Posts Tagged trading
Underrated strategy
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on August 27th, 2010
I covered the ‘lay the field’ strategy in some depth in racing ahead magazine a couple of months or so ago, it’s an easy strategy that works well and has been popular amongst exchange users for years. On Bet Angel you just need to set the odds, a value and click to lay the field.
To make it work, all you need to do is look for a market with a great deal of uncertainty about it. One market that was well qualified recently to fulfil this criteria was the Aston Villa next manager market. In fact most next manager markets exhibit similar characteristics and you can profit if you lay the field early on in these markets. A competitive handicap in racing over a short distance can also be fun!
Currently in the Aston Villa next manager market, these are the lowest traded odds: -
Bob Bradley – 1.43
Sven GE – 2.00
Kevin MacDonland – 2.32
Martin Jol – 5.00
Gareth Southgate – 6.00
Laying the field at less than 3.00′s would have been a viable strategy here and it’s possible that others may still come into contention.
A worthwhile strategy in your armoury.
Working holiday
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on August 16th, 2010
I can now finally explain my ‘very satisfying‘ comment from a little while back.
Under duress from my wife and kids, this year we decided to have some time off in August. I usually holiday in the winter when the sporting schedule is very quiet. But this year we took a summer holiday as well. With the summer sporting schedule in full flow it would prove very costly financially to just take time off. So it was a ‘working’ week. At first this sounds a bit odd, but not when you put a few pieces together.
Most sports events don’t start till later in the day in the summer and go into the evening. So that leaves the morning and early afternoon to spend time with the family, not just on holiday of course, but throughout the summer holidays. When the evening is over there is plenty of time there also, so there is only a small section of the day when you are incommunicado. On holiday, early mornings would be spent out and about at different locations and down the beach, before returning for the afternoon session. As the evening set in we would invite some people round; sit on the patio, eat drink and be merry, while we watched the ships float past. It was idyllic. It made me think again about making some lifestyle choices. I have been determined my whole life not to relive the same year again and again and promised I would treat myself given the chance. I have often failed to do so!
It took some planning as we need to find a nice place to stay but one that also had decent broadband and a satellite access. We found the place and it was perfect! I enjoyed it so much I am sure it could be a regular activity. Here are some images of my temporary set up and the view in both directions.
Getting stung
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on July 23rd, 2010
I got stung twice on Tuesday. Both incidents were pretty rare but taught me a lesson.
Sting one, we have a wasps nest in the Garden. Despite many attempts to get rid of it, they still persist. We called in the specialists in but that was only a temporary respite. So I took matters into my own hands and had a good poke around in the composter to locate it. Unfortunately the wasps were wise to me and one poke with a stick sent a flood out of them to defend their territory. I got stung a couple of times and one was right on the joint of my wrist and very painful. This made moving the mouse was a bit tricky for a couple of days. Anyhow, the specialist returned yesterday and destroyed the nest!
Sting two. If I get something wrong in a market, I don’t panic I just adopt a plan B, then C & D if that doesn’t work. Starting with low stakes I tend to try something and then if that doesn’t work I will cut out and try something else. Now and again though it can backfire, especially if you are unlucky. I got unlucky this week and managed to put in my worst daily performance for about 13 months. I’ve been quite happy this month but the market well and truly tripped me up on this day. Just a set of events that don’t occur very often did and that was it, nothing I could do. I did the best to repair the damage but I didn’t chase it. The upside return on trading is quite small when measure in percentage terms. I’ve often seen people go into ‘recovery’ mode when something happens, especially out of the blue. But if the ‘recovery’ fails then the road back is very long and hard. You are just better off accepting a loss, whether it was a fluke or not. You will live to fight another day, chasing a loss could wipe you out forever!
My lesson, a bit of stupidity is going to cost me one way or another, that’s inevitable. But it often serves as a useful reminder not be stupid! More importantly, its how you deal with the aftermath that’s key. Both my painful stings are behind me and I am confidently moving forward again.
