis so far. Nothing to worry about, and as the stakes are bigger so the wins/losses should be too. it's just the way it goes... probably... I hope...

Same thing happened last week, maybe it's something to do with the weather.

Horse racing started off well, but I had to go to work and as I'm currently trading with only £2 for the first 3 markets, I never got as far as raising the stakes.

Statistic of the day:
In the last 12 months(ish) of 47956 horses that traded at 1000.0 In Play, 68 of them won!

Unfortunately most of them only had about 5p matched...

What is more interesting is that of 10539 horses that traded at 1.01 in play, 144 lost...

Not much occurring today

 

Tennis Daily P&L	19.82	Monthly P&L	136.78
Horses Daily P&L	0.00	Monthly P&L	33.16
		Total	169.94

No time to trade this afternoon so it was just the Tennis.

have been looking at software for in running horses to see if there is any opportunity to trade without pictures, just using the price movements. Bet Gizmo looks interesting.

I also had a look at the Betfair API as I'd like to automate some of my tennis trades and none of the software I've found does much apart from horses and dogs. Looks a bit complicated so might have to wait until I have more time in December when my coaching finishes.

Did more analysis of the Tennis and found some filters that in theory improve both my hit rate and margin significantly, but it also reduces the number of available markets so much that whilst I won't get as many losing trades I also won't get enough trades to make it worth doing without putting silly money into it.

I'm probably better sticking with the trades I'm already using and taking the more frequent temporary losses but with a much higher turnover and (hopefully) bigger long term profit.

Nothing came of the NFL trade I was talking about last week, I only had 2 trades matched in the whole week and it really isn't worth bothering with when that's all the markets that are available. Not really much point continuing, was only doing it for fun and it's not even fun.

I hope to get some horses traded tomorrow afternoon (but probably won't be until Thursday)

Hope you had a good day.

If Only

 

Tennis Daily P&L	-32.50	Monthly P&L	116.96
Horses Daily P&L	0.00	Monthly P&L	33.16
		Total	150.12

Nothing good from the semis and finals, so down £32 since Friday, but a good week.

If I can repeat this every week this month I'll be rather pleased!

Going back to my previous thread about compound interest and having increased the bank from £500 to £650 in a week, if we extend this out x 52 I'll be a millionaire by next year... £323,653,994.94... sounds good...

   But obviously not going to happen.

Still, a couple of million will do...

Would be nice...

The power of compound interest

Suppose you could do 100 trades per month with a 14% return...

bank	stake	profit
£1,000.00	£100.00	£1,400.00
£2,400.00	£240.00	£3,360.00
£5,760.00	£576.00	£8,064.00
£13,824.00	£1,382.40	£19,353.60
£33,177.60	£3,317.76	£46,448.64
£79,626.24	£7,962.62	£111,476.74
£191,102.98	£19,110.30	£267,544.17
£458,647.14	£45,864.71	£642,106.00
£1,100,753.14	£110,075.31	£1,541,054.40
£2,641,807.54	£264,180.75	£3,698,530.56
£6,340,338.10	£634,033.81	£8,876,473.34
£15,216,811.43	£1,521,681.14	£21,303,536.00
£36,520,347.44

£36 million in a year...

That's pretty impressive return on a £1000 investment

If only I had a trade that gave 14% return...

And I reckon you might have problems getting matched with a 1.5 million stake...

Thanks Billy

 

Tennis Daily P&L	93.02	Monthly P&L	149.46
Horses Daily P&L	0.15	Monthly P&L	33.16
		Total	182.62

Nice bonus today when I went back to my bookmaker accounts to check profits since I started and found £50 in the Billy Hill account!

Total P&L from January (I never bet or traded at all before that): Betfair horses shows a loss of £248 but a lot of that is from arbs that I did in June where the profit ended up in the bookmaker account and some losses I made before I started the blog, so I wanted to work out the actual figures since I started.

Here's my totals for everything (betting, trading, arbing).



The Japan and China quarter finals were quite good to me, with another decent green total today. I've checked the markets and my liability for the Semi's and the finals will only be about £25, so even if every trade loses I will end this week in profit on the Tennis and the stake will be able top go up (based on final bank figure).

I have more confidence now than I've ever had since I started trading. I can see opportunities outside of pre race horses that have taken the pressure off a bit and I'm enjoying the pre race horses more even if not making massive amounts, having less time in the afternoon is probably helping.

Won't be much on the horses until Monday now, wasn't much time today as you can see from the lack of trades in the P&L. Should have some Tennis figures for the semi's and Finals to post.

Have decided that the greyhounds are not worth pursuing now that I have some tennis strategies, but will stick at the horses even if the tennis continues going well as it's a challenge I want to crack.

That's me finished with trading for today... Have a great Weekend!

