Melbourne Cup meeting – Day three

05/11/2014 | By | Reply More

I was going to post up a breakdown of the big day, but the unfortunate circumstances surrounding the post race period put paid to that. Couldn’t bring myself to post enthusiastically about proceedings given that. In case you don’t know what happened the BBC has detailed the unfortunate set of circumstances.

From a trading perspective things went pretty well. I don’t expect to set records on every major race meeting now, due to the time I’ve been in the market, so was happy to put out a cracking result on the big race and a decent result on the day. I ended up surpassing last year.

It’s curious how these big meetings go though. It seems at the start of the day the markets are engender a sense of stoic behaviour in a lot traders. But as the day progresses the market loosens up a fair bit.

In previous years the pattern has been for the Tuesday to produce the biggest day and the two Saturdays around the meeting to look similar. The Thursday is the weakest day of the meeting. Typically producing around 15% of the matched bet turnover on the week. The big day produces about 1/3rd of the total turnover.

One characteristic that I am seeing is that turnover is falling overall and on the big race itself. In 2011 the meeting had £27.8m, then £20.5m and last year £20m. in 2010 the Melbourne Cup did a remarkable £4.17m but that has slipped to under £3m this year. I’ve noticed a similar thing on the Breeders cup.

If price rush is pushing orders through the exchange, then for all those many thousands of rushes that are happening, we are not seeing it over here for some reason, not even in the UK racing. Must be going somewhere else I reckon.

Last year I didn’t do a good job on the Thursday so I’m hoping to improve this year. I’ve introduced a new tactic this year to try and boost returns. Today will be a good test of that.

05-11-2014 - MC Turnover

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Category: Australian, Horse Racing

About the Author ()

I left a good job in the consumer technology industry to go a trade on Betfair for a living way back in June 2000. I've been here ever since pushing very boundaries of what's possible on betting exchanges and loved every minute of it.

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