Tag: betfair
Look, no hands…
One upshot of Betfair’s recently decision to increase their rake from more successful users like myself is that I have revisited my love of interacting on the exchanges with spreadsheets.
I have taken some time out from ‘normal’ trading to work on spreadsheets a bit more. This is to see if I can create something that works fully automatically for me where the payoff will now be particularly high as it takes none of my time to execute. When something …
York Ebor meeting
Summer racing isn’t over quite yet and today kicks of the Ebor meeting at York. I’ve traditionally done OK at this festival each year so I am looking for something above average this week. I’m going to give Betdaq a good go this week at York as liquidity is rising and I suspect I can get something decent out of some of these races. I’m keen to get some decent practice in. If you look at my Ebor result from …
Betfair’s LMAX loses £13.2m in first year
Betfair’s majority owned financial trading product LMAX recorded pre-tax losses of £13.2m for the year ended 30 April, Betfair’s annual report has shown. Full story: –
https://www.egrmagazine.com/news/
I think LMAX is going to continue to be a burden for Betfair. There are already very good solutions in place in this market and despite the suggestion it’s a new way, most new users have found that the markets are heavily seeded and the fill rates poor. It’s got a long way …
A sea of red
Fortunately this doesn’t reflect my betting exchange activity, tepid though it is this week. The title refers to the chaos in financial markets. As a lot of your know I am heavily invested in financials and it’s part of my grander plan to eventually sit on my bottom each day doing nothing. I’ve been actively investing since 1990 and messing around for longer than that. It was gambling that lead me to the great casino of the lot, the stock …
Kick off
The English football season kicked off in earnest last night with Blackpool nudging a 1-0 win against Hull. Today league football gets underway properly and the hopes and aspirations of many will re-ignite across the nation. How appropriate that the financial markets are crashing under the weight of false hopes and huge amounts of debt just as the football season starts up! If you are looking for excess then there is plenty to find on and off the football field, …
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 …
Good approach
Looks like it will be the last day before the glorious weather breaks in the UK so went out to play some Golf with my son this morning.
A good approach on the seventh left me in the middle of the green but with a tricky put for an birdie. Almost the perfect put, but the ball stopped just short of falling in the cup. No amount of stomping on the green would make it fall in, so I had …
Betfair sponsor Tuerkiyemspor
If your reaction was “Who?”, you are not alone in thinking that. Visit this link for an interesting angle on why: –
Gooder Goodwood
My old English tutor would have a heart attack with that title!
Had my best day of the week yesterday and should be headed for a great festival overall. The day didn’t start very well with a delayed start and then I got my bottom spanked at Nottingham when I failed to address an alarming drift on the horse I was trading. But from there in things just got better and better. I managed to pull in some really good …
Phone call from Betfair
A few weeks I got a phone call from a number I didn’t recognise. It was Betfair telling me I was now going to pay 60% of my profit to them. Or not as it turned out!
I tagged a name to that number so if they phoned again I would know who it was. Yesterday that number rang again, right in the middle of trading, thanks. What could Betfair be doing phoning me in the middle of Goodwood? Curious …
Betfair International Stakes
Couldn’t resist posting up this P&L on this race from yesterday. OK I got more on Betfair, a bit, but nowhere near the same when if deduct a 60% commission.
You should always do what is best for you, especially in a trading market, but look at my circumstances. It’s a strange feeling to only be able to earn 40% what others can earn by doing exactly the same thing. I can teach people how to do similar things and …
Betfair – Cross matching
Cross matching has slowly been implemented across many sports markets on Betfair and earlier this year on the big one, horse racing.
There are still some odd things with cross matching. Prices for the API and for the Betfair web site are different. This is because cross matching is not exposed via the API. We put the cross matching algorithm into Bet Angel, but quite a large number of API applications still show the ‘wrong’ prices. Betfair also never tell …
IG Index vs Betfair
IG Index released year end results yesterday and they make interesting reading when compared to Betfair. I quite like comparing IG Index and Betfair as they are both spread betting companies, moreso now than ever. Now they are both listed companies, its possible to draw some rough lines around both businesses. Comparisons to IG helped me decide that Betfair was way overvalued when they listed.
Revenues are fairly similar across both businesses but margins at IG are much higher and …
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 …
Betdaq boost
Yesterday saw a fairly big boost on trading volume on the horse racing markets on Betdaq, which was more or less running at double last weeks numbers on average. It’s too early to say if this is a sustained increase or just a blip, but it’s encouraging.
