Author Archive: Peter Webb
I left a good job in the consumer technology industry to go a trade on Betfair for a living way back in June 2000.
I've been here ever since pushing very boundaries of what's possible on betting exchanges and loved every minute of it.
Have your say on the future of BETDAQ
With all the fuss and conjecture about the Ladrokes takeover of Betdaq we are all eagerly awaiting a clear view on what path both will take in the future.
Yesterday Betdaq popped into our forum to solicit views from Bet Angel users.
To quote – “We are writing to you to invite you to engage with us as we begin to plan the transformation of the BETDAQ exchange after the completion of our acquisition by Ladbrokes.”
I’d encourage you to …
Volatility friend or foe?
Volatile markets can be like rollercoasters, one minute the price is here, then it’s there, then it’s back to where it started.
There are two prevailing views on volatility, one is that it’s great because it creates opportunity and the other one that it’s a nightmare because a volatile market means more potential losses, which one is true?
I’m going to give you the first shot of an opinion. I’ve added a poll onto the main blog page where you …
1.03, 1.02….1.01
I don’t profess to being a genius when it come to in-play stuff on the racing, but I am currently trying hard! Part of that is watching and gathering data on each race. I just watched a classic at Wincanton.
Leading horse comes up to the last fence, never sure why prices are so short in heavy ground, jumps it then pecks the ground and takes a tumble. There is 1.03 gone!
Second place horse only just about makes it …
Some statistics on the Aussie Open Tennis
I’ve started digging my way through my data and notes, so here is some data. Only mens at the moment. I’ve made my comments strategy neutral, so you will have to work out from it what it from you wish!
The average number of games per set was 9.81 which is above the long term average, this was a more competitive tournament than usual. You have to go back to the 2000 tournament for a higher number.
The average number …
My motivation
As you know I have been around for some time. I’ve really enjoyed my journey through sports markets and the key for me has been the challenge of actually doing it.
There is hardly ever a moment when I am not thinking about or actually probing some aspect of the markets. I’m always challenging myself to either find something new, explain what I’ve found or examine what is happening. Sometimes you can find things that seem radically unintuitive, so the …
What a joy!
How wonderful to actually get some decent racing on Saturday, even it we didn’t have a full card. The Cheltenham trials is always a good practice ground for the festival in March and I was desperate for the meeting to go ahead, so was delighted to hear the optimism of the clerk of the course on Friday which proved correct come Saturday morning. Leopardstown was quite fun to trade as well.
Now we dodged that hurdle, the rain has arrived …
Key turning points in a Tennis match
When trading you want to look for key moments to trade in and out. Sometimes these can be arbitrary, a goal up, a goal down, certain times. A set up, a break up etc. etc.
Today I saw a turning point in the Australian Open final that I hadn’t witnessed before and one that I had.
I’ve mentioned before about how players are keen to get opponents out of the zone where possible, but today this happened in an unusual …
Azarenka vs Li Na
Well that was an interesting final, not quite what I expected and a lot of it revolved around Li Na’s ankles.
Detailed below you can see the profit profile for Azarenka. This is basically telling you what would have happened if you backed Azarenka at the start. Above the line means you would have profited by backing Azarenka or laying her opponent. Below the line means the opposite.
In total, excluding brief periods above and below it flipped six times …
Bert in £3m Betfair cash out
According to a regulatory filing notice issued on the 24th January; Andrew Black, one of the founders of Betfair, ‘cashed out’ £3m worth of shares on Wednesday.
In my experience there can be any number of reasons to sell shares, but only one reason to buy them. So I’m not sure a sale is that significant. Also, he still has 7,817,390 left! When Bert left the board is was a watershed moment for Betfair. It’s never been the same since.…
Is Tennis trading a load of old balls?