Getting stung can be a useful reminder
My lucky day
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on July 6th, 2010
Nothing lucky about the result which was fine, but it was more the manner in which it was achieved. Often you can wade into a market and everything goes wrong. Nothing works the way it ‘should’ and bad postions get worse and so do good ones. Yesterday was unusual, in that I forcast a poor day but I didn’t really get any significant negatives yesterday. It just seemed that when I got myself into a hole, it quickly offered me a way out. That was lucky, but it’s continued my good start to July, a morale booster. I now can’t claim bad luck when I have my next stinker, I’ll just net it off against yesterday!
An easy way to maintain discipline
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on May 20th, 2010
There are no end of horror stories out there of people that fail to exit a position before the off and then they let that trade turn into a gamble. If you struggle with this or simply want to automate some aspects of your trading you may want to use a spreadsheet in conjunction with Bet Angel to help you achieve this.
Using Bet Angel you can link to a spreadsheet and automate a variety of elements of your trading without having to worry about additional data charges. Bet Angel will even flick through each market for you automatically. You can use all the functions of Bet Angel and the spreadsheet at the same time. In this example we put some trades in via Bet Angel’s main interface and the spreadsheet closes all our positions at the off. Just one of many ways you can use the built in spreadsheet integration. I recently covered in this post how to create your own charts or indicators using the ready made spreadsheet we supply with Bet Angel, you may want to look at that as well.
Getting burnt
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on April 19th, 2010
This title could be a reflection on the weather in the UK at the moment, which is fantastic. Lots of us took advantage in the last couple of weeks to head out with the children during the Easter holidays. As a result, quite a few have a bit of burnt skin thanks to the less than common, warm and persistent sunshine. It’s not unheard of though, as I remember running the London marathon in 1996 when the temperature was 20c, what a slog that was!
The main reason for the title is to reflect on how people got caught out by the abnormal number of big spikes in prices last week on the horse racing markets. There was a long discussion on the forum about the spikes, which were causing a lot of people to get burnt. These sorts of things are difficult to predict and can be damaging to a position, but once it was obvious that they were happening very frequently, I decided to change style slightly and put orders in the market to try and take advantage of any unusual spikes. It didn’t work all the time, but it was obvious that I needed to do something to counter the activity. Once I had adapted, I actually ended up having my best week of the year so far. It wasn’t just purely down to this adaptation though, there were a lot more races last week and that obviously helped significantly.
Unfortunately you don’t get the transparency on Betfair that you get in financial markets, so it’s difficult to speculate on what caused the spikes. It will be interesting to see if the activity returns this week or whether it was just somebody experimenting or something else completely different, who knows.
- Spikes can hurt if you step on one
Day of the drifter
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on March 2nd, 2010
Sounds like a documentary of some sort, but this was the predominant feature in Monday’s horse racing markets.
In our etenral quest for knowledge, we run strategies in the back ground all the time. These can be to test new ideas or simply to explore certain aspects in the market. One of the strategies we often run is to test how ‘swingy’ the markets are. It’s simple, every minute from four minutes out we pop an order in the market to back at the current price and then green / red up at post time. This tells us how much markets are moving around during this period and how stable they are and the general direction they travel. On it’s own it doesn’t say much but over time, using this and other strategies, we have accumulated a vast amount of knowledge on how the markets act and, more importantly, why.
Monday was an unusual day, which generated this post. On Monday the markets just wanted to drift, drift, drift. The favourites were loveless. As long as your opening position was a lay you would almost certainly have made money . It was especially unusual in that, of the 19 races we covered, only three showed a profit. Two of those profits were less than £1 and one was a reasonable profit, two broke even and the rest were clear losers.
If you were actively trading these races you would have probably picked up this trend early on and cut losses. But our objective was simply to measure activity. I did OK myself, quite good for a Monday, but having been on the right side of most of these drifts I got too aggressive eventually and dropped somewhere around £200 from my potential profit on the day just because I over traded, grrr.
What does this day mean for the next trading session? Nothing unfortunately, the clock gets reset to zero. So don’t start laying everything after reading this post, please. The next session could be as equally unusual in the other direction.
Murray suffers shock defeat
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on February 25th, 2010
1.12 turned over, in a shock defeat.
