Day of the drifter
Sounds like a documentary of some sort, but this was the predominant feature in Monday’s horse racing markets.
In our etenral quest for knowledge, we run strategies in the back ground all the time. These can be to test new ideas or simply to explore certain aspects in the market. One of the strategies we often run is to test how ‘swingy’ the markets are. It’s simple, every minute from four minutes out we pop an order in the market to back at the current price and then green / red up at post time. This tells us how much markets are moving around during this period and how stable they are and the general direction they travel. On it’s own it doesn’t say much but over time, using this and other strategies, we have accumulated a vast amount of knowledge on how the markets act and, more importantly, why.
Monday was an unusual day, which generated this post. On Monday the markets just wanted to drift, drift, drift. The favourites were loveless. As long as your opening position was a lay you would almost certainly have made money . It was especially unusual in that, of the 19 races we covered, only three showed a profit. Two of those profits were less than £1 and one was a reasonable profit, two broke even and the rest were clear losers.
If you were actively trading these races you would have probably picked up this trend early on and cut losses. But our objective was simply to measure activity. I did OK myself, quite good for a Monday, but having been on the right side of most of these drifts I got too aggressive eventually and dropped somewhere around £200 from my potential profit on the day just because I over traded, grrr.
What does this day mean for the next trading session? Nothing unfortunately, the clock gets reset to zero. So don’t start laying everything after reading this post, please. The next session could be as equally unusual in the other direction.
Category: Horse Racing
