Increasing Stakes Question

[cmuddle]

Hello everyone, need help with this.

I have created an automation file to back the favourite in running with certain conditions and was running it with £2 stakes for over a week.
It produced good results, made over £80 in that one week.
From the beginning the strategy proved to be profitable with good strike rate and minimum losses.
That gave me hope.

So I thought that looks rather good and increased stakes to £20 and suddenly everything changed!

Certain rules started to trigger that usually weren't triggering before and quickly race after race it was going into deeper minus.

I would appreciate your comments if you had experience with this.

[Dallas]

Sounds a little too early to have increase stakes by such a big amount from £2 to £20 is a big jump and a week is not much in the grand scheme of things
Try taking it slower maybe, £4 then if things are OK in another few weeks then increase to £6 or £8

Also, there will be a limit how much any strategy can support so if you hit a losing few weeks with a stake drop it back down, that will help you find the max stake you can use and all the time will get more races under your belt to find out if it's going to be a profitable long-term strategy

[cmuddle]

Sounds a little too early to have increase stakes by such a big amount from £2 to £20 is a big jump and a week is not much in the grand scheme of things
Try taking it slower maybe, £4 then if things are OK in another few weeks then increase to £6 or £8

Also, there will be a limit how much any strategy can support so if you hit a losing few weeks with a stake drop it back down, that will help you find the max stake you can use and all the time will get more races under your belt to find out if it's going to be a profitable long-term strategy

Thanks Dallas
How is it with practice mode? Will that be reliable to test a strategy with the stakes that one wants to use?

[Dallas]

Sounds a little too early to have increase stakes by such a big amount from £2 to £20 is a big jump and a week is not much in the grand scheme of things
Try taking it slower maybe, £4 then if things are OK in another few weeks then increase to £6 or £8

Also, there will be a limit how much any strategy can support so if you hit a losing few weeks with a stake drop it back down, that will help you find the max stake you can use and all the time will get more races under your belt to find out if it's going to be a profitable long-term strategy

Thanks Dallas
How is it with practice mode? Will that be reliable to test a strategy with the stakes that one wants to use?

No, practice mode should not be used to test strategies especially in-running ones you will get completely different results when In live mode

[cmuddle]

Sounds a little too early to have increase stakes by such a big amount from £2 to £20 is a big jump and a week is not much in the grand scheme of things
Try taking it slower maybe, £4 then if things are OK in another few weeks then increase to £6 or £8

Also, there will be a limit how much any strategy can support so if you hit a losing few weeks with a stake drop it back down, that will help you find the max stake you can use and all the time will get more races under your belt to find out if it's going to be a profitable long-term strategy

Thanks Dallas
How is it with practice mode? Will that be reliable to test a strategy with the stakes that one wants to use?

No, practice mode should not be used to test strategies especially in-running ones you will get completely different results when In live mode

I understand that one shouldn't use much bigger stakes but £20 is not very big for a good liquid market.

Don't understand why suddenly it produces different results.
Is it because of BF matching algorithms?

[Dallas]

Don't understand why suddenly it produces different results.
Is it because of BF matching algorithms?

Are you saying you tested in PM with £2 then went into live with £20 stakes?

Even if you ran in Live for £2 then jumped to £20 that can still affect a strategy as people may now start jumping in front of the £20 stopping it all being matched or making it longer to get matched

[LinusP]

There is a fine line in a strategy being profitable when it comes to stake size especially inplay racing and it’s almost always to do with market capacity. Not sure why it isn’t discussed more because improving match rate is all I do!

You will find that you get half matched or less on the winners and fully on the losers. Even a 1% match improvement can have significant changes on your pnl, especially when placing lots of orders. I recommend going back to £2 and getting a base before increasing:

- matched per runner / market
- return on investment
- % killed / matched / semi matched

It’s worth mentioning that there is nothing wrong with £2 stakes and I have plenty of strategies that make decent sums with £2.

[cmuddle]

Don't understand why suddenly it produces different results.
Is it because of BF matching algorithms?

Are you saying you tested in PM with £2 then went into live with £20 stakes?

Even if you ran in Live for £2 then jumped to £20 that can still affect a strategy as people may now start jumping in front of the £20 stopping it all being matched or making it longer to get matched

It was all in live mode. Even when I went down with the stakes to £10 it was still not working.

[cmuddle]

There is a fine line in a strategy being profitable when it comes to stake size especially inplay racing and it’s almost always to do with market capacity. Not sure why it isn’t discussed more because improving match rate is all I do!

You will find that you get half matched or less on the winners and fully on the losers. Even a 1% match improvement can have significant changes on your pnl, especially when placing lots of orders. I recommend going back to £2 and getting a base before increasing:

- matched per runner / market
- return on investment
- % killed / matched / semi matched

It’s worth mentioning that there is nothing wrong with £2 stakes and I have plenty of strategies that make decent sums with £2.

Yes I agree the match rate in a running market is important and it has to be fine tuned.

The problem that became apparent when I increased stakes was that my safety rules were triggering for no much reason.
For example the bet gets matched on the winner and is going well but then the rule that was supposed to trigger only if a second runner hits below certain odds fires although it is trading way above.

[ShaunWhite]

You might be able to learn something about what's happening by running multiple £2 versions rather than a single larger version? Do the 2x2's produce a better result than 1x4? Perhaps some of the 4s that are filled on losers but not filled on winners will end up as a 2 that's fully filled both sides and a 2 that misses the boat completely and doesn't even get matched?

It's hard to say really but you've certainly got the best in the business on the case with Dallas and Linus giving advice.

A £2 bot making £80, with those two helping... Now that's a situation I'd like to be in.

[ShaunWhite]

BTW my advice such as it is should be taken with an extremely large pinch of salt. Every bot I've tried to develop seems to turn into a machine for shredding pound notes rather than printing them.

[Black Ice]

ShaunWhite wrote: Every bot I've tried to develop seems to turn into a machine for shredding pound notes rather than printing them.

+1. I'm rapidly coming to conclusion that if you are an ordinary bloke & not a super techie that bots are a waste of time & will cost you money. Even big servers in tennis can win all their games on serve....but you will still end up with a red even after first set. They sound great...but are mostly a pipe dream!

[ShaunWhite]

ShaunWhite wrote: Every bot I've tried to develop seems to turn into a machine for shredding pound notes rather than printing them.

+1. I'm rapidly coming to conclusion that if you are an ordinary bloke & not a super techie that bots are a waste of time & will cost you money. Even big servers in tennis can win all their games on serve....but you will still end up with a red even after first set. They sound great...but are mostly a pipe dream!

Don't get me wrong black ice, bots aren't that difficult to program. Very doable for a regular Joe and they're defiantly not just a pipe dream. Lots of people have successful bots and some people do nothing else.

I didn't actually expect my bots to make money, I made them to try and understand something and it was worth spending a few quid to do it. My comment was lighthearted not a real gripe.

You just need to have a methodical approach and be prepared to put in the hours working on it. A bot just executes a strategy, it's the strategy that takes work just like any other strategy you might want to execute.

Obviously it's not going to be easy, or we'd all just have an ATMbot making tenners 24/7. But something as straightforward as 'difficulty' should never be an obstacle. If something's difficult it's no big deal, it just means it'll take a few more weeks, months or years than something that's easy. Who wants easy anyway? if we wanted easy we'd all just go and flip burgers.

Bots are great, bots make money, and if they don't then I'm afraid it's the operators fault and not the general concept of a bot. That's the brutal truth about all types of trading as it goes. The buck stops on our desks.