However, short odds turned over in these sorts of matches are not uncommon. If you limit a match to three sets then the propensity for an upsets shoots up. One break of serve, if you are serving first, wins you the set. A couple of errors in the next set and the match is over. If the prospect of a shock was high, then it was in space yesterday when Tipsy took Murray to a tie break in the first set. After wining that, the maths and Tennis gods were always working against Murray.
The percentage difference of one server winning a point against another is typically quite small. So, thanks to the unique scoring system that tennis has, tiny errors can result in large end results. But this is especially so when there are fewer sets to be played.
Some interesting charts
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on November 5th, 2009
In these very dull UK markets excitement is hard to come by, but here are some interesting charts for you.
First a weird one from Fairyhouse yesterday. It’s fairly obvious that the Irish racing is quite likely to be more volatile than the UK racing, this race in particular was always going to see the odds move around a fair bit. But I didn’t expect to see what happened here.
This next chart was certainly more readable. Tons of money appeared when Northern Bolt hit it’s low price and forced the price to drift. When the drift hit it’s high price, nobody wanted to lay anymore and it came right back in again. Where Fairyhouse was a rollercoaster ride, Catterick was a gentle punt down the river, stopping off for a pint along the way. Two interesting graphs anyhow.
Big backer back
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on October 28th, 2009
I’m sure you have seen this from time to time, but it appears a big backer is back in the market. Southwell was subject to some unusual moves yesterday but it was at Catterick that the unusual activity stuck out like a sore thumb. Despite studying the moves yesterday, I couldn’t really see a pattern. You can see in the chart below the two big volumes spikes that occurred when the price was smashed in.
Whether you trade the favourite or not this can be very frustrating as the entire book will react to such sharp moves. It’s very difficult to predict, so I just accept that it happens. Sometimes I will be on the wrong side and sometimes on the right side. But it tends to even out in time.
So close….
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on October 13th, 2009
Almost a blockbuster start on Saturday when Lady Jinks, priced at 1000, almost won the first race at Chepstow.
If I make something on a race, I’ll often put a little on the outsiders, generally in the jumps season, in the hope of catching a big one. In this race Lady Jinks put in a great show and surprised everybody by shortening to as little as 5′s before fluffing the last fence. It was agonising to watch as she just fell short of overhauling 11/8 favourite Tito Bustillo, it was a very close call. The bookies had her priced up at 200/1.
If you want to have a pop at catching a big outsider do the following. Set up Bet Angel to back a horse at 1000 with offsetting set at 140, use ‘with greening’ and if you are doing this before the race, turn the bet into a Keep bet. Make sure you check your stake, you don’t want to dump a load of money on this horse, it’s better if you use the minimum stake of £2. With that set up, you could turn that £2 stake into £200 if it shortens to 10′s in running. Of course, your skill now switches to trying to find at least 1 in 100 races where this could happen. If you can, you will be profitable in the long term.
Ten pound trader – Day two
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on October 4th, 2009
Using maximum stakes of £11.76, ten pound trader managed to make £3.73 yesterday. That’s represents a 31.72% return on stake size on the day. Sounds impressive! Well it is, but it isn’t, but I hope my point will come across over the course of this post.
If I asked if you could return the same percentage on the day, you would probably be hesitant. But if I asked you if you could make 11p a race you would probably have a go. The fact is that in this case, both are one and the same thing. The reason for the higher return today is that I simply did more races. Such is the wonder of instant settlement and short term events on betting exchanges that its possible to recycle the money through the market very quickly, which produces these sorts of results.
Early on Saturday morning I was doing a dry run for the Melbourne cup, so ten pound trader joined me for the Aussie racing and the UK racing. In total I did 36 races on the day averaging just over 10p a race. If you look at the prior day I did 17 races, averaging a similar amount per race. So you could argue I did worse today as I had a larger stake size to work with.
With yesterdays result added in, the maximum stake for today will be £15.49. This is now more than 50% higher than we started with. Despite only making an average of just over 10p per race we are already moving up the stakes nicely. I will be active today as we have the Prix De L’arc. I’ll see if I can get get ten pound traders bank up a little but he will probably have a rest on Monday and Tuesday.
