Tag: trading
An ill wind….
Tis an Ill win that blows no good, so they say. With an ill wind blowing down from the artic it looks like racing is going to suffer badly over the next week. Saturday is pretty much a wipe out by the look of it.
So….. Hopefully you can now see the context of this blog entry back in the summer.
I know it seemed odd to some that you would put trading first in these situations. But that week …
There was a little girl
You may have heard this poem before: –
There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.
The market can feel like that at times and it can be the very thing that throws you off balance. But you have to believe that just as the market can be horrid she can be very good …
95% of traders lose?
95% of traders lose is a very common statistic quoted, but I’ve never seen any data on it. Somebody recently sent this to me about forex traders, which I thought made interesting reading. Obviously this is limited to the scope and definition of the survey but I think it’s an interesting article and discussion. It also shows the importance of money management and low transaction costs.
As they say, 47.3% of statistics are made up on the spot!
https://forexmagnates.com/us-forex-brokers-account-profitability-comparison/
Betfair’s LMAX up and running
It looks like Betfiar’s financial markets operation, LMAX, is up and running. I am on their mailing list but haven’t received anything yet. However, if you visit the following site you can read about LMAX and sign up for an account and browse the site.
The first thing I tried to find was charges. It appears Betfair are going to adopt a normal financial market model of charging for a buy and sell, there are some example trades here: …
X Factor alert
OK, I know you are thinking, what’s Peter doing talking about the X Factor! But, for anybody that has been on my course, the news that a new contestant is likely to be added to the market on Saturday should be a signal to get involved in the market.
As with all things, there is a bit of uncertaintly here. But you could get some good upside if the 13th contestant does arrive. For once in my life I will …
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 …
Well done Nadal
Well done to Rafa Nadal who completed a career grand slam this morning, UK time, at the US Open. He looked good value for the win, though I only stayed up till 11pm to watch it, but at that point the rain stopped play. I looked at the recording and spreadsheet data this morning for the part I missed. It didn’t appear to restart till 1am this morning.
It’s been a good trading tournament and I took forward my Wimbledon …
Lucky unluckiness
Was really looking forward to watching the US open final Tennis on Sunday when………….. boom! All the power goes in the house.
I think SSE have done a bad job on the electrics around here as once a year the same thing happens. I knew what would be coming next, a few hours later a van would arrive dig up the road and replace the underground cabling. After chasing for a few hours I got a positive answer that this …
Trading Tennis
The US open has provided some excellent trading opportunities so far and there are probably many more to come as we reach the more competitive stages of the tournament. Tonight the Wawrinka v Youzhny match looks particularly interesting, especially with the way Wawrinka has been playing.
If you get the right set up, trading a service game is a particularly good strategy. With Tennis Trader you will also know what chance the server has of winning the game and your …
Just goes to show
It aint over till the fat lady sings as they say. Trading the Murray v Wawrinka match well this evening and managed to lay some off some of the profit on Murray at very short odds, looking for a Wawrinka fight back. I got one and Murray really let his head drop when broken twice in the third set. He really looked on his way out of the third set and possibly the match. Murray called on the trainer during …
Automated trading
Early on in the development of Bet Angel I decided we should be able to link to a spreadsheet. Doing this meant that I & other Bet Angel users could experiment to their hearts content, create new views of the market or new trading tools using the spreadsheet. Since the first primitive implementation we have worked hard to add additional features so if you haven’t used it recently give it a try
There are many useful things you can use …
August
August turned out to be an interesting month.
I wasn’t sure what to expect, coming into it off the back of a record month, so I set my much expectations lower. It turned out to be a pretty good month anyhow and I was just short of my third best month of the year. I now tend to glance at prior years to figure what I should achieve and I was more or less on target based on years prior. …
Underrated strategy
I covered the ‘lay the field’ strategy in some depth in racing ahead magazine a couple of months or so ago, it’s an easy strategy that works well and has been popular amongst exchange users for years. On Bet Angel you just need to set the odds, a value and click to lay the field.
To make it work, all you need to do is look for a market with a great deal of uncertainty about it. One market that …
Working holiday
I can now finally explain my ‘very satisfying‘ comment from a little while back.
Under duress from my wife and kids, this year we decided to have some ‘time off’ in August. I usually holiday in the winter when the sporting schedule is very quiet, but this year we took a summer ‘holiday’ as well. With the summer sporting schedule in full flow, it would prove very costly financially to just take time off; the winter is the …
Getting stung
I got stung twice on Tuesday. Both incidents were pretty rare but taught me a lesson.
Sting one, we have a wasps nest in the Garden. Despite many attempts to get rid of it, they still persist. We called in the specialists in but that was only a temporary respite. So I took matters into my own hands and had a good poke around in the composter to locate it. Unfortunately the wasps were wise to me and one poke …
My lucky day
Nothing lucky about the result which was fine, but it was more the manner in which it was achieved. Often you can wade into a market and everything goes wrong. Nothing works the way it ‘should’ and bad postions get worse and so do good ones. Yesterday was unusual, in that I forcast a poor day but I didn’t really get any significant negatives yesterday. It just seemed that when I got myself into a hole, it quickly offered me …
An easy way to maintain discipline
There are no end of horror stories out there of people that fail to exit a position before the off and then they let that trade turn into a gamble. If you struggle with this or simply want to automate some aspects of your trading you may want to use a spreadsheet in conjunction with Bet Angel to help you achieve this.
