When Betfair has an outage, I knew immediately what I should be doing.
The first thing was to warn other people, the second thing was to moan about it and the final thing on my list of responses to the outage was to immediately switch to Betdaq and start trading there.
I have some automation that runs on Betdaq every day and I also have the option to trade it manually. That is available to me at any moment, depending upon whether I choose to do so. Or in this case, I can switch to it quickly during an outage.
I often hear people say that they want to trade on Betdaq, but it doesn’t have enough liquidity or it’s gappy. Basically, they just can’t trade it the same way. That last comment is fair enough. However, there are ways that you can effectively trade.
The key is, as I’ve mentioned many times before, every market has a strategy and every strategy, a market. And your role as a trader is to match the two together. So necessarily, you shouldn’t be trading on Betdaq the same way they would trade on Betfair.
To make this point clear, let me take you back to when I first started trading Betfair. The markets were gappy and illiquid. The strategies that I use on a day to day basis now, would not have worked at the very start of my Betfair trading journey. Therefore, you shouldn’t expect strategies that you use on a day to day basis on Betfair would work on Betdaq, especially when Betfair has just crashed.
This is why every market looks like an opportunity to me. Because over many years, I’ve transitioned from those very early markets that I saw on Betfair, to the state in which they are now. That means there’s a strategy to use in each one of those markets. Each market looks like an opportunity to me, all I have to do is figure out which strategy is going to be best applicable to what I see in front of me.
And that was the case today. As soon as I switch to Betdaq yes, the markets are gapping and illiquid. But upon my arrival, I can start putting liquidity into the market and closing those gaps. This is the sort of strategy that I would have followed if you go back 20 years ago to when I started on Betfair. It’s a bit like winding the clock back and having the markets the way they were when I first started.
There’s no particular reason why you would want to trade those types of markets with strategies that work in those types of markets. But there is also a deeper question here. It’s very easy to find problems with anything. If you’re looking for a perfect solution to a problem, you will never find it, because such a thing does not exist.
But fundamentally speaking as a trader, what you should be doing is understanding and acknowledging the fact that the market looks different. Then you are trying to find a strategy that is suitable for what you see. As I’ve often stated before, if you approach things in a negative manner, you’ll always find problems. But if you approach things in a positive manner, you will always find opportunities.
And that is why for me every market looks like an opportunity!