Ten pound trader – Day one
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on October 2nd, 2009
After a great September I had considered posting up the P&L for last month and also the last three months in total as they are absolute stonkers. But as I went to prepare the image for upload I paused for thought.
I guess they show what is possible, but having been around for so long you would suspect that I should be able to pull in something special, especially with bigger amounts of capital to hand. So I had another idea, what would happen if I took my bank right back to something that somebody starting out would have? I think this may be more interesting to a lot of blog followers?
So, today I funded a new account with £100 and started trading at £10 stake sizes. Of course, I can’t forgo my normal trading so Mr Ten Pound trader is going to have to run alongside my existing activity. It’s going to be quite a task to manage both so I am expecting the odd mess up and bad day but then, if I was starting out from new, that would probably be a similar story.
I know I am very experienced and don’t want to set false expectations, but I do believe that with the right approach it’s perfectly possible to squeeze something out of the market. I also believe that it’s definitely easier to use smaller stakes than big ones. With big stakes you have to gamble on getting filled, that’s not a problem using tiny stakes.
Each day, in line with sensible money management strategies, I will increment or decrement my stake by the prior days profit (or loss!). I’ll take Mr Ten Pound trader up to a notional value and then stop. I could go on forever but I just want to show that even from small amounts your bank can grow quite quickly. When finished I’m going to donate the profits to the injured jockey’s fund.
It could be a miserable failure and prove impossible to trade two accounts at once, but here goes anyway!
Are cats good at trading?
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on September 27th, 2009
I did a post on rats trading, so I had to share this users post on the forum with you: -
“Don’t know if this has happened to anyone else, but was trading a 3rd favourite today, odds of 8 – 8.2. I just couldn’t get it right. Ended up losing £11 on the race before the 5 minute to go warning. At this I decided to have a break and went to the shop to get some fags. On coming back home I saw one of my new kittens draped over my pc mouse, sunning itself. I picked it up and put it on the chair so i could settle down for some more trading. I maximised my betfair account screen to see my P&L for the day after my £11 loss. To say I was shocked was an understatement!
I trade to a £1000 bank, and was trading to £100 on the 8 – 8.2 shot. My balance had increased by £728!! With my heart beating fast, I checked the account statement page and saw a back bet of £100 @ 8.6. Then it fell into place, my kitten must have Either trod on the mouse or lay on it and clicked the button, As I had left the cursor over the ladder. Tonight, that kittens had fresh salmon!”
Iffy the comeback
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on September 23rd, 2009
I think I may have to buy this horse, I follow it’s fortunes so often. It ran, yes that’s right, it ran, this evening at Kempton. It has such a dodgy record for running I had my finger poised but it actually managed to race tonight. Maybe it’s something to do with longer races that it doesn’t like? Anyhow, for the record, here is its record: -
Return on turnover
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on September 22nd, 2009
While I’m in the mood let’s talk about return on turnover as well. I’ve tracked my return on turnover for some time as I feel this is the key to sustaining longevity in the market. It also tells you a lot about trading.
Adam Heathcote recently put up a spreadsheet sent by Betfair detailing how much he had turned over and earned this year. On this sheet is shows that Adam’s return on turnover was 0.17%. If you wind the clock back to an era where software didn’t exist and traders used screen refreshers, we have detailed public records of another trader that allows us to calculate their RoT, in fact they did it for us. It was 0.23%, 0.19% & 0.13%. You can see their edge was eroding year by year to the point where they stopped trading.
There is so little data out there for us to compare against, its interesting to see data exposed in this way. I’ve measured my rate for some time knowing that it is the key to maintaining my edge. If I see the rate declining I need to step in and take corrective action or learn new tricks! As it is, my rate is probably very high in comparison to the others I have seen using a similar style, so it looks like things are OK, for the moment. Basically, if you are trading, your return on turnover is going to be measured in 10ths of a % and this tallys with my experiance.
We can use the stats detailed to throw up another metric though. Let us use the poorest rate out there which was our trader of 5-6 years ago. They managed a 0.13% return, let us assume we could match this, in fact given Adam’s 0.17% return, lets set the bar much lower at 0.10% on average. To get £1, on average, from a race would therefore require an average turnover of £1000 per race!
