Posts Tagged hennessy
The fifth, five years on
Posted by Peter Webb in Betfair, Horse Racing on November 26th, 2011
It’s the fighting fifth at Newcastle today. It’s often a small field and can be a bit tricky, but it usually contains some opportunities. Only five runners and Binocular is almost evens, that’s a tricky set up.
It’s also the Hennessy Gold Cup. I have fond memories of this race as five years ago today I traded it live at the IX Investor show for Betfair. Seeing a betting company at an investor show was a shock for many people and we had trouble getting people to come near the stand; so I just rolled up my sleeves and traded live for everybody. A slightly unorthodox set up, but it worked. As the profits flowed in it inevitably brought people to the stand to try and understand what market I could possibly be trading on Saturday and making money. If I remember correctly I bagged £250 on the Gold Cup in about ten minutes.
Last year I did even better, which was miraculous if you remember the difficulties we had with the weather. Last year the weather had just started to really go downhill and on the Saturday and we had a very limited card on display. Newcastle wasn’t on at all and the fighting fifth ended up at Newbury. From that point onwards the weather got colder, and colder, and colder and colder. The coldest winter for 30 years! This year is balmy by comparison, lets hope the opportunities are too!
Trying to explain that this isn't a stock chart
Trading the drifting Denman
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on November 28th, 2010
With a tough week already, it looked like Saturday was going to be a white out as well. Fortunately Newbury survived with a quality card and that gave me a reason to sit behind my desk. I’ve typically done OK at the Hennessy gold cup, so wanted a fair crack at it. When you have been going for a few years you can’t but resist looking at previous years and having that as an unofficial target. Tough when the most of the racing has been cancelled.
The predominant factor in the early market was the drift on Denman.
Denman was asked to carry 2st and with uncertain ground, it was probably this that set of the drift. I don’t follow horse form so I can’t confirm that, but I suspect that the ground could have been reason that the drift set in? With that weight in such a competitive field, I’d also be surprised if the market didn’t think Denman was a little short at his early price. Either way there was a drift.
So how would you trade this? Most people would extrapolate the current trend and lay first, but that would have been a disaster here as Denman went off at an SP of 5.9. It’s typically a common issue that you see in many markets, that people put too much weight on something that has just happened and project it into the future. Often the past has little relationship to the future.
If I toss a coin and it comes up heads ten times in a row I may suspect the coin is biased. But unless I have firm evidence of that, I have to assume the next toss is 50/50. Most people would put undue weight on heads in this scenario. I didn’t choose heads and because of that got the result I wanted from this race. But I bet you there were a lot of people that laid at 7.60!
