Tag: trading
My Sports trading journey – Part five
A new year seems a good place to try and round off my story of how I got trading and my journey through the markets.
Click on the links to catch up with parts one, two, three and four
The jump
So I had taken the great leap into the unknown. For years I’d worked diligently up the corporate ladder and could have stayed in a senior position, but had now stepped off. At the back of my …
Consistency
So the festive trading period is over and we now return to more mundane matters on the racing front.
Nothing outstanding occurred for me on the trading front, but Sprinter Sacre pulling up at an SP of 1.20 was probably the high or lowlight of the period depending on which side of the book you were on. You could hear the howls of anguish like never before coming from the crowd. Another reason why trading is much better than traditional …
The Bitcoin trading phenomenon
One thing you will notice about the Bet Angel forum is that not only do we talk a lot about sports trading and sports markets, but we also talk a lot about general trading and other trading markets.
As you may know I am active in both and push equally hard in all directions to learn more about all markets. I bought my first shares in the heady privatisation days in the mid to late eighties and pursued a well …
One of my favourite races of the year
The Hennessy Gold Cup was run at Newbury yesterday and I have fond memories of this race as this is the race I traded live at the IX Investor show for Betfair in 2006.
Seeing a betting company at an financial investment show was a shock for many people and lots couldn’t understand why we were there, so we had real trouble getting people to come near the stand.
This was when I rolled up my sleeves and traded live …
Another graph
I’m presenting another course today; if you are interested, I’ll be doing one more course on 9th December before I change the format in the new year. We still have a few places left on that one.
Amongst many things I’ll discuss and explain, I’ll be talking about this graph today. It’s curious how different strategies can throw out similar graphs. If you have seen some recent graphs I posted up you will spot the similarity, but the strategy …
Market watching – Day of the drifter
I’m an avid market watcher. Every day for years I’ve collected data on what I’ve been doing and what the market is doing, where the odds are going, what’s happening etc. This allows me to ‘look under the bonnet’ of the market and understand what is going on. On occasion it throws up some real anomalies. On Monday we experienced some of that.
Monday was the ‘day of the drifter’. If you would have laid the favourite, the majority of …
Santa delivers early xmas present
No I haven’t finally got a Christmas card from Betfair, just a catch up on events at Santa Anita a couple of weeks ago.
I’ve had an on off relationship with the breeders cup over the years but this year turned out to be quite good in the scheme of things. It was marked by good and bad races but the good ones produced something and the bad ones didn’t really lose much. So I’d rank 2013 as one of …
Does scalping still work?
I’m doing a course today at the office where, amongst many things, I will talk about scalping and answer this question. The answer is ‘Yes’ by the way.
Qualifying the ‘yes’
For every market, there is a strategy and every strategy a market. Your mission is to join the two up. If you deploy the wrong strategy in the wrong market then you will get bad results. So underlying this ‘Yes’ is some depth and qualification, it takes a bit …
St Leger meeting
For some background to this meeting have a read of this wiki link.
I must admit, from a trading perspective, I haven’t got a great deal out of this meeting in the past. So I tend to not set high expectations only be disappointed. I tend to treat it as a decent meeting, but not something I expect to get anything stunning from. I see some people are talking it up, but that just shows they haven’t traded it …
The missing link in trading
I’ve been on a very long journey to understand risk and trading as I do now. When I talk and examine risk I do so almost intuitively now, but I had to learn it all the hard way, from the ground up.
The journey has led me to re-examine myself a lot. I’ve had to learn and improve my ability in three distinct things, trading (the structural bit), modelling markets (the understanding bit) and finally a bit of psychology (the …
Using Bet Angel to autotrade score-lines in football
Last season I knocked up a spreadsheet that did something interesting.
I didn’t realise at the time, but it turned out to be one of my more popular posts and videos. Basically it used Guardian and our spreadsheet integration to create an imaginative overview on an underlying football match.
I do this sort of stuff all the time to examine all manner of markets. Stepping back from the just the numbers and looking at another representation of the market can …
What does value look like, on a bigger scale
I did a post some time ago called, ‘What value looks like’. Here is the same effect but on a much grander scale, though you should not the familiarity between the two. Finding value is one of the hardest things to do in any betting market because usually the market is hyper efficient. But probably the biggest issue is the wild swings you can get and how they affect your psychology.
In the graph you can see we start …
The rise and rise of Cricket trading
So it’s the Ashes and English expectations are high and liquidity is expected to be so as well. There have been some blockbusting markets on the Ashes in the past so I’m quite interested in keeping an eye on it this time around.
I have to admit though that I’m not a big cricket trader, yet. There are only 24 hours in a day and therefore I have to pick where to put my focus and all my time is …
When is a Tennis player most likely to hold serve?
If you back a player before they serve, they are very likely to win their service game. At which point the odds will contract and you can net a profit, hurrah! Sounds easy, but nothing ever is that simple is it?
