Posts Tagged newbury
Another difficult day for racing
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on February 12th, 2011
Racing hasn’t had it easy this winter. Over half the meetings lost in December, November wasn’t a bundle of joy and the start of the year hasn’t really gone to plan.I am struggling to remember when we last had a normal week.
Lots of good thoroughbreds need a decent run out ahead of Cheltenham, but few are getting one. Just when you think you have seen it all; we see, on what was going to be a great days racing, a disaster at Newbury. It’s too early to speculate on exactly what happened, but it’s ripped a hole in what should have been a very good day. Let’s hope they solve the problem quickly and make sure it never happens again. A very sad day for connections and all involved. Nicky Henderson described the events were ‘Like a horror story’
With half term on the horizon and a quieter month I think it’s time to have a break from things to return fully charged for peak season. Winter isn’t outstanding at the best of times, so little is lost by going for some R&R at this time of year. Horrible incident, let’s hope they get to the bottom of it quickly.
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!
Fat fingers crucify punter
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on October 23rd, 2010
I see lots of strange things in the markets but few stranger than what happened just a moment ago at Newbury. While I realise we all, in some way, take money of each other now and again. I feel a great deal of sympathy for what they did, we all screw up from time to time. I can’t imagine how they felt after this error.
The long and short of it is that they backed a 400/1 shot down to only 1.08, with significant amounts of money. All this occured before the off. Why, is anybodies guess. But you feel it could be a bot error. There is a discussion on the forum, but here is an image I took quickly after this happened.
It’s going to take some getting back I think.
Ouch!
Only a few seconds..
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on February 15th, 2010
Amazing how a few seconds can make such a difference.
Ahead of the Eon chase we were speculating in the office at how short a price Denman was. In fact it was more like moaning, because we knew it would make getting anything out of the race pretty difficult. Our conclusion was that the incredibly skinny odds of 1.17 or thereabouts really represented the fact that Denman was going to win easy, except if he fell. We watched the race and witnessed Denman just trotting around the Newbury circuit with ease. We still continued our discussions as the race was underway. At which point I piped up and said, “I’m going to lay him”. I already had a reasonable, though not spectacular, profit on the race and just fancied my chances. No sooner had I said that than he stumbled, I never got filled at 1.05. Then he clattered into the next and it was all over. A few seconds early and I could have possibly had my biggest ever single daily total! Isn’t hindsight a wonderful thing.
I switched quickly to the gold cup market but it seems many others had already and his price had already drifted enough.
