Don’t Panic!
This afternoon, for an experiment, I was wired up to a heart rate monitor. It was a test to see how I reacted throughout a busy day and to see what sort of stress I went through. As it turned out it measured a different sort of stress from normal!
The day started as normal and pulled in a couple of OK results. On the approached to race three though something seemed to be going wrong and the response I was getting from the exchanges was a bit erratic. By race three I was all over the place, which was a shame, as I was trading it really well. Overall we were doing really well but it was untradable for me. I needed to switch to my backup connections, which I did. But on one of the bigger days of the year, this wasn’t ideal! I had to find out what the problem was before the Gold Cup. I traded it the best I could, but it wasn’t to the best of my abilities. Immediately the tape went up I headed off to a backup location. I missed the entire Gold Cup race for the first time ever!
It was at this point that I had a message to say it was a problem with BT Internet. This wasn’t ideal as my backup connection was on BT as well, new lesson learnt. So I switched locations again and managed to settle in for the rest of the card. So unfortunate that not only did the problem occur, but that it occurred on a critical day at a critical moment. But such is life! The rest of the card went really well and we smashed last year’s total. It was a fine finish to Cheltenham and was a bit of a confidence booster.
As for the heart rate monitor, a slightly different set of readings than expected! My resting heart rate is in the early 60’s max. It would rise to 70’s as we approached the start of a big race and touched mid 90’s during the more manic phases. But the highest reading was 120 when I was running for the car after the start of the Gold Cup! I think we will have to run the experiment again.
Overall during Cheltenham week, we noticed that liquidity was higher, but fill rate poorer on Betfair. The markets were very similar to last year, apart from the slow up in fill rate. Betdaq was more or less similar to last year and delivered some good results. Betdaq filled orders twice as fast as Betfair and the prices were very highly correlated or sometimes better. It wasn’t difficult to achieve results on Betdaq better than post commission Betfair totals. We ended the last race of the week with our best result on an individual Betdaq race. In all, a good weeks work.
Category: General, Horse Racing, Trading strategies
