I do vaguely remember you posting that, LinusP. I don't think I found it that suspicious at the time. I just assumed they were hiring traders for their sports book. Betfair have been open in the past about using the exchange for hedging their sports book though, so I guess that could be qualified as "trading their own markets". I don't see why they would hire traders to trade specifically on the exchange though. They have an army of people (PC payers) doing that already who get paid profit share effectively. If you're good at trading, why would you want a job there when you'd probably get paid less based on how much you could win them. Alternatively if their salary would be more than you can earn by trading yourself independently then surely Betfair wouldn't want you as a trader because you wouldn't be good enough. Doesn't entirely make sense to me. The Premium Charge basically takes care of it for them.LinusP wrote:I can't find it now but I posted a link to a job advert a while ago from Betfair which was basically advertising the fact they trade there own markets with zero commission.
Anyway, my point was that these kind of conversations are just a bit of a distraction. It's still currently possible to make money even if Betfair are inspecting our accounts. As I think I've mentioned elsewhere, after 6 years, I'm still slowly scaling up.
I propose we get this thread back to the original topic as it's an interesting and relevant one. Here's where we left off:
lonestar wrote:I think Euler's video on testing is pretty good. (The guy is making a living off this, so we are not surprised...)
I also agree with the comment that profits of a strategy will often decline over time. So it is best to have multiple **profitable** strategies running. If a strategy loses enough times, you should have a mechanism to stop you trading it further. Remember Betfair has data scientists who can easily look into profitable accounts and reverse engineer your logic.
I saw someone mention "optimizing" strategy parameters to maximize profit. This is the wrong approach. You should really be measuring the parameter sensitivity of your profitability. If profits change a lot when a parameter value changes, you are in trouble! (i.e you will be overfitting by optimizing the parameter)...
Good luck
marksmeets302 wrote:Thanks lonestar. Is there a way to quantify this?