If you are trading with £10′s it suddenly looks a bit daunting to squeeze £1 out of a race, but in fact, it’s not as daunting as it looks. This is because Betfair offer instant settlement. You don’t need to put £1000 in one go you can put ten lots of £100 instead, or 20 lots of £50. Not so daunting after all is it?
Simple scalping
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on September 5th, 2009
We uploaded this video recently and it has proved pretty popular so I thought I would put this on the blog. It’s just a simple guide to the thought process that goes into a simple scalp. On this video we get £40 gross with a couple of quick scalps on something priced at 6′s. Double click the video to enlarge. Enjoy…
Barcelona vs Shaktar
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on August 28th, 2009
My models suggest a price of around 5.50 for the draw. Currently it is trading at 5.2 to back so this suggests, for once, there is value in laying the draw here. Even if I use a pessimistic view I wouldn’t shorten the price to less than 5.35. That said there isn’t a great deal to play for in this match.
Most of these assumptions revolve around the price of Barca. I would price them around 1.36 versus the 1.42 on offer, they look slightly too long at this price, Shaktar are too short at around 9′s. This market feels pretty loose to me at the moment.
Quiet end to Ebor
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on August 21st, 2009
The Ebor meeting closed with a quiet day, no fireworks or anything particularly special, but it’s been a good meeting.
I made a couple of cock ups today. Went too aggressive on one market and couldn’t turn it around when it went against me, but I did manage to restrict the loss to only -£50. Then I completely messed up the last and lost £120, not the ideal way to end, but the other races were OK. I managed to get a fair bit out of Chester today for some reason so I am hoping that continues into tomorrow. On the same day last year I didn’t do well so I am hoping to put that to rest tomorrow.
Subject to how tomorrow goes I could grab by fourth best ever week and depending on how next week goes I could be on target to set my highest ever strike rate for one month. About eight weeks ago I decided to do some analysis as I noticed my strike rate was gently slipping during the year. I narrowed this down to its cause and put in corrective action.
Just goes to show that no matter how experienced you are, there is always room to improve. It also shows you the importance of keeping good records. If I didn’t have such good records I may not have seen the gentle slope down or been able to identify the cause and put in corrective action.
There is a really useful spreadsheet on the forum for keeping track of your results. It’s worth investing some time to use it start keeping track of your results. It will quickly highlight your strengths and weaknesses.
Outrageous risk – Part Two
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on May 15th, 2009
To recap. Last Thursday we backed the favourite at a fixed time of the day and let our losses run without re-dress. Basically it was dumb, reckless swing trading with complete abandon. By doing this we were opening ourselves to potential losses that could be massive. Only at post time did we bother to close our position. Other than that, we let risk run to its fullest extent.
My question to you, is did we: -
(a) Make a bunch of money
(b) Lose a bunch of money
(c) Neither
Well (a) seems unrealistic unless we were very lucky. You would have been incorrect if you opted for option (a). If you opted for option (b) you would have also been wrong, we didn’t lose a bunch of money. In fact it was (c) that was correct, we neither made nor lost a bunch of money. In fact we were only just short of break even on the day. This illustrates at least a couple of points.
The first is that just as volatility can work against you it can work for you as well. It’s a glass half full / half empty moment. While it may start moving away from you, it can also work spectacularly in your favour. It is no coincidence that most of my biggest ever wins have been on great swing trading races. Again, I don’t recommend this blind strategy as it can be dramatically improved upon. But you can’t escape that, as I showed in an earlier post, some of these swings can be significant. Therefore it’s unrealistic to assume that because there is a lot of movement it will only be in the wrong direction!
In part three we will have a closer look at that P&L and compare it to another and make a couple of suggestions.
When it’s scary to scalp!
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on May 1st, 2009
When I started this blog my first ever post was about three club monte, you can see the original blog entry here. Since I started trading, nearly nine years ago, my view has always been that there is a strategy for every market. Recognise the right one and it’s a breeze, well much easier anyhow. Use the wrong one and it will make your life very hard indeed.
