Firedave trading Betfair with Bet Angel

Documenting my experiences with Bet Angel using BetFair. This will be used to record my progress as I take trading on full time.

Bet Angel - The most effective tool for Betfair

One of the main reasons for keeping the blog was to keep a diary of how my trading goes. This will help me learn and see how I was doing at the beginning to how I am doing now. Another reason of keeping the blog is to show others what is possible and how I am achieving the gains (although small at the moment, I feel these could become more impressive as my bank grows). To this end, I would like to say that my bank has gone from £20 to now £99.76 but not totally with trading. There were two events in between that helped. I am a huge fan of tennis, and when I saw Rafa Nadal playing the way he was at the French, then Queens, I was not going to miss the opportunity of backing him to win Wimbledon. This accounted for a small jump in fortune. The other, slightly larger increase (£20) was due to a good shout from my girlfriend. She wanted to place a bet on Spain in the football to win the Euros; which they did. The other £50 is from trading using Bet Angel. Since I started this blog back in March, it isn't terribly impressive amount for 5 months work. I do know I definitely wasn't trading anywhere near every week (let alone day). Ideally I would keep my betting account separate to my trading account. However, this would require me not to use Bet Angel as my interface (and having used it I find it hard to use BetFairs own interface!)

Aug 11, 2008

Steady going...


Although this seemed like just half an hours trading, it actually took place over an hour when I made a trade, went for a run in between the penultimate and last trades. These were awkward markets, as there was very little money. Try not to enter a market if no trends have formed (anything less than 300K is no good really). My bank is just shy of £95, this makes trading at size £3-£5 ticks very difficult when the price is low (Sub 2) and today all of the trading was around this value. However, a couple of swings I saw coming and was near the front a couple of times. I wanted to put my P&L up because I thought it showed what you could do in a short time with little effort. However, it wasn't as short as I thought it was and it wasn't a great bit of trading. However, I am now a few pence off the £100 mark. A few more days of this, and I hope to be able to trade the lower prices as often as the ones around the 5-8 mark. Happy trading (let me know if you use anything different to Bet Angel, always glad to hear other ways of making a few pence!) :D

Well I was getting itchy for a bit of trading. Having not done any for the last couple of weeks due to time pressures, I was wanting to have a quick session on Bet Angel. I opened up the market and selected a few markets to trade in the next half hour. The first race got off well with spotting the swing and taking a few ticks. I followed up with chasing the swing the other direction and made myself £2.56 after greening. OK, not huge amounts, but I was only using a £2 minimum bet...

I thought to myself, I can see what is happening here, let's try using the tick size as previously discussed. I set the tick size to £1, so every tick I make will make £1 before greening up. Had another stormer, where I had £10 on the favourite before greening. This turned into £3.01 after greening. I did 2 other races which were fairly small earners, dipped in and scratched out as I saw the money turning against me.

I know £5.57 isn't a lot, but with a bank of £90 it is a decent percentage. I think I will definitely continue with the tick size now my bank is large enough to sustain it. It also is becoming more profitable for the time invested. I think when I can get the tick size to be around £3-£5 it will be a lot more worth the time. On average, I will be hoping to take £5-£10 per race... but I will keep you posted on how that will pan out!

Aug 5, 2008

Tick Size

Tick size means, that for every tick I want to make/can afford to lose £x. This is set up in Bet Angel and means Bet Angel will calculate the amounts required to bet/lay to achieve the tick size.

Tick size is the most important criteria when judging how well you are doing. This eliminates the necessity of, how much do I need to bet or lay on a particular horse (or whichever market you are trading) but makes you think “How many ticks have I achieved today.” This shift in thought will really help with discipline and keep you on the straight and narrow.

At first I thought this was a bit of a gimmick. So I tried out the two scenarios. I tried a day of trading with set amounts based on what odds the market was offering, and I tried a day of trading using tick size. The day without the tick size enabled, I was still in profit and thought well what can tick size actually do for me. When I applied the tick size, I was amazed by the difference. When I checked my bank it had actually doubled the days profit. Now I am not saying that this is really a very good test, in fact I can see immediately that one day’s trading may well have been better than the other. However, what it did show me, was that it consistently made the correct choice (without me knowing.) At the end of the day I could clearly see that I was up 15 ticks. Whereas, before I could say my bank was up £x, but this didn’t relate to how well the day had gone (was this one big positive trade with lots of losses?)

Either way, use the tick size. It will help! If you don’t believe me, give it a try and let me know your comments! J

Hi! Sorry for the long time off period. I will be updating my blog over the next few weeks as a lot has happened since my last post. Getting more in to scraping, and in to the proper world of trading rather than odds betting. I have also had a mentoring session, which I will talk about in a separate post. The bank is up to £90 with only a couple of days trading from my last post. I will go over a few of the techniques that I have tried and failed, and that I have been more successful with. Also, I will have a couple of posts on whether this might be something I would like to do more full time, and commercial decisions that this would influence. The betfair market, reliability and sustainability are all aspects that I will be looking at as the credit crunch is well under way. Please keep posted, and I enjoy reading all the comments I have been getting. If anyone is keen to purchase the full license for Bet Angel, then please use the links on my blog. :)