Randomness and Swans

 

Tennis Daily P&L	40.22	Monthly P&L	56.44
Horses Daily P&L	1.47	Monthly P&L	33.01
		Total	89.45

Just small stakes on the horses again, trying a few things out, some worked some didn't, not sure if it was helpful or not, but it ended green which is always good.

Tennis went well again, there are less matches at the end of the week when they are down to quarter/semi/finals, so will do less trades over the weekend. Am quite pleased with the tennis this week, it seems to be going pretty much according to the %'s I predicted so far

The thing with probability is that it isn't regular. For example if you throw a dice you don't usually get a six once every six throws, you might get 30 throws in a row with no sixes then 4 sixes in a row... You just need to have confidence that when you've done 6000 throws you will have had about 1000 sixes...

That's how my tennis strategy works, and why I will get losing days/weeks. I don't change my trades, I just identify the right markets and then do the same trade every time, and in theory I should make a profit roughly 1 in 12 trades. It's the 1 in 12 black swan trade that makes the money by paying back more than the 11 losses.

New Tipping Service?

Ok, I know I said I would not be charging for any services on this blog, but I'm quite tempted to cash in after my recent success in the OLBG tipping competition

Now I know you will want to know if this is going to be reliable and worthwhile so I'll explain my selection process in detail:

In the morning after the odds are available I log into my account on OLBG and pick afternoon races at random, then I look at the list of runners and decide which horses name I like best from the middle of the list (i.e. odds about 6/1-50/1), then I stick £500 on it to win.



As you can see from the above screen shot I made £5,800 last week from about 4 selections and a starting bank of £1000, so you can see that this is a really successful strategy that I'm sure you'll want to sign up to my selections if I ever go public with it...

Easy Come Easy Go

 

Tennis Daily P&L	-10.65	Monthly P&L	16.22
Horses Daily P&L	1.23	Monthly P&L	31.54
		Total	47.76

Lost £345 on the car!
MOT, headlight unit and new front disks/pads



On the plus side I don't think there's anything else left to go wrong on it now, has cost me a fortune in the last 6 months.

Loads of work on at the moment so had hardly any time for Horses and was on the phone while I traded so only using £5 stakes hence the small figures.

Tennis was unexciting, a small loss of £10, but I prefer small losses to big ones so can't really complain.

Back to Green

 

Tennis Daily P&L	133.08	Monthly P&L	26.87
Horses Daily P&L	2.60	Monthly P&L	30.31
		Total	57.18

Is always difficult to take losses, even when I know that they are inevitable due to my tennis strategy. But I'm pleased to say that Tennis had a good day today and is (for now) back in profit.

I have spotted a couple of potential tweaks that might get me a better hit rate, but it would reduce volume, so I need to run through the data in more detail to be sure it's worthwhile before I introduce them.

Another uneventful green day on the horses as well. What I have noticed the last 3 days is that with a bank that is much bigger than my stake/liability I am able to work with movements against me much better as I can place additional bets as part of my exit strategy. With a smaller bank relative to stake you often cannot make additional bets, especially lays.

I have found this really useful, and I think lack of bank size to stake is one of the reasons I was taking losses and losing confidence in August.

I also have work in the early mornings and evenings for the next 2 months, so the trading time is a bit shorter, I think this is good as I have more non trading things to keep me occupied and the limited time is helping me focus.

Have started a sideline in NFL. I did some research into NFL data from the last 12 months after reading a post by Cassini about laying short odds.

Just for fun I've set up a small £50 bank on Betdaq where I will be laying low odds in play for a few weeks to see how this pans out. I'm not going to put this in my blog P&L, it's just a bit of fun for my own interest as there isn't enough volume to make this a big money spinner, but I'll do an update at some point

Tennis 30 Cran 0

 

Tennis Daily P&L	-75.01	Monthly P&L	-106.21
Horses Daily P&L	15.82	Monthly P&L	27.71
		Total	-78.50

Another good day on the horses

Another not so good day on the tennis

As I mentioned previously, losing days on the tennis are to be expected with the strategy I'm using, so not too worried at the moment, but it would have been nice to be in profit.

Much more relaxed with the horses again today and I think that makes a big difference. Was again using small stakes and made £15. Is much easier to read the market when there is less at stake. I've been able to close the reds and let the greens run, with bigger stakes I've been doing the opposite.

I guess I need to increase gradually so i stay relaxed about it.

Tennis 15 Cran 0

 

Tennis Daily P&L	-32.50	Monthly P&L	-31.20
Horses Daily P&L	0.00	Monthly P&L	11.89
		Total	-19.31

No time for Horses today, but managed to lose a few quid on the Tennis...

Tomorrow has a lot more tennis matches so it should be a better P&L figure (colour tba)