Royal Ascot so far
A blockbuster start to day one with Frankel opening proceedings and promptly romping home by an astonishing distance.
Matched bet turnover was up on last year, but that’s no surprise on the basis of Frankel’s very short price. Overall pre-off volumes are ahead of last year, £35.3m has been matched on the races of the first two days. Curiously in-running matched bet volumes are down £3m on last year.
Tuesday is the day when I try and work out what does and doesn’t work and what has changed from last year. This is the day when I get my house in order and experiment on the markets. I tend to dislike the long run into each race on Tuesday. I had some good clues about the markets on Tuesday and also made some right cock ups, but that’s what you should use Tuesday for. The rest of the week you should build your effort in the market once you feel comfortable that you have an idea of how it is behaving.
Wednesday was a much improved day for me and I got to grips with things a lot better. The markets were fairly uniform but we have noticed this year that the amount of unmatched money sloshing around the market is pretty large, bigger than before. This is slowing up the fill rate quite a bit and leading to more risk and exposure in the market. A side effect is that price movements are proving to be less sticky. I.e. once a price starts to move it almost never comes back. There was a fair bit of chasing going on Tuesday and a bit more yesterday. The markets are feeling particulary ‘swingy’ this year.
It’s also interesting to compare Betfair and Betdaq markets on the Frankel race. Betfair was almost impossible to trade effectively with so much money holding up the price, though Frankel did come in a bit. But on Betdaq the lower unmatched bet amounts made it perfectly tradable. There was some joker laying £1m at 1.11, would have been interesting to see what happen if it was taken. I didn’t have enough in my account to sweep that up though!
Looking forward to the remainder of Ascot
Category: Horse Racing
