Royal Ascot trading review
This was an interesting year at Royal Ascot. The obvious highlights were Frankel’s win and Black Caviar’s close call. I thought the Duke of Edinburgh presenting his wife with a trophy was also a moment to remember, surprised to see no caption competitions on that!
Overall, according to Betfair’s statistics, £92.6m was traded before the off, up from £73m the year before. However, that included to races at incredibly short prices. If you strip those out and add back average expected volume then you more or less return to the prior year total. On average there was around £3.3m traded per race. Betdaq matched bet volume came in at over £50m, though they do count their volume differently. I collected a ton of data on Ascot this year, more than ever. So it will take a few weeks to really munch through all that data.
Both exchanges were perfectly tradable and in fact Betdaq scored high on ‘tradeability’ when prices were low on Betfair. I illustrated earlier in the week just how outrageous some of the unmatched bet volume was on Betfair. This holds up your orders and vastly increases risk. On these occasions it was easier to get on with Betdaq. It was a good week on both though and a lot of markets were equal in potential IMHO (see below). High volume is not helpful all the time.
Overall Royal Ascot went much better than I expected and my PC statement yesterday showed that. At times it didn’t feel like that and Tuesday lived up to it’s reputation of not providing a good guide for the coming week. But as the week strode on it/I got better and better. In all a satisfactory week of work, I’m looking forward to the next big meeting.
Category: Betdaq, Betfair, Horse Racing