So, one itching question I sought to solve last year was “Which game is a player most likely to win on serve”. The hypothesis was that the propensity to win on serve is higher at some times than others.…
An Ace is worth more than a point
When you read that statement it looks a little strange. How can one point be worth more than another? But statistics seem to show that’s true.
Over the last couple of years, I’ve been busy collecting data on a range of Tennis matches from the top level of how a match played, in games and sets, right down to individual points.
I’ve been carefully examining how one point affects another and spotted what seemed to be a bias on serving …
Can you predict 1.01 defeats in Tennis?
Surface problems aside, the main news from Wimbledon this week was the ‘shock’ defeat of Rafa Nadal, shortly followed by Federer. Nadal was a shock, apart from the fact that last year he crashed out in similar circumstances, it was just a round later. Coincidence, predictable or a shock?
A couple of factors play into the hands of the Nadal shock this time. The first is that Rafa’s game leads him to get injured more often than other players, he’s …
Travelling trader
This post has been prompted by this thread in the forum. I don’t know if you remember my post of 2/3 years ago, where I kitted out a holiday cottage so I could trade.
Why? I’ve learnt from past mistakes that if you see an opportunity you take it, in full. So while I’m still in my trading prime, I’d be a fool to turn down the opportunity. Plenty of time to enjoy it later. I also love travelling …
Flat racing falls at the first hurdle, but…
Hopefully the start of the flat season isn’t a portent to the rest of the season!
I always enjoy the Lincoln handicap this Saturday as it can be a pretty useful day and a kick start to the season proper. But not this year, yet. Hopefully things can return to normal and by next weekend we can really get moving.
While we are missing what would be a normal card, opportunity is always in the market if you look at …
From feast to famine
That was a really nice finish to the Festival, I can therefore declare Cheltenham 2013 as a success. Now its back to the grindstone trying to sort the wheat from the chaff; I am findingb lost of chaff.
Cheltenham went well and it was really nice to do that because you tend to measure yourself on prior years and hope you are still moving in the right direction. So it’s reassuring to know you can still do it and in …
Cheltenham – Finishing post is almost in sight!
Gold Cup day is upon us and that means all this weeks fun and games at Cheltenham are almost over.
Yesterday continued the trend of a decline in turnover that we have seen this year. Yesterday was 12% lower than previous years. We also got to add back in the XC chase to the mix and rebasing that back to Tuesday indicated that day declined 7%.
I’m not expecting to break any records this year, to do that needs everything …
Improving conditions at Cheltenham
After a bumpy start on the first day at Cheltenham, day two proved more predictable and productive.
Overall turnover on Betfair was down 10% year on year, which was a surprise. Especially given the incredibly, and completely justified, short price on Sprinter Sacre. It was one hell of a performance and fully justified the price. I wasn’t sure what to the make of the market at first other than it would be almost impossible to trade. But I went for …
Conclusions from Cheltenham day one
And they are off. Sort off, after a delay then a cancelled race.
Hmm, that was a bit of a messy start to Cheltenham but that’s never stopped me in the past and it didn’t yesterday. When I heard that race times were to be put back I wasn’t sure what I would see. Would we get a double surge in volume? No was the in-direct answer to that question, but it obviously did lead to an increase but also …
FA Cup fifth round
So the FA Cup trundles on.
No real surprises so far in terms of how the tournament is playing out. I’ve pointed out in previous blog posts that from a tournament trading perspective it’s dominated by the top teams. So far this year premiership teams have dominated the book% in all rounds and that doesn’t look like it’s going to change.
Volumes on FA Cup matches are lower than higher profile so I’m starting to find it a bit annoying! …
The depths of winter
So here we are at the start of February, in the depths of winter.
Australian Open tennis has just finished, Cheltenham isn’t too far away but for now the immediate outlook is a little weak for me.
It can be pretty tough, especially on the racing front, at this time of year. So it’s only with experience that you learn not to worry, it’s just part of the annual cycle. In the summer opportunities come thick and fast and you …
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 …
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 …
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 …
The Academy
Back in 2004 I stood up in-front of some financial market traders, in Clitheroe of all places, and talked to them about how I traded on Betfair.
Such was the interest that the company that invited me asked me to do a full day of training for them and that was how I started offering advice on how to trade.
Since then things have moved on a lot. It was tough back then as people hadn’t really grasped the concept …
Tactical football trading
As is well publicised, I started my odyssey in sports when I was very young, analysing footy matches looking for draws.
I still endlessly search for new information, a quest to find something that hasn’t been found before. To give you some hope if you are doing the same, I am always finding new things. Sometimes by looking for something else.
I recently revisited how a football match unfolds and if there was information contain in the first half stats …
The comeback kings
When trading you are looking to lay at the shortest possible odds first then trade out at much higher odds, or vice versa. Doesn’t matter which, I’ll take either!
However you need something to happen for that opportunity to arise. In football there are many ways that this can happen but the main method to see a swing in odds is goals.
The perfect scenario is for a team to conceded a goal then comeback to win the match. This …
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