If you looked at yesterdays races before they started you could see pretty quickly that it wasn’t exactly a scalping paradise. As the day wore on anybody trying for a one tick upside risked some pretty hefty downside movement. Looking at my stats, it was third most volatile day this year. At the end of the day, of the 35 markets I traded yesterday, a large chunk of them were the antithesis of scalping; very volatile with big movements. If you just scalped you would have had a tough day, by contrast swing traders had a field day yesterday.
The first race of the day was a classic example. The price moved from 10′s to 4′s and if you didn’t catch that, then one of the clearest cut swing trading patterns occurred when the horses were at the post. It sent the price right back out again. It would have been a clear signal for even a die hard scalper to change styles.
Today’s forecast is some more of the same. More races today are ideal for scalping so it’s a bit better balanced but quite a few will exhibit characteristics that are not at all suitable. Scalp those and you could get into trouble pretty quickly. Of course everybody sits in their own comfort zone but trying to scalp a volatile market is actually a common mistake that inexperienced traders make and is best avoided.
More reason to make sure you are equipped with tools that will allow you to take advantage of what promises to be another volatile day.
Solid start despite cock up!
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on March 10th, 2009
Got off to a solid start on the Cheltenham festival despite a bit of a cock up. Was busy trading the big race of the day when I figured out a lot of my orders were not going in the market. It took me ages to realise that the account I was using didn’t have the correct exposure limit! Doh!
It was too late to get the issue fully sorted at that moment in time so I just needed to do the best I could and sort out the issue after the race. It was frustrating as it was going well and I no doubt lost a lot of ground through my inability to put new orders through. Such is life. Ended up on a decent total for the day which gives me confidence for the week. But it could have been so much better! I’d obviously had the same issue up to that point but never realised.
You tube channel
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on February 23rd, 2009
For some time now Bet Angel users have been uploading trading videos to You Tube. One of the earlier videos has now had nearly 17,000 views.
Late last year we thought it would be a good idea to group them together into one area for you, so we set up a channel at http://www.youtube.com/betangeltv. We have also been uploading videos of our own for your referance.You tube can be a bit of a challenge as the video image is so small so we have replicated the videos on our site at higher resolution.
If you have any videos you would like us to add to the channel just drop support a note and we will add you in. In the meantime you can visit the channel at the link mentioned in this post.
Magnificent Murray
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on September 12th, 2008
Two years after beating Federer at the Cinny Masters Andy Murray finally managed to get the same masters title under his belt and move up to an all time six in the world rankings. The final showed that there is plenty of room for improvement. Djokovic never managed to put any real pressure on Murray’s serve but Murray still had to battle out a 7-6 7-6 victory. The game should have been long over before the final tie break was played out.
Over the last couple of years I’ve worked hard to improve my understanding of Tennis and how it is priced and late on in the second set there was some clear opportunities to back Murray at good odds. Due to the scoreline the odds were accurate but it was clear from a dominance and psychological perspective Murray was in the ascendancy. Right near the end of the match, thanks to the two set format, you could have backed Murray at 1.37 when he was only a matter of points away from the title. However, Murray’s inability to convert his advantage would have had you sweating now and again. Still, a pleasing chunk of opportunities occurred in the game.
Such is Murray’s inconsistency though, that he has subsequently crashed out in Beijing at the first attempt to somebody ranked 71 places below him. Still a work in progress.
There was a little girl
Posted by Peter Webb in Bet Angel on September 3rd, 2010
You may have heard this poem before: -
There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.
The market can feel like that at times and it can be the very thing that throws you off balance. But you have to believe that just as the market can be horrid she can be very good too! Look at Monday’s racing card and you see it was a bit of a mess. Poor quality racing, mainly at lower grade courses. It was always going to be tough, and so that proved. There is always tomorrow to have a good day and Tuesday actually wasn’t too bad.
Comparing day to last week Monday, last month or last year is always going to be subjective. So don’t imagine you can get a repeat performance simply because of your prior results. No matter how clever you are sometimes the market just isn’t strong enough to work the way you want. At this point sit back and wait for clear cut opportunities, some days the market just wants to be horrid!