Ever the researcher, I have been browsing some books and documents recently. I stumbled across an interesting document that relates to whether new or old balls are an advantage in a Tennis match, it gave me some food for thought. It relates mainly to Wimbledon but it’s got me thinking about other surface types also and whether the same thing would be applicable there or whether this is an anomaly.
So for my first serve, stop reading for a second …
Ladbrokes buys Betdaq
Major, but not totally unexpected, news in the betting exchange world this morning.
I really felt that exchanges could change everything when I first started using them, but lately it almost felt like they were regressing to a standard betting model! I am hopeful that this news will breath new life into the betting exchange concept and allow things to start moving forward again in a more positive manner than we have been used to in recent years. While we …
Visualising sports trading data
You may have noticed my regular theme of visualising data. Why do I do this?
The reason is simple, it’s easy to pick up patterns when you are looking at them visually. If you have to plough through billions of rows of spreadsheets, pivot tables or outputs from a database, you may find some of the more obvious patterns may elude you due to number blindness. Visualise it and it often leaps right out at you.
Bet Angel contains a …
Seeded vs non-Seeded tournaments
We have a couple of classic divergences being display in full glory in the markets at the moment.
In Melbourne we have the Australian open Tennis where, in a seeded tournament, the semi finals look like they will be played out amongst the top four seeds. Seeded tournaments are basically there to ensure the top competitors have every chance of meeting in the latter stages.
In the UK, I just watched Bradford City complete a remarkable cup run to make …
Aussie Open serves up another classic tennis match
Anybody trading on Sunday was treated to another classic Tennis match in Melbourne.
Stanislas Wawrinka shocked world number one Novak Djokovic by racing to a 6-1 first set lead. Djokovic was clearly in trouble and needed to stage a big fight back or hope that Wawrinka faded.
Being the champion that Djokovic is, he dug deep and started the fight back. This match exhibited perfect trading characteristics again. It was another match, where if you were trading, you couldn’t lose. …
Snow way!
With racing cancelled today, I took the opportunity to regress to childhood and went outside to play in the snow after the Australian Open Tennis had finished for the day. That’s the useful thing about having Children, you can act like one!
I didn’t anticipate doing any racing at all, but drifted back behind my desk to set up for the Tennis tomorrow morning. I saw Dundalk was on and thought I’d have a quick go. Profited on every race …
The appeal of Tennis trading
Some decent matches this week at the Australian Open, it’s been a good opening week. Don’t forget to use Tennis Trader!!
There are two key aspects of Tennis trading that should interest you if you haven’t traded tennis before.
(1) No pre-defined length of match
I was active on the Kvitova vs Robson match, which eventually ran into the start of the racing. This is always a problem with Tennis. Being a competitive match, both players fought hard to …
It will get you in the end…
There is one definable characteristic in Tennis that allows you to predict how a player will perform year on year.
It’s age….
There is also definable characteristic with most gamblers, it’s called the gamblers fallacy. Basically people back things because they either expect them to continue, or they expected a ‘trend’ to reverse. In Tennis this often leads people to consistantly back dominant players to win or back once great players expecting a ‘return to form’.
To pick up …
Australian Open Tennis
The start of the year is a great time to get some Tennis trading experience under your belt.
The Australian Open is the first grand slam tournament of the year and usually presents some good opportunities. Last year we were treated to a legendary final which I documented on the blog. The final turned over £46.2m in matched bets in total. The thread on the forum documented a lot of the action during the course of the tournament and …
My Sports trading journey – Part three
Betting exchanges arrive on the scene
I placed my first bet on a betting exchange on June 5th 2000. It was a bet on the FTSE close market, which I won. It took until 11th June before I did my first sports bet which was on Tiger Woods US Open win market. Both these were on Flutter, being a slacker, I didn’t join Betfair till the 18th June.
