Category: Trading strategies
Mighty oaks from little acorns grow
When my first daughter was born I planted an acorn. Since then it has grown to the proverbial Oak Tree. This year it is 14 years old and yielded its first crop of Acorns.
My point?
When I was in a ‘normal’ job I was always planting metaphoric acorns. My hope was that some would grow to Oaks, and so they did. So I suggest you always keep planting Acorns. Not just in the context of building for the long …
Back to back
That’s woken me up from my slumber!
A very simple strategy would have made you money trading the racing today. Get a back order filled and wait.
Somebody was in the market a lot today, as we have seen before, with seemingly infinitely deep pockets. Race after race has had one horse or another completely smashed up with huge back orders. When trading you don’t need to catch many of these to make a huge difference. I am sure a …
Passive Tennis trading
Missed most of the US open last night as I opted to play Tennis rather than watch it, but I still profited on the matches last night.
I also had a nice reminder of how using stats can show a different version of the match than the score. I won 6-4 6-4 last night, but the first set was quite tight and I effectively won it with a break of serve in the ninth game. The second set was not …
Another new strategy
Sat the in bath the other night pondering a number of things. Of all the things I do, looking for new things and trying to solve the puzzles that any market throws at me is the thing I find most interesting.
I came up with a way off thought based upon what I had seen from recent market data. Basically that the market has been tightening and less money than ever is lost to one side of the book or …
Horses and hay don’t work
Having exclaimed yesterday that you should make hay while the sun shines it seems that today at least, there is a dearth of hay to be made in the racing markets. Two low quality cards, on a Tuesday and only one race has ten runners or more. Hay doesn’t spring to mind but slurry does. With the sun beating down and the kids on holiday it’s part of afternoon off. I’ll do some work in other areas as well. Racing …
Make hay while the sun shines
You may remember this post from last year: –
https://www.betangel.com/blog_wp/2010/08/16/working-holiday/
With regard to the title, never has there been a more apt phrase for sports traders.
In the Summer there is wall to wall sport and opportunties appear at will. In the winter you are digging around for every penny, but pon top of that you also don’t know what the future will bring. So making the most of it while available is always a sensible move, I hope my …
Botfair
I read some comments yesterday evening from some ‘traditional’ punters about how they were pleased Betfair’s new charges were going to get rid of the bots. Unfortunately for these posters, the opposite is almost certainly likely to be true. There is some pretty simple logic behind it.
Say you have a winning bot that makes money on a market and you suddenly face higher charges. At this level you would most likely work more aggressively to make more to offset …
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, …
Important Information
Well day 3/6 on jinx week has passed without catastrophe. Yesterday wasn’t a great day by any means and I really fouled up on one race, but I’m still moving ahead on the week and hope for a better day today.
I’m always experimenting and there is no better way of doing that than directly in the market itself. I will always recommend this, as it’s the best way to really know what is really happening and how your actions …
Jinx week
For some reason this week each year is the week where errors creep in, unexpected things happen and bad luck gets called in. I’ve netted some of my most spectacular failure in week 20 for some reason, year after year. I can’t explain why and despite attempts in previous years to be super cautious during this week, something always trips me up. It could be anything, a system crash, broadband failure, Betfair crash, highly unusual event, anything.
So you can …
Best trade ever?
It was a couple of years ago I said this and I’m hoping for a repeat again this year, but then again I was hoping last year would see a repeat and that didn’t happen either! Here’s hoping! You can never predict where a really big opportunity, but as long as you are focused you will always be able to jump on the back of one when the inevitable occurs.
Part of trick is being available and alert to opportunties. …
Gambling millions
Give me five minutes with somebody and I can teach you how to put through enormous sums through a market at relatively little risk, you wont make or lose much, but you will be able to say that you gambled millions that day, an impressive feat; or is it?
I have often been misquoted, especially when it comes to numbers. But one thing that is fairly certain in the modern betting age, is that racking up bets in the millions …
Waves
For some time I’ve noticed curious elements within betting markets. I love analysing and studying what happens in the market, and it’s all to find out that critical question, why?
Getting a deeper understanding is useful because it allows you to build a firm framework around your decisions. I’ve often seen people stumble on something that works and then come up with things to justify that. Eventually they will fail a little while later and slip out of existence, why? …
Should I green up?
People often ask me if it is worth greening, or redding, up; hedging your profit so you win what ever the result. In a word yes, but a longer description follows.
First off the market is very efficient, so in essence you could argue that it makes no difference. If you hedge you need to place another lay order. The hedge value is calculated by laying off the profit at the current lay price, thereby dividing your profit by the …
Bump..
Now Cheltenham is firmly behind us and the champions league football pauses for a few weeks, it’s time to come back to earth with a bump. On the racing front, the weeks before and after Cheltenham are often starkly different, so it’s time to dig deep and stay out of trouble.
