How "safe" is in-play trading?

[Selmer]

Hi everybody,

I have an in-play strategy that involves active management of a position in-play. However, I`ve experienced a number of cases when Betfair suspends markets for 10-15 minutes for whatever reason which is fine. My biggest fear is that there will be a match which they suspend during the first half and then never unsuspend until the end. If i want to scale my strategy, I would end up with huge liability of a few thousand, not being able to cash out and from there it`s only about luck.

What are the chances of this? Has anyone seen this before? And what to do in this case?

[spreadbetting]

Chances are it will happen, just remember Betfair isn't the only exchange and plenty of other bookmakers too , so you usually have other options unless everyone's feeds go down.

Alot depends on the matches you bet on as some 3rd division Turkish game is more likely to lose feed than a prem game. Open a few accounts with bookies , betdaq etc so you're better prepared.

[Selmer]

spreadbetting, thanks for your reply.

Bookies usually offer terrible odds, so I should probably look at other exchanges.

[jamesedwards]

Even worse is the small but seemingly growing number of cases where Betfair are voiding bets long after the event closes due to issues around late suspensions.

I've seen a couple of stories on this very site, where people have closed up an event with nice green all-round only to find some of their bets were later voided leaving them blissfully unaware of big fat red liabilities. Football is particularly prone to this now due to VAR.

I even had a horse race the other week that went into play correctly at the off, but just because Betfair forgot to suspend the market at the end of the race ALL in-play bets were voided. Not just the ones placed after the end of the race, ALL in-play bets! Now of course I have to carry this tiny piece of doubt in my mind for every single race whether my final position will be closed off or voided if Betfair forget to suspend the race on time. This can't be right!

[ShaunWhite]

I've seen a couple of stories on this very site, where people have closed up an event with nice green all-round only to find some of their bets were later voided leaving them blissfully unaware of big fat red liabilities.

There'll be just as much money in greens, that's how it works. People tend to post more about misfortune than good fortune from what I can see.

[jamesedwards]

I've seen a couple of stories on this very site, where people have closed up an event with nice green all-round only to find some of their bets were later voided leaving them blissfully unaware of big fat red liabilities.

There'll be just as much money in greens, that's how it works. People tend to post more about misfortune than good fortune from what I can see.

Of course for every red there is (nearly) a green. The problem is not knowing and the risk you are sailing blind.

[Kai]

Dallas wrote a couple of good articles for this exact purpose here and here.

What are the chances of this? Has anyone seen this before? And what to do in this case?

Unfortunately you have to take outages and various Betfair fuckups into account, judging by their level of service post-Covid things aren't getting better either but increasingly worse across the board.

My outage losses overall went up to 4 figures in total which is probably relatively low compared to many others on here, couple times I got lucky (by avoiding a massive loss) and couple times I closed elsewhere. Not sure I've ever won anything big from outages.

Overall losing stakes shouldn't really be a big problem (imho) but losing large liabilities that you weren't planning on risking obviously can be, so bear that in mind. That's why I've stopped using strategies that can potentially wipe out my bank, and any new strategy/edge that I build basically has to take outages and other types of issues into account to render them harmless.

If you've got some niche inplay strategy with massive liabilities every match like laying high CS or something along those lines that produces modest returns compared to your liabilities, I'd be very careful to say the least, especially when getting involved in less popular matches.

[ShaunWhite]

Kai, the consolation probably ought to be that if you consistently lost because of it, you could engineer the conditions where you consistently profited from it. But as I don't think you can consistently profit from it, then logically you can't consistently lose because of it either. I think the logic holds up so the maths should.

These things come down to money management, ie how many doomsday scenarios can you take before your working capital erodes too much. If you need a bank of $1000 to make a living then I'd say you need a 10k fighting fund to allow survive the freakier ups and downs without them being catastrophic.

The problem of course with the 'must break even' logic is that it depends on a pretty big sample, but seeing as deviation from expected outcomes (Eg the number of expected consecutive losses at 2.0 even if the actual odds should be 1.9 and therefore long term profitable) is part of the job then the risk of losses/depth of bank shouldn't be too hard work out. Same with outages, if your normal approach is to open with a short priced back vs someone preferring opening a long priced back, you'll have different levels of varience if/when you can't get the closing bet in. Both will be a long term break even due to efficiency but the uncovered long price backs will take longer to show that equilibrium. Basically when a system is prone to failure, the risk can be mitigated by using a strategy that's designed to be more resilient, or at least more likely to not lose so often.

[ShaunWhite]

Judging by their level of service post-Covid things aren't getting better either but increasingly worse across the board.

Is this anecdotal or a fact? Complaining about Betfair goes through phases of being à la mode so distinguishing fact from reality isn't always as easy as it seems.

[Wildly]

Long-term break even from outages won't be the case if the outages are not betfair wide. If someone still has access your open bets will on losers will be picked off.

[Kai]

Judging by their level of service post-Covid things aren't getting better either but increasingly worse across the board.

Is this anecdotal or a fact? Complaining about Betfair goes through phases of being à la mode so distinguishing fact from reality isn't always as easy as it seems.

Don't be trolling Shawn, some of the derps and cockups during the last couple of weeks are still fresh in my mind so you tell me

Like wrongly settling the Juve match and deleting already settled bets from my P&L plus taking chunks out of my bank to re-settle it afterwards. Then like 2 days later exact same thing happened on Brentford playoffs, never seen that before in my 5 years of trading. Another Italian match went inplay 2 hours before kickoff (it was the only football match that evening for Pete's sake!), the market didn't know wtf to do and the seed money was gone, not seen that one either. Most recent fuckup is probably on golf and the standard racing screwups are hardly worth mentioning anymore.