Using Bet Angel you can link to a spreadsheet and automate a variety of elements of your trading …
Getting burnt
This title could be a reflection on the weather in the UK at the moment, which is fantastic. Lots of us took advantage in the last couple of weeks to head out with the children during the Easter holidays. As a result, quite a few have a bit of burnt skin thanks to the less than common, warm and persistent sunshine. It’s not unheard of though, as I remember running the London marathon in 1996 when the temperature was 20c, …
Day of the drifter
Sounds like a documentary of some sort, but this was the predominant feature in Monday’s horse racing markets.
In our etenral quest for knowledge, we run strategies in the back ground all the time. These can be to test new ideas or simply to explore certain aspects in the market. One of the strategies we often run is to test how ‘swingy’ the markets are. It’s simple, every minute from four minutes out we pop an order in the market …
Murray suffers shock defeat
1.12 turned over, in a shock defeat.
However, short odds turned over in these sorts of matches are not uncommon. If you limit a match to three sets then the propensity for an upsets shoots up. One break of serve, if you are serving first, wins you the set. A couple of errors in the next set and the match is over. If the prospect of a shock was high, then it was in space yesterday when Tipsy took Murray …
Some interesting charts
In these very dull UK markets excitement is hard to come by, but here are some interesting charts for you.
First a weird one from Fairyhouse yesterday. It’s fairly obvious that the Irish racing is quite likely to be more volatile than the UK racing, this race in particular was always going to see the odds move around a fair bit. But I didn’t expect to see what happened here.
This next chart was certainly more readable. Tons of money …
Big backer back
I’m sure you have seen this from time to time, but it appears a big backer is back in the market. Southwell was subject to some unusual moves yesterday but it was at Catterick that the unusual activity stuck out like a sore thumb. Despite studying the moves yesterday, I couldn’t really see a pattern. You can see in the chart below the two big volumes spikes that occurred when the price was smashed in.
Whether you trade the favourite …
So close….
Almost a blockbuster start on Saturday when Lady Jinks, priced at 1000, almost won the first race at Chepstow.
If I make something on a race, I’ll often put a little on the outsiders, generally in the jumps season, in the hope of catching a big one. In this race Lady Jinks put in a great show and surprised everybody by shortening to as little as 5’s before fluffing the last fence. It was agonising to watch as she just …
Ten pound trader – Day two
Using maximum stakes of £11.76, ten pound trader managed to make £3.73 yesterday. That’s represents a 31.72% return on stake size on the day. Sounds impressive! Well it is, but it isn’t, but I hope my point will come across over the course of this post.
If I asked if you could return the same percentage on the day, you would probably be hesitant. But if I asked you if you could make 11p a race you would probably have …
Ten pound trader – Day one
After a great September I had considered posting up the P&L for last month and also the last three months in total as they are absolute stonkers. But as I went to prepare the image for upload I paused for thought.
I guess they show what is possible, but having been around for so long you would suspect that I should be able to pull in something special, especially with bigger amounts of capital to hand. So I had another …
Are cats good at trading?
I did a post on rats trading, so I had to share this users post on the forum with you: –
“Don’t know if this has happened to anyone else, but was trading a 3rd favourite today, odds of 8 – 8.2. I just couldn’t get it right. Ended up losing £11 on the race before the 5 minute to go warning. At this I decided to have a break and went to the shop to get some fags. …
Iffy the comeback
I think I may have to buy this horse, I follow it’s fortunes so often. It ran, yes that’s right, it ran, this evening at Kempton. It has such a dodgy record for running I had my finger poised but it actually managed to race tonight. Maybe it’s something to do with longer races that it doesn’t like? Anyhow, for the record, here is its record: –
https://www.gg.com/racing/horseform.php/iffy-gb/3710.html
Return on turnover
While I’m in the mood let’s talk about return on turnover as well. I’ve tracked my return on turnover for some time as I feel this is the key to sustaining longevity in the market. It also tells you a lot about trading.
Adam Heathcote recently put up a spreadsheet sent by Betfair detailing how much he had turned over and earned this year. On this sheet is shows that Adam’s return on turnover was 0.17%. If you wind the …
Simple scalping
We uploaded this video recently and it has proved pretty popular so I thought I would put this on the blog. It’s just a simple guide to the thought process that goes into a simple scalp. On this video we get £40 gross with a couple of quick scalps on something priced at 6’s. Double click the video to enlarge. Enjoy…
Barcelona vs Shaktar
My models suggest a price of around 5.50 for the draw. Currently it is trading at 5.2 to back so this suggests, for once, there is value in laying the draw here. Even if I use a pessimistic view I wouldn’t shorten the price to less than 5.35. That said there isn’t a great deal to play for in this match.
Most of these assumptions revolve around the price of Barca. I would price them around 1.36 versus the 1.42 …
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