I’ll be adopting a cautious approach in the coming week and not trying to push too hard to find an opportunity. Doing that gives you a tendency to look …
Efficient Cheltenham
Just had a browse at the first few markets at Cheltenham and it’s amazing how small the book percentage is on a lot of them. Some of the books are only just over 100% and this makes it fantastic value for backers or people dutching the market.
I’ll be gathering data all week, so I’ll let you know if I spot anything interesting. But that’s the first thing to jump out at me this morning.
The secret to good decisions
Was tipped off by somebody the other day about this key bit of scientific advice. So next time you make a bad decision you now know what to do!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/
Safety in numbers…
An overlooked strategy on betting exchanges is spreading your risk across a number of selections and / or markets. A lot of people think this involves more risk but I’d actually argue it involves less.
By doing more you increase your chance of a return and minimise the pain of a loss. This is strategy that can be applied in a number of ways but can most commonly be applied across, say, a number of football matches before the start. …
Accidents and evolution (Part three)
Never one for rhetoric; I presented a similar case, to those I have described in the prior posts, at a talk I did last year. Using a similar model we followed how that can evolve from a base set of criteria and environments to something more complex. The following two snap shots are from a control where we work at random and an evolved model a few generations on.
I reckon I could replicate the performance of the two at …
Accidents and evolution (Part two)
So how did my view on evolution, natural selection and Darwin translate into market strategy?
There are many ways to apply it, but first you need to start. Your first strategy is to have no strategy, just poke around at random. This gives you a control sample to work with, a base metric from which you can build your activity. You should regularly revisit your control to ensure the base you are working from is still the same as when …
Accidents and evolution (Part one)
Some time ago, when I was young, I was accosted by somebody on the streets of Guildford. He was trying to challenge my view of the world and get me to sign up to their cult or something. He followed me down the street and asked me if I really believed the world, everything we see, was created by accident. Without hesitation I replied, YES!
When I was young I had asked myself the same question. So I went to …
Ouch!
You have to feel sorry for money chasers sometimes. On Sunday we saw one of those ‘classic’ horse racing moments when a horse, that traded at 1.09 before the off, fell at the first hurdle at Fakenham.
That said, I don’t feel that sorry for money chasers as when I see something at short odds I instinctively try to oppose it. Low downside and high upside is just too tempting to resist. Therefore I will always look for an opportunity …
Backing a definite loser to win
Bizarre start to the racing at Huntingdon. Nine out of eleven horses took the wrong course, the chase instead of the hurdle course. The end result is that all horses on the chase course were disqualified. One jockey went back to complete the correct course though and netted third place. So only three out of the starting line up qualified as finishers.
You could still back the real winner for large odds as he approached the line and it seemed …
SPOTY
Or Sports Personality Of The Year in its long form.
Let me declare my interest. I would love Tony McCoy to win this award. Not only is it fully deserved, but it would also give a boost to racing. Let me temper that with the fact that the short priced favourite just never seems to win this award any more. Also, in the general public, there is little recognition of who Tony McCoy is.
Before I got into horse racing …
Trading the drifting Denman
With a tough week already, it looked like Saturday was going to be a white out as well. Fortunately Newbury survived with a quality card and that gave me a reason to sit behind my desk. I’ve typically done OK at the Hennessy gold cup, so wanted a fair crack at it. When you have been going for a few years you can’t but resist looking at previous years and having that as an unofficial target. Tough when the most …
Jockey title opportunties
Another close Jockey championship draws to a close this weekend and it’s going to the wire by the look of it.
https://www.thepja.co.uk/champ_flat.aspx
The battle is throwing up some interesting trading opporunties as people start to discount the prospect of a jockey change bringing a change of fortune for individual horses. Certainly there is a big incentive to win races that may have been over looked earlier in the season. Keep your eyes open for racing with either of the …
The aching transition
It’s that time of year in horse racing where the flat gives way to the jumps.
Some good flat races left, but a lot of lower quality and end of season stuff too. On the other side, the jumps now also have a number of novice races. So you end up with some really thin betting markets around at this time of year and things get tougher. However, it’s not new it’s been the same for years, it just a …
Death of a strategy
If you read the ‘birth of a strategy‘ one thing you can see how is long it takes for a new idea to fade, but why?
Well, people were in this market before I was, so my arrival no doubt had an impact on them. It must have or else I couldn’t have made any money. So was their response to sit there and let it happen? No, they would have tweaked their strategy to take account of …
Too hard
There are many thousands of markets that will come under your eyes each year. So which ones should you do? The hard ones or the easy ones. Not a difficult question is it? So why do so many people pick situations that are likely to fall into the too hard category? I’ll explain on another post, but before that, let me explain how I approach each opportunity.
When I approach a market, I will label it easy, not sure or …
A bit of a eureka moment..
For some time I’ve been working on a modelling spreadsheet. On and off I’ve dabbled with it for a few years when time permitted. The aim is to produce a better tool for forecasting value. Predicting the future is always tough and I’ve been searching for a solution to a complicated forecasting problem. I’ve got close, but not enough for a clear ‘victory’.
Sat in bed on Saturday evening with my iPad, I was getting a bit bored of the …
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