Can you trade historical races in Bet Angel?

[ruthlessimon]

Like the new BA version, everyones going to gain (apparently) so I hope that's at the expense of the bookies and punters and not each other.

That's a really good point I hadn't thought of that. In theory, it's actually mathematically impossible for everyone to gain.

But this is the thing. As edges become common knowledge, surely the person who had the edge originally is the first to realize it's fading away - & the first to go & adjust it. Similarly to a trend in a market. By the time the punters etc. are aware of the edge (trend goes exponential), the smart money/traders have already moved on to new ideas & avenues.

Could this graph accurately describe the lifecycle of an edge?

[Bluesky]

Sorry to bring this back, but I still can't get my head around this - & I'm as open-minded as they come !

7 figure traders in the city, live & die, by being able to replay their strategies & models to hone their execution skills. I can't believe why BF trading should be so different.

I agree 100%, I was actually shocked when I started looking at sports trading that this facility wasn't already available. Talking to several other sports traders a lot of them would welcome this option and many of them would be prepared to pay a premium (not a large fee) but something most people would consider reasonable to have this facility built in to BA.

If I ran a sports trading software company I think this option would be a 'game changer' and I would see if it could be introduced at a reasonable cost to my customers. I would also imagine that my competition would be extremely worried if I was to provide this option. I suspect they would very quickly have to do the same or go out of business.

[LinusP]

You can buy historical data from betfair so it would only involve BA implementing the logic to read/parse this data (it’s in streaming format so the logic is already there), don’t see how that is against betfair’s terms and conditions?

I and many others who program their own applications already do this and I assumed its why betfair offered historical data in the first place. At the moment its limited to those who can program, featuring it on BA would increase the revenue 100x, for many financial exchanges selling data is one of their main money makers.

http://app.ft.com/content/785092ec-33d8 ... ee5ffe5b5b

[spreadbetting]

Sorry to bring this back, but I still can't get my head around this - & I'm as open-minded as they come !

7 figure traders in the city, live & die, by being able to replay their strategies & models to hone their execution skills. I can't believe why BF trading should be so different.

I agree 100%, I was actually shocked when I started looking at sports trading that this facility wasn't already available. Talking to several other sports traders a lot of them would welcome this option and many of them would be prepared to pay a premium (not a large fee) but something most people would consider reasonable to have this facility built in to BA.

If I ran a sports trading software company I think this option would be a 'game changer' and I would see if it could be introduced at a reasonable cost to my customers. I would also imagine that my competition would be extremely worried if I was to provide this option. I suspect they would very quickly have to do the same or go out of business.

Betfair currently offer the pro data at a fee of £200 per month for the Horseracing,£200 for soccer etc. Surely if there was such a demand for what you're all asking some developer would have released something by now to cash in on that demand.

For BA to amend the app to import that data and act as some kind of 'practice' mode would them mean an additional cost added to the app to cover any development costs etc.


I remember the big clamour when PC was introduced and everyone saying they'd switch to Betdaq if only the software was available. I doubt the demand is really there to cover the cost or hassle of dealing with Betfair to introduce it to an existing app.

[Euler]

People seem to baulk at the cost of software to trade at £12.50 a month, so seeing people willing to pay £200 a month is a bit of a stretch TBH. Betfair also wants to charge us a hefty fee to make it available via an app as well. I can see the appeal to serious users.

I use data a lot to construct ideas but almost never to backtest strategies. Ideas come out of the data which I then test in the market. There is a huge leap from idea to a practical application, so all my best strategies have come from direct participation.

I think there is a better solution for customers. But I'll keep that under my hat for the moment.

[spreadbetting]

Personally I can't see what would be gained from replaying a random market thru BA. I can see some value in data crunching large volumes of markets and do collect data daily myself but I'm not too sure there's any real value in looking at single markets in minute detail when tens of thousands have been run. It'd be like looking for a needle in a haystack hoping you'd picked a market that was representative of them as a whole to make any long-term viable deductions. If anything there may be a tendancy to spot things that don't really exist from concentrating on the relatively small samples you'd view via BA.

[ShaunWhite]

I see the point of using historical datasets to look for patterns analytically, but I too really can't see the point of replaying old markets in some sort of practice mode.

There would be issues around interpretting the data without at least pictures to back it up. There'd be no way of telling if a drift reversal was due to market resistance theory or a horse fooling around that suddenly behaves. No context created by events in earlier races like jockey/stable streaks or the last 3 shorties having landed. No way to tell if a favourite on any given day was affected by rapidly changing weather or by money movements on the 2nd & 3rd.

The key question, What activity was cause and what was effect? would be unanswerable.

If you can practice and study live data from today, watching what it was like a year ago when the bomber was popping up or it was unusually busy/quiet seems pretty futile. Yes they do it in the city on occasions but I feel that racing especially has many more variables than are present in a simple price & market news data feed. News of a rights issue or stock split in the city has a predictable mechanical effect, the consequences of Willy Mullins looking downbeat in an interview might not be so easy to identify.

[Bluesky]

Some really great points there Shaun. I had thought of some of these and my plan to mitigate several of them is as follows (I don't know how realistic any of this is perhaps your and others could comment).

I have SkyQ (can record several tv channels at once and store up to 1000 hours of recordings). So I was thinking about recording ATR and Racing UK. Not sure how easy it would be to sync the video recordings with the data from BF it could be a massive faff, but on the other had it might be fairly straight forward.

Regarding cost, I don't think many people would be interested if it was an extra £200 per month on top of our current BA charge, I certainly wouldn't be anyway, as it is far to high compared with what we currently pay.

In particular if as several people in this thread think, it might not make much difference then paying that kind of money is not going to attract many customers.

I was thinking more like a top of the range version with maybe a 50% increase on what we currently pay for BA. If you don't want that version they you stick with what you have now, if you would like the new version then you pay around an extra 5 or 6 quid a month.

[Euler]

Betfair wants to levy a £200 a month fee for data, so we have no flexibility on price. That would be your cost, you wouldn't be able to buy data through us and we wouldn't be allowed to sell it. We could only supply the platform for it and you would pay that to Betfair. We would also have to pay a fee to Betfair to allow you to use the data. Betfair considers the prices we put up as their intellectual property and want to license it is a revenue source.

[Bluesky]

Betfair wants to levy a £200 a month fee for data, so we have no flexibility on price.

Oh well if there is no way around that then, that's knocked the idea right on the head, hardly anyone would be prepared to pay that kind of money. Its a crying shame BF don't face any serious competition, being a virtual monopoly they can more or less charge what ever they like. Perhaps the over all sports exchange market isn't big enough to ever allow a rival to be able match BF and introduce some serious competition into the market place.