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.
Royal Ascot / Open Golf Thursday
Another good day in the bag for Royal Ascot, but I left it late today. I didn’t get a real blockbuster race till near the end of the card. I had to work much harder than yesterday and I took my foot of Betdaq, as working harder meant I couldn’t keep focus on two exchanges effectively. I did broaden my activity out on Betdaq though to other races and they worked well. So after Ascot I’m going to continue my …
US Open golf
I love the majors as they very often throw up some excellent opportunties. So while things are very busy at the moment, I will be taking time out today to open up with some positions on the US open.
The Blue Course at Congressional is longer than when previous majors were held there and the par has been reduced to 71. That is almost certaintly going to make the scoring much more competitive and the scores lower. Should be interesting.…
Royal Ascot – Day two
That went well! I have to give myself a 10/10 for yesterday. After a quiet start with a few errors in my P&L I slowly got into stride and managed to really hit top speed by the end of the day. In the end I managed to achieve my best ever daily result at Ascot which was incredibly satisfying. I can’t pretend today will be a repeat performance, but I will try hard.
It’s difficult to pick any highlights out …
Ascot – Day one summary
I thought that went quite well. I struggled last year but this year was ok and I could have done better if I was a bit more aggressive. In hindsight I was too passive yesterday, didn’t take on board enough risk. So I’ll give myself an 8/10 as it was good, but I could have done better.
Frankel made a bit of a mess of the feature race of the day and the market on Frankel was so strong that …
Royal Ascot day one
An intriguing day one at Ascot. After all, what colour hat will the Queen be wearing. LOL!
I’ll be all guns on the first day to work out what feel the market brings this year. I’ve paid a lot of attention to Ascot over the years and each year we see the market shift subtly in one direction or the other. I didn’t do a very good job of it last year, comparatively speaking, so I’ll want to put in …
It’s a trick…
Shot.
Great value entertainment and trading fodder today at Queens, in the traditional warm up for Wimbledon. I thought Murray did a great battling job in Paris and his display against Roddick the other day was just awesome. Today, after an early wobble, he closed out against Tsonga and did some headline making shots as well, but in a different manner to the Roddick match. Hold onto your hats as Wimbledon fever is almost here. Can’t wait!
Canadian entertainment
Not often you see a formula 1 race like that! I lost count of the number of times Jenson Button pitted, then he goes on to win the race! Vettel lost it on the last lap and was turned over at 1.04, Button was backed at very big odds. I wasn’t trading it but perhaps should have been given the weather conditions. Sometimes it’s just nice to watch the sport, especially when it’s this entertaining.
£174m
The Deloitte football report is out and makes continued interesting reading. The current austerity in the western world doesn’t seem to have affected football. Their finances are as bad as ever but the players get paid more in a week than a group of the fans could reasonably expected to earn in a year. The clamour for ‘talent’ continues unabated.
There are some very interesting bits in the report. Manchester United spent 46% of its revenue on pay, but rivals …
Free money
Bets are being taken on the end of the world on the 29th October. You can get 1/100 on the world not ending.
If the world does end then, of course, you will not be around to have to pay out the liability. Click here to see the latest odds: –
https://www.victorchandler.com/vcbet/en- … 1200/22889
In fact, this is a neat way of generating low cost cash flow. Offering very short odds at some point in the future and you get …
Betfair files complaint over Greek ban
Betfair has filed a complaint with the European Commission over the ban on betting exchanges contained within the Greek draft egaming law.
https://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/08/betfair-greece-idUKLDE7571AL20110608?type=companyNews
Levy board statement
The HBLB made a statement yesterday which you can read here: –
https://www.hblb.org.uk/document.php?id=411&search=
Betfair’s response is here: –
https://corporate.betfair.com/media/press-releases/2011/2011-06-08.aspx
Morning workshop
Bet Angel has a ton of different functions in it. To help Bet Angel users get the most from our product. We have decided to start running some morning workshop sessions. We are doing them in the morning on quieter days when there is the least impact on the trading day and also to give you time to return to your own desks.
If you are interested in attending, you can get more information by clicking here.
A comedy of errors!
This could easily describe my sub standard activities yesterday, but instead it relates to an incident yesterday evening.
I started trading a race with the urge to visit the loo. The race was a little late getting off, so with the position in reasonable shape I thought I would do a quick sprint to the loo. I promptly kicked the door on my sprint out of the study and smashed my toe against the corner. So instead of some relief, …
Federer loses French Open final
I’ve deliberately titled this post in a manner that is completely dissimilar to the current headlines out there. Well done to Nadal winning the French open; but if you look at the flow of the match from a statistical viewpoint, it was more like Federer who actually lost it in my opinion.
It was a fairly tight match, till the last set at least, 7-5, 7-6, 5-7, 6-1. You would expect the younger player of the two to do better …
Derby result
A satisfactory result. Not my best, but not my worst either. The market seemed pretty boyant today and volumes were much better than last year. Racing should be thankful that the Queen will bring so much attention to next years Derby. Can’t only help can’t it?
