Category: General
Winning Betfair Strategies
Roll up, I have a new system for you, for no effort and little skill you can bag £50k a year and Sir, for you today, it’s only…. Not £499, Not even £99, but just £37. But hurry I am closing offers on Friday and I only have 20 left!
I bet you heard that pitch before, it seems every day my inbox is fills up with offers telling me they have a foolproof system for me. A lot get …
What changed?
Join the debate on the forum – https://www.betangel.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=6516&start=10
I’m an avid market watcher and over time you expect all markets to evolve and change, I’ve always been keen to be one step ahead of that. Something that worked well in certain market conditions, sometimes doesn’t work a few months down the line; though some things are unchanging.
When a strategy fails you often have to look at yourself first. I made a cock up on a strategy not so long …
Has Athletics shown up football?
I’m still buzzing from all the Olympics action we have been privileged to see recently.
People stretching every sinew of their body for that elusive and hard fought honour, an Olympic medal. A chance to say there were the best in the world. Great honour in representing their country, whether they win or now. Years of training, pushing themselves to the limit of their bodies and stretching what is humanly possible.
Contrast that with the current state of professional football.…
Sports overload!
I swear if there is more sports available on TV my head is going to explode!
It seems for most of the summer I have been bouncing from one major sporting event to another and now, with the Olympics on, it’s all gone into over drive. I am definitely going to have a rest at the end of this period.
The Tennis has been by far the most tradable sport at the Olympics and we culminate with the finals this …
Echo’s of 2008, only worse…
I was browsing the latest list of abandoned meetings and thinking about whether we have ever had a worse summer? When I was driving back from Heathrow this morning it rained so hard that all the traffic stopped on the motorway, not encouraging. It’s really disappointing that so many sports, not just racing, are falling by the wayside. But At least it means I can get some rest after a manic start to the summer.
Euro 2012, Wimbledon, & Royal …
Rome, York, Kiev
Back to the fold today and have been watching the Masters Tennis in Rome with much interest. It’s thrown up some good matches already and the ‘non-blue’ clay should give us some clues for the French Open. Murray’s match with Nalbandian yesterday had some great opportunites in it.
The Rome masters is a good place to get some practice in before the French open. Typically players will use it for the same reason as well, but be aware of retirements. …
Just another tepid Tuesday
After the fun and games over the weekend we now step back into the ordinary racing card again.
At this time of year we revert to two cards in the afternoon. I don’t really enjoy these very much and last year I swore blind I wouldn’t do them next year. So this year and I going to do a lot less on these afternoons.
Well I say a lot less, just something different. I recently bought a new gadget that …
Just another Manic Monday
It has proved to be a ‘interesting’ Guineas weekend.
Saturday was OK and I netted a nice result on the big race. The FA Cup final was, I felt, a bit poor as a market. I don’t usually attempt to trade it pre-off, as I likely to be on some big racing markets on the same day, but I was suprised at how ‘inactive’ the market was.
Sunday proved to be a bit of mess. Several loose horses and a …
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New blog format
I’ve been posting on this or the older blog for at least four years now, so I thought it was time to refresh it a little.
Over that time I’ve made thousands of posts but they just tend to get lost in the mists of time. There is a real treasure trove of information in here, but we had feedback that lots of people are obviously not finding it, or digging in deep enough, so we have taken the plunge …
Why a lack of fuel is linked to sports trading
On the walk into the office this morning I passed the local petrol station, there were a queue right out into the road. I saw somebody I knew who had driven in from some distance and he revealed a similar story across a wide area. It’s all down the fuss about whether tanker drivers will go on strike. People are scared that fuel may run out if this happens. You can summarise this situation up quite simply, people are acting …
A question of scale (part three)
Click on the text for part one and part two
Curiously for some, it is actually quite easy to work out the maximum upside you can get in any market over time, that’s a definite calculable variable. See my previous blog post ‘profit exists everywhere’. You can also do the same for losses. When you look at those stats, you suddenly realise that the market is capped in either direction. That has advantages and disadvantages.
But the ‘market capped’ thing …
Profit exists everywhere
Somebody asked me the other day which markets have profit in them. Well the answer is that all have profit in them, it’s more a question of where it ends up. But all, have the potential for payoff. There are a couple of other key factors, which I will explain later.
Long before the market really gets going, each market can be split up and broken down in infinite detail. If you know how volatile it is then you can …
Sports Relief – Auction for signed England shirt
Just got back from my local school where two of my children have just done their run for Sports Relief.
Sports relief resonates with me as I’ve always been into sport. But it also strikes a chord because when I finished running competitively for a club, I still wanted to run. So I started to run for charitable causes instead. Keep fit and do something good as well. I ran my last Marathon in London in 1996 and my …
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 …
Nightmare
I have a little diary next to my desk. In it I scribble notes on the markets and what happened and any mitigating circumstances. I also keep a spreadsheet where I track what sort of activity I have been up to.
Both are key pointers for me to look at and to set expectations from. If I look on the spreadsheet and see a really good, or really poor day. I’ll flip to the diary to see what actually happened. …
The 49 bets
Here is something interesting. Well I thought it was interesting anyhow, so I thought I would share it.