I’m not going to tell you to use one exchange or the other or both, that’s your decision, not mine. Everybody is at different stages of their trading. But there are obvious benefits …
60% Premium charge
On the first day of trading on 22nd October 2010 Betfair shares closed at 1550p. At the time of writing this post the shares are trading at 627p or down nearly 60% from that closing high. How ironic!
I don’t want to feed that hand that bites me, to reverse the common metaphor. So, for me at least, action speak louder than words. Whether volume decreases or increases on the Betfair exchange, why will be the most pressing question. Volume …
Betfair down, again!
Just two days before Betfair are due to impose massive increases in costs on their users, they face yet another major outage on their site.
You just can’t really believe it’s possible to get much worse PR for Betfair, but somehow they manage to pull another shocker out of the hat. It’s really quite incredible. You think the least they could do was quickly put a message up on their service page.
Open golf – Best trades
For a full list and other lists, visit the forum.
The Open has been brilliant so far. The highlight today was the hole in one by Tom Watson, amazing. When my shoulder is better I’m getting out there again to reduce my handicap. It’s inspiring to see a 61 year old holding his own against the worlds top golfers.
This is the last list now as we turn our attention to specific golfers for the remaining two days. The …
Big moves
I thought the first day of the Open Golf at Sandwich would be interesting and that’s exactly how it has proved. For a full list of movers visit the thread on the forum.
Golf has really grown on me as a trading sport and the small gap between the leader-board and oblivion creates some fantastic opportunities. With a £10 stake this is what you could have greened up for on the top movers at the end of day one. …
Repeating patterns
Sometimes the markets surprise me, but more often than not they don’t. After 11 years of doing this, even the surprises don’t seem surprising any more. But yesterday I got a surprise.
Yesterday, last year, I traded a race at Catterick and got a really cracking result from it. A year later at the same course, on the same day and on the exact same race I got the same result. You would think it impossible that such a thing …
Practice makes perfect
I thought I would make this post to remind people to upgrade / try the latest version of Bet Angel. I’m motivated to highlight this by the fact that only a portion of our users base have upgraded at the moment according to last months figures.
As a reminder, we recently introduced a very comprehensive practice mode in the latest release of Bet Angel, version 1.28. You can see more about it here: –
The practice / training / …
A year after leaving
A very interesting post from Ex Betfair man Mark Davis has appeared on his blog this evening, worth a read: –
https://www.markxdavies.com/2011/07/04/a-year-after-leaving/
Lack of liquidity
Low matched bet turnover, gappy prices, lack of depth in the market. Yes, I am sure you are familiar with these problems. But I’m not talking about Betdaq, I am talking about Betfair.
Back when Betfair started the markets were pretty thin, but I still saw opportunity in them. As people began to develop techniques to squeak a few quid out of these markets things improved. As traders joined the market and improved liquidity, bigger backers and layers started to …
Jelly
A long time ago I worked for a company where the MD had a great idea. A quick way to boost profits was to levy a new charge for delivery. He asked for comments.
“Jelly” I responded. Everybody thought it was an insult not piece of insight. But my point was that like squashing Jelly, new charges wouldn’t lead to the problem being stamped on, it would just lead to the problem oozing out elsewhere in the business.
Imposing the …
June
June turned out to be a very good month in the end and much better than I expected. It was the best June I’ve had for a few years. How useful to have a decent send off as it were, given the news from last week.
The highlight was obviously Royal Ascot and that contributed the bulk of things for the month. As I have done for a little while, I used both exchanges during Ascot week and this has …
Betfair premium charge & earnings soar
As we are all aware now, Betfair pleaded poverty and an imbalanced business model again yesterday, when announcing another new charge. This time hitting consistent earners for up to 60% of their profits. We heard the similar stories for data charges, transaction charges and the premium charge part one and all the other various amendments over the years to their charge structure.
This didn’t stop them from announcing record revenue and earnings a few hours later. Earnings per share are …
Betfair confirms CEO to quit
“After ten years with Betfair, and nearly six as CEO, David Yu has informed the Board that he believes it is now the right time for the company to start looking for his successor. He does not intend to renew his current contract (which expires in October 2012) and therefore the Board will now begin a search process for a new CEO. During the process of identifying his successor, David will remain fully committed to the Company and to delivering …
Betfair poised to replace chief executive
Interesting report in the Telegraph which popped up late last night.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/
Grass is for cows
Wimbledon is the only grand slam on grass, but it wasn’t always that way. Two other tournaments were played on grass on the grand slam circuit. The US Open, was played on grass until 1974, and the Australian Open, was played on grass until 1988.
Very few players would not admit that a win at Wimbledon would be a career defining moment. But it’s not through trying that players fail; it’s generally down to how each surface plays. Research by …
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