I’m taking tomorrow off from an activity perspective. I had hoped to trade the mens final at the French Open tennis, but I’ve been going downhill the last few days with a heavy cold …
Derby Day
An interesting day yesterday. The two Tennis semi finals were good, but not perfect trading fodder. I could have done with Murray coming back into the match a bit. Nadal / Murray had matched bet volume of £30m, the other semi was almost exactly the same amount. The Oaks had matched bet turnover of £2.6m.
Turnover on the Oaks was up on last year, but that can be accounted for by the way the field manifests itself. I will be …
Fab Friday
Today, we have a decent looking day ahead of us on the sporting front.
The Epsom derby meeting kicks off today and the Oaks is always a reminder of the first race that Betfair took bets on back in June 2000. To be honest I haven’t really ripped through this Friday for a few years. So I’ll be taking things careful until I get a feel for the day.
At the French Open the top four men in the world …
May
Another month has gone and I’m feeling more optimistic about the year as it wears on.
Each year I’m deliberately pessimistic at my chances. I’d rather have low expectations and exceed them, than high ones that force my hand. God knows I spend so much of my life tied up in numbers and so on, I swear I’m going mad some times. However, I’m much more relaxed this year about and have spent a lot of time doing new things; …
New balls please
One of the key stories going into the French open was the fact they were going to use a new ball type. I sort of guessed this may lead to a few suprises, but it realistically is going to take the whole tournament to work out if it really made much difference. It’s certainly added a few variables to things. This is an interesting article discussing this very point: –
https://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304520804576341380613199152.html
Two card monte
We have reached the time of year when Monday and Tuesday racing drops to two cards in the afternoon. It’s an important time of year as this changes the characteristic of these cards to the negative, but also it allows you to do a few other things and skip these cards if needed.
Racing tends to be lower quality on a Monday and Tuesday and that combined with the 15 minute gaps in-between the cards leads to much poorer market …
Bank Holiday Moo-nday
Had to laugh at this great peice of camera work today from Carlisle. It seems it just wasn’t the punters that were interested in the Racing.
A bit of a messicre!
Fairly early on last night, apart form the opening exchanges, you could see this match wasn’t going Man Utd’s way last night. The stats said it all. Possession was heavily skewed to Barca and by the end of the match Barca had 13 shots on target to Man Utd’s 1! Over 2.5 goals looked almost certain by half time, as did the Barca win. Barcelona really cemented their status as best club in Europe last night and probably the world.…
Champions League
Everybody else will be posting about it so I thought I would add my two penneth worth.
An intriguing clash, for once I think I will watch this than trade it.
A neutral venue but Man Utd will practically be at home, so you would have to favour Barca but discount some of the neutrality. I think this is the weakest Man Utd team for a while. Other teams really should have put in a stronger challenge for the premier …
Murray Worry
The sign of a true champion is the ability to overcome the impossible. While I’m not suggesting that Murray will win the title at Roland Garros, he certainly showed today that he’s got the guts. After turning over his ankle during the match, his price shot out after people started fearing a retirement. He had already traded at 1.01 adding to the pressure to push the price out.
Murray had his ankle strapped, Dug down deep and got on to …
Half price sale underway
When Betfair floated I got some stick for saying they were overvalued and they were not a buy. This wasn’t a statement on Betfair’s business or business model, more the price it was selling at.
I first started taking an interest in the stock market in the mid 80’s and five or so years later I started investing. One thing I learnt is that if a company IPO’s and sells some of it’s stock it will do so at the …
Good day all round
While the afternoon racing yesterday was a complete farce – shame on you racing, the evening card was much more interesting, enjoyable and full of opportunity. On the horses I managed more than double yesterday, which was a good result.
At Roland Garros the tennis was proving brilliant yesterday as well. With the wind howling around the courts it threw up lots of oppotunity. Some high profile slip ups generated some excellent opportunties. Congratulations to the person who backed Rus …
Quieter day
It was a quiet day yesterday at Roland Garros. Only five matches really caught my attention compared to nine the day before. With the wind blowing around a lot today I feel we could see some unexpected results today.
I had a more productive day on the horse racing and I am looking forward to the meeting at Sandown tonight, but the afternoon card looks a bit of a farce to be honest! Only ten runners in total in the …
Buying a toss of a coin
Apart from the wild volatility, the thing I love about Tennis is the binary nature of the market. Like the toss of a coin there is only one decision to be made, heads or tails, will they wont they. Your decision making process is much easier and can be focused on some key points.
Yesterday I backed Isner at 160, he traded as low as 3.30 before going on to lose. At his ‘worst’ he traded at 200’s. It would …
French Open Tennis
If the tournament continues like this it could be very memorable indeed. On Monday we saw the seeded Berdych crash out against a french qualifier. Andy Murray didn’t repeat the mistake today, but plenty of other big priced winners are coming in today.
Even if you oppose short priced favourites, thanks to the volatility in Tennis, the results can be excellent. Don’t forget to fire up Tennis Trader to check out your potential up or downside in each match before …
French Open Tennis
Looking forward to getting stuck into the Tennis this week, especially with the football season now behind us.
Nadal has an easier draw potentially than Djokovic so Djokovic is right up against it if he is going to maintain his amazing start to 2011.
Don’t forget to use Tennis trader to frame your upside (or downside) when trading a tennis match.
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