On Saturday I was working a position into the Liverpool vs Arsenal match. I’ve often maintained there can’t be many big gamblers / traders out there as I rarely see big amounts in the market. OK there are reasons why I may not be able to see them, but even then, I rarely see anything that looks like a bigger player.
In …
Betfair continues squeeze on users
Full management statement here: –
https://corporate.betfair.com/media/press-releases/2012/06-03-2012.aspx
Having been an active investor for over 20 years, here is my take on the management statement. Management statements always focus on the positive and you have to read a bit deeper than the headlines.
Core revenues up 11%, but no mention of non core revenues, other than ‘they are in line with expectations’. The games products are no longer working and despite being pushed in-front of all users, which personally I find very …
A question of scale (part two)
In part one we talked about how scale could be an issue in the markets, but how?
If you are betting there is a maximum amount of money that you can bet ‘at value’. Obviously there is little point in betting outside of value, so by default that means it’s impossible to fulfill an unlimited amount at value. It’s also impossible to take all the money on offer and get value, so you realise quickly that there is only a …
Creating a profitable strategy (Part one)
Lots of people want to know how to do a winning trade. But very few ask, or think hard enough about how to create an overall postive strategy.
In the context of trying to do something positive over the long term, a trade is just one component of a broader strategy. Trades will win but also lose and therefore it’s the overall strategy where we want to get the balance right rather than getting too focused on each individual position …
Back to the desk
Back behind my trading desk today after a few days trying to recover from this illness. Still nowhere near 100% but I just hate doing nothing. I’d rather be distracted by something other than the sight of a sick bowl! I actually find trading quite fun, so I can still do it and mess around with the numbers, even when I’m not on form. It’s definitely the challenge I enjoy more than the result, though that helps!
The Wolves next …
Is inability to trade a genetic trait?
When you look at any market that follows a random walk, upside and downside is created in equal proportion. So it’s impossible, if you participate at random, to lose money, apart from the cost of transacting in that market.
On the stock market it’s even more favourable as the underlying investment is net accretive, so it should be even less possible to lose money. But still people lose!
Having studied the markets for so long I now have a very …
Are people in the UK less enterprising?
I did a course at our offices yesterday where I talked all day about how the markets work and why. I followed this up with showing that in action.
That’s fairly normal, but the unusual thing about yesterday is that only a couple of people in the room were from the UK. This seems to be a trend that is constantly developing in everything I do. On Friday I am meeting somebody at Heathrow whom I am going to work …
My curious liquidity poll
I recently asked on the bl0g poll, top right of the blog in case you hadn’t noticed, about what constitutes ‘good’ liquidity in a market. I think there are quite a few considerations you could take account of when assessing what ‘good’ liquidity is. But it was sparked by another poll which asked ‘What would make you move to Betdaq’. The answer came back ‘better liquidity’.
We are all aware of the chicken and egg syndrome that exists in the …
Performance anxiety – Why players lose form
Lovely piece on psychology in the weekend FT. It examines why players of a sport often inexplicably lose their form. I’ve been studying this specifically in a few sports to come up with predictors of decline. My research was sparked by the collapse in form David Duval after he won the British Open golf and I started to dig around deeper and deeper for events that can lead to a decline. I’ve found it useful in Golf and Tennis which …
Opportunity through adversity
OK, so it looks like there will be no ‘real’ racing in the UK for a while. But rather than bemoan your fortune use the opportunity to experiment, examine and look for new ideas or opportunities.
Quite a few years ago I got into the mode of taking time off in February. I learnt that it was the lowest yielding month of the year and part or all of it could easily be skipped without too much impact. So I …
Snow way
UK racing cancelled, a few football matches on. But just over that hill there, there is a ton of snow and some kids waiting for me to push them down it. Not a difficult choice of what to do this afternoon. Besides, we will be shattered after a few hours of this!
Enjoying little pleasures like this while you can.
A question of scale (part one)
I got a phone call from the Financial times the other week about the collapse of Centaur. They wanted to know how I knew it would collapse long before it did, they originally phoned me for an opinion when Centaur first started up and I told them then what I repeated recently.
When you looked at the proposition there were in fact many, many flaws in there; but the top one for me was one of scale. Mainly because I’ve …
Losers needed!
Over the years I’ve studied the markets and a number of strategies, but all of these have been focused on winning.
Late last year I turned my attention to why people lose, the psychology behind that, but also what fundamental flaws they have with their approaches in the market.
If you mess around at random you should, over long periods, break even less the spread or commission that you pay to the service provider. However, when I look at a …
Hello 2012
Greetings to the year 2012, or if you are Assyrian the year 6762 or if you are 2556 in Buddism or…, well you catch my drift.
2012 is going to be a very busy year on the sports front, if the Mayan apocalypse doesn’t mature, so I look forward to what should be a very interesting year. I spent a lot of the second half of last year looking at new things so I look forward to doing some of …
Farewell 2011
No time to summarise the year on this post, hopefully I’ll get the chance in the new year. But just wanted to say goodbye 2011 and thanks for everybody’s support and custom through out the year. It turned out to be a really interesting year, right to the final days!
I managed to bag a four figure race yesterday and did well on the darts in the evening so it’s likely to be a nice sign off for the year.…
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