My …
My Sports trading journey – Part two
Click here for part one
Financial markets
My early forays into the gambling world had taught me two things. People very often don’t make rational decisions and that making money by gambling was incredibly hard. I didn’t need to learn the latter point as that was obvious, but I thought it was worth a try. It was a dream that maybe somehow, someday, I could find a way overcome all the issues and achieve the impossible of making gambling pay. …
Dubai World Cup Carnival
Here is another sports event I will make the effort to attend some day. For the moment, I’m still sat behind my monitor taking an active interest in it from the other side.
The racecourse was designed to be spectacular and a draw to people all over the world, they have certainly achieved that. I’m aching to get there at some point and will do so when the time is right.
Over the years the amount of liquidity on the …
My Sports Trading Journey – Part one
Some of you already know my story, but here is it for those that don’t know and for those who are looking for some inspiration at the start of the new year!
The start
To understand where I am today, you need to wind the clock back to my childhood and the spark that created everything.
When I was young I loved playing sport. That was about all I enjoyed really and didn’t particularly excel academically. As a result I …
A strange sort of day…
Markets in the winter months are not known for their fluid liquidity, or solid nature. But yesterday was an odd day in the racing markets by any standard.
Probably the stand out moment was a massive divergence in price on the 16:30 race at Kempton, a very rare occurrence. While the on course market was pricing the favourite at odds on, Betfair’s market was showing it as a persistent drifter. It just shows you how incredibly thin the underlying …
Ladbrokes confirm talks with Betdaq
In a brief statement issued today Ladbrokes confirmed the long runner rumours that have been around for some time, that they ARE in talks to acquire Betdaq.
The short statement said: –
“The Board notes repeated press speculation regarding Betdaq. Ladbrokes enjoys a close commercial cooperation with Betdaq and can confirm discussions regarding a potential future acquisition.
Negotiations are ongoing though at this stage there is no certainty that an agreement will be reached.
Any further announcement will be made …
Picking an FA Cup shock
Ah, the romance of the FA Cup!
The romance bit comes from a non league team coming up against a major club and beating them. But the evidence for regular giant killings is a little thin on the ground.
Last year, for the first time since 1994 a minor team made the fifth round. In the prior year a league two team made the fifth round, but there are often many years where this doesn’t occur. It really is the …
Farewell 2012
Sat down today to have a go at the last day of 2012 with a view to signing off with a half decent result. I pretty much got that, nothing stunning but a decent result for a tricky day.
It was somewhat flattered by the last race where I pushed the boat out a bit in the hope of finishing 2012 on a high and that’s pretty much what happened. So now I can look forward to a decent evening …
2012 – The year I got a bit lazy
Actually, that is an unfair headline, as nobody who knows me would stick the lazy label on me!
But, 2012 is the year where I didn’t feel compelled to trade every day , or every market on everyday. I was determined that 2012 would be the year where I would not spent as much time as previous years stuck behind my desk. As they say, you can’t take it with you, so you may as well enjoy it while you …
Goal fest
More amazing score lines in the premier league yesterday, but an interesting peice of psychology appears to be at hand.
A friend of mine sent me a text last night to exclaim just how many goals there had been this season, to which I replied, ‘It feels like it doesn’t it’. There-in ensued an argument about whether there actually had been more goals or not.
Yesterday we had a 3-4 and a 7-3, on boxing day an 8-0. Both very …
Two very contrasting days
You couldn’t wish for two contrasting days in the racing markets this week.
Boxing day was pretty chaotic and messy, that wasn’t entirely unexpected; but it was much chaotic than I wished. Very few races dovetailed neatly into one another and overall volumes on average were down 20% year on year. I struggled to get any fluency into my activity and couldn’t really build any momentum. In fact I had quite a few losers in a row as I struggled …
How to post comments on our blog
I have to admit most of the chatter on Bet Angel takes place on our forum rather than the blog. Some of the benefits of this are that comments are threaded, categorised and have many contributors.
I’ve replied to the odd comment that comes through on the blog so I know people can reply, but it seems some people are confused as to how to post comments. So here is a guide to that that very topic: –
(1) …