Data Collection Automation of Bookies odds v Exchange

[Ralphyboy]

Hi fellas I'm new to the forum this is my first post, but i been absorbing some of the excellent post's over the past week which have proved very helpful however this is my first venture into the automation section.

I'm currently collecting data from the bookies and the exchanges on a list of tipsters racing posts naps and a few other sources to see if theres any trends i can discover it's a simple idea no doubt and will have been tried by others i'm sure but i like to continue to explore it for the time being as it helping me with my learning and venture into trading the exchanges.

At the moment it's taking a couple of hours per day to record all the data i'm pulling the numbers in manually from odds checker for my bookies price into excel then same with betfair is there a way to to have this done with some sort of automation to cut my time down of manually searching for the odds then writing them into excel ?

P.s I originally posted this in the Automation forum but received no response so i thought i chance my luck here,

Kind Regards
Ralph.

[nigelk]

I made something along the lines of what you are looking for a while ago, it gets the generally available odds from Oddschecker, but is not Betfair specific.

Don't know if this is the sort of thing you are after?
(odds for tomorrows racing)

[Ralphyboy]

Nigel ill take a look at this now thank you very much

[nikigatrell82]

Hope you don't mind me hijacking this post. Really nice functionality Nigel that will save me a lot of time!

I've opened the file in Excel and it's pulled in all of the prices but if I click on update I get an error "The macro ''Import ABC.With Odds.xlsx'!ImportData' cannot be found." do you have the macro available?

I'm a web developer by trade but wouldn't mind trying my hand at VB but I don't think I can start from scratch!

Cheers

[nigelk]

Posted the incorrect book. This one contains the macros (not password protected), so you can have a look. There are a few sheets hidden as well, but only for cosmetic reasons.

I've run this just before posting, and you can see that a lot of races have no prices, that's only because they've been run already.

It uses the inbuilt import from web feature of excel and gets the data from the racing post and oddschecker. It'll take about a minute to complete.

[CLOWNSHOES]

When i was around 16 and heard the old chestnut of laying the favourites on betfair i spent months building up a database of beaten favourites using newspaper odds without knowing how drastically different the exchange odds were. The innocence of youth, if only it were that simple

[poklius]

If you want to efficiently scrape odds from odd checker or betfair API I'd recommend learning to code in Python. Its not very hard language to learn, there is plenty of tutorials how to use it with betfair's API and it also has web scraping modules like BeautifulSoup.

[gstar1975]

Posted the incorrect book. This one contains the macros (not password protected), so you can have a look. There are a few sheets hidden as well, but only for cosmetic reasons.

I've run this just before posting, and you can see that a lot of races have no prices, that's only because they've been run already.

It uses the inbuilt import from web feature of excel and gets the data from the racing post and oddschecker. It'll take about a minute to complete.

I tried using this but kept coming up with "Compile Error: Variable not defined"

also highlighted in the microsoft VB "For x = Lr to 2 Step -1" with x highlighted

also "remove any unknown courses" is highlighted in green

Error import.jpg

[nigelk]

The error occured because I forgot to declare X as an integer as the beginning ( Dim X as integer).

However, when I ran it just now it threw another error, maybe because the Racing Post have changed their website layout or because all races have been run for today and it can't find what it's looking for.

I'll run it tomorrow morning and let you know either way.

Cheers,Nigel.

[gstar1975]

The error occured because I forgot to declare X as an integer as the beginning ( Dim X as integer).

However, when I ran it just now it threw another error, maybe because the Racing Post have changed their website layout or because all races have been run for today and it can't find what it's looking for.

I'll run it tomorrow morning and let you know either way.

Cheers,Nigel.

Thanks Nigel! I look forward to the update.

[nigelk]

Hi gstar1975

Sorry for the late response but I've just checked and it's because the R.Post have changed the layout of their website.

[gstar1975]

Hi gstar1975

Sorry for the late response but I've just checked and it's because the R.Post have changed the layout of their website.

Would you be able to update it so that it does work with the RP website or teach me how to do it please?

[nigelk]

I've made quick videos that shows how to connect to a website and get the runner ABC & prices. Works well with the sporting life.

https://youtu.be/I73Edf2pcyc

Cheers,Nigel.

[gstar1975]

I've made quick videos that shows how to connect to a website and get the runner ABC & prices. Works well with the sporting life.

https://youtu.be/I73Edf2pcyc

Cheers,Nigel.

Hi Nigel

That video is no longer available. Have you got an updated version of that spreadsheet?