Auto trade during the day

[ODPaul82]

The BA commands within excel correspond to the same features within the BA application itself.

OFFSET : X - How many ticks you want to place your offset bet against

FILL_KILL : TRUE/FALSE - Fill or kill the bet

KILL DELAY : x Number of seconds before you place your fill or kill bet

BATCHES : x - How many batches to split your offset bets to

STOP : x - Price to put your stop loss at.

STOP_PLACE : x - Not 100% sure as never used it, could potentially be the equivalent to stop on opening bet?

TRAILING_STOP : TRUE/FALSE - Is this going to be a trailing stop loss or not

WITH_GREENING : TRUE/FALSE - Is it going to have automatic greening up

CLOSE_TRADE - Close position using net stake (i.e. you back £100 at 3, lay price is now 2.5, it will lay at £100)

GREEN - Attempts to green up the market

CANCEL - Cancels the individual bet that you are on if it is unmatched.

CANCEL_ALL - Cancels all of your unmatched bets in the market

CANCEL_ALL_BACK - Cancels all of your unmatched back bets

CANCEL_ALL_LAY - Cancels all of your unmatched lay bets.

[Zenyatta]

The STOP only sets at what price the stop loss is triggered. However at this point, the price will usually have moved on and you will often miss it...because the prices move fast it will already have passed the trigger price, so the STOP PLACE is the maximum number of ticks you'd accept... the actual place of the 'get out' price (the exchange has to give you the best possible price so the price you get will be somewhere between the trigger point and the stop place).

[TheTub]

STOP : x - Price to put your stop loss at.

This is not correct.

x is the number of ticks away to place the stop. You cannot specify a price here.

STOP_PLACE:x

This is where to actually place the stop bet. In volatile markets your stop may trigger 5 ticks away but the price may move on another 10 ticks by the time your bet hits the market. So it makes sense to build in a buffer to give your stop order a greater chance of being matched. So if STOP is 5 ticks then STOP_PLACE needs to be 6 or greater depending on the market volatility.

[Zenyatta]

Note: I should point out there is still a bug with the GREEN_ALL command. This has cost me money, so I'd better point it out for other users.

Attempting to GREEN_ALL will sometimes give an 'Account exceedeed avaliable balance' error unless you have all the funds required to cover the entire cost of the corresponding LAY bets (if you BACKed and offset initially). This is a bug, because you shouldn't need to cover the entire cost of the lay bets if you already placed corresponding back bets (GREEN_ALL fails to take into account your current P&L position).

[TheTub]

I'm fairly sure that is not a bug. I think I'm right in saying that error message is generated by Betfair.

[Zenyatta]

Hi Tub,

As an example, say I have $100 in my Betfair account and I place a $100 BACK bet. My Betfair account balance is now $0.

Greening Up normally (manually with BetAngel) is no problem, provided total liability is less than total profit. However, try to use the spreadsheet to do the same thing -GREEN_ALL and then you get the balance exceeded error (it thinks I can't green up because my account balance is 0 and it thinks I can't cover the liabilities of the lay bet?).

P.S You may be right the error message is generated by Betfair. But this is an illustration of the perils of automation. If you don't have sufficient funds to cover the liabilities when trying to green-up, the spreadsheet does the exact opposite of what you want- when the 'error, balance exceeded' message comes through, instead of greening it simply cancels the other side of the bets, leaving you completly exposed.

[ODPaul82]

Cheers TheTub, I never use the stop triggers myself, hence why I got it wrong!

[Morph]

That is an interesting point.

In trying to lay multiple selections, I occasionally get a bet FAILED message of @ exposure calculation in progress, bet not placed @.

Although I have enough deposited to cover the biggest bet, I wonder if there is an exposure size issue.

Has anyone else had the above failure message?

Any theories greatly appreciated.

[LeTiss 4pm]

Do you use set stakes, or are you asking Excel to calculate stakes? If so, do you have a rounddown, or roundup command in place? This can lead to bet error/failed messages if it can't calculate stakes correctly

[Morph]

Le Tiss,

Thank You. I think you have hit the nail on the head.

I thought that simply formatting the cell would suffice but I can see that the calculation of stake is returning some very long number strings. However, I am struggling to use the ROUND function within my formulas. If I insert =ROUND(a2,2 at the start of the formula, it keeps telling me I am using a circular reference.

I have tried help searches and I know I am probably being very thick but I can't seem to be able to instruct my formulas to calculate to only 2 decimal places.

Any suggestions or help gratefully received.

Regards,

Morph