And of course there's the curious case of the missing P&L page, some people literally cannot see their P&L

Honestly, I am pretty sure everyone at Betfair is currently on holiday and that interns are running day-to-day operations.

[ShaunWhite]

Honestly, I am pretty sure everyone at Betfair is currently on holiday and that interns are running day-to-day operations.

Quite possible. Unprecedented economic times to say the least, there isn't as much being spent on entertainment like betting esp when there's so many more entertaining things to spend spare money on now anyway. If they weren't cutting costs in order to try and survive then I'd be very surprised. It's a business decision at the end of the day and whether it's been right or wrong will be proven if we still have a Betfair in 3yrs time or if PP decide it's too much agro and give up on it.

Never being afraid to be Devil's Advocate Kai, that's why diversification is important, if footy starts to look too risky then perhaps look towards things that aren't as susceptible to operational issues. First port of call would probably be sports that don't have in-game suspensions, or ones with so many events a few going awol isn't so bad. We're not going to change Betfair so we have a choice of being stubborn and keep doing the same thing or change what we do to suit the conditions. It's crap, but businesses who fail are the ones who aren't prepared to change when the world does, perhaps this is just the demise of, or temporary break in, a particular approach.

Specialists will suffer but take a look at how Peter has been doing so well for 2 decades, horses, dogs, football, tennis, golf, everything you can think of. Eggs in lots of different baskets and really cleverly insulated from big issues in any one of them. The loss of all UK racing was case in point, nobody ever thought that could happen and for some it meant having no income for 2 months, for others they could get by because they also had other things they did to keep a few quid coming in.

[spreadbetting]

Not sure you're so much a Devil's Advocate , Shaun, more of a contrarian and Betfair apologist. I was told football liquidity actually rose 20% due to the fact the matches were televised and spread out.

[Kai]

If they weren't cutting costs in order to try and survive then I'd be very surprised.

Only joking about the interns but didn't mind ranting a bit if you were asking for it So that OP can see how unreliable Betfair can be at times if he hasn't already, he did say his exposures would get very high so his approach might be more vulnerable than most other approaches.

But nah, you maybe misunderstood the risk part I guess, luckily most trading styles (at least ones I'm interested in) on football and racing are by default practically immune to outages and various disruptions of service, in some cases it may even be beneficial for the overall P&L, so I'm not saying that football is becoming untradeable or that it's just "TOO DAMN RISKY" but I'm pretty sure I speak on behalf many of us when I say that it's been beyond annoying seeing Betfair consistently mess up even the simplest of things like turning a market inplay at the right flippin' time, idk whether they're trying to automate certain operations to cut costs or it's just gross incompetence at work again but end result is still the same.

I mean, you see people ranting all over and a good chunk of it is probably justified atm, risk-wise I personally don't need a bigger bank for racing cuz it's a different market and you're going for massive swings of price anyway but for football I use/need a 6k bank and up to 95% of it is often tied up in liabilities across a few matches, so I'm not exposing most of it on one market like I used to do years ago by lumping whole banks on like an Arsenal swing preoff or something, but I can't imagine what would happen if/when they eventually mess up and wrongly settle a market where my turnover was much higher than my actual bank. Wtf would even happen when I'm sometimes active on a market with like 20k turnover either side compared to just 6k bank, they may need to borrow the whole bank to help settle stuff and cover liabilities for every individual bet I made and could put my account in a temporary minus or something stupid like that, if that's how a few people randomly ended up with a big fat temporary minus on their account then that's a beyond ridiculous system to use.

OP has to fully cover his bases and make sure he isn't overexposing in general compared to his profits etc, my own risk management on football was obviously crap years ago but it's a lot more sensible now and I'm okay with my exposure ratios versus profit or reward ratios, my football P&L for last month close to equaled my working 6k bank so I am okay with all the ratios, and if I'm extremely unlucky I may lose a chunk here or there due to a Betfair cockup, like I already did, so I'm okay with that being part of it although I'm probably due a win somewhere, but I do still keep a Betdaq account in reserve. Btw OP can also use the Betfair Sportsbook to close a trade if it's still up during an outage, it's not ideal but I used it once for cover.

And yeah, I'm aware of your automation perspective and that you probably don't care one bit about outages and disruptions of service because your stuff smoothly evens out, which is a good thing to have, but if OP wrecks his whole bank on one market and thus abandons his strategy there's no such thing as evening out long-term!

[wearthefoxhat]

Judging by their level of service post-Covid things aren't getting better either but increasingly worse across the board.

Is this anecdotal or a fact? Complaining about Betfair goes through phases of being à la mode so distinguishing fact from reality isn't always as easy as it seems.

Like wrongly settling the Juve match and deleting already settled bets from my P&L plus taking chunks out of my bank to re-settle it afterwards. Then like 2 days later exact same thing happened on Brentford playoffs, never seen that before in my 5 years of trading. Another Italian match went inplay 2 hours before kickoff (it was the only football match that evening for Pete's sake!), the market didn't know wtf to do and the seed money was gone, not seen that one either. Most recent fuckup is probably on golf and the standard racing screwups are hardly worth mentioning anymore.


Honestly, I am pretty sure everyone at Betfair is currently on holiday and that interns are running day-to-day operations.

The Brentford play-offs settlement was a weird one.

I had Pre-off and HT trades go through the same process. (not exactly subject to the In-Play shenanigans). It seems the existing software is struggling to cope, even after all the upgrades they went through a few months back.