Firedave trading Betfair with Bet Angel

This weekend was very enjoyable. We went to Wembley to watch Carlisle play Southampton in the Johnstone's Paint Trophy. It was one of those weekends where, although we did a lot of travelling, everything was perfect. We met up with a lot of our friends we hadn't seen for a while. Had a good trip round London, and had a superb meal.  What more could we want!

Admittedly we were cheering for Carlisle - so the score could've been better!  Wembley looks great, and with the 73,000 spectators there yesterday the sound was brilliant. The acoustics are shocking, but the atmosphere exuberating.  Burger, chips and a soft drink all under £8!

Trading today was good and steady. A couple of races were profitable, a couple I had to cut at a loss and overall a small profit. Fingers crossed the rest of the week will be as successful, if not more.

McLaren managed to predict the weather conditions to record the fastest practice sessions. This normally worries me as the fastest in practice tends not to be the winner of the race - Hamilton must still have had his racing shoes on when leaving the track as he managed to get his road car impounded!

Trading today was okay, managed a good P&L but still let a couple of ugly positions run a little too long. I need to figure out a good way of managing multiple trades at once. For example, looking at my What is trading post I go through an example of a single trade. Often though I have many trades waiting to be picked up, and if these go wrong then I need to be more ready to cut the loss.  If too quick though, the trending pattern often returns to the position and any profits can be cut.

Quite a solid day trading today. Made sure I was cutting my bad trades early and holding on to profitable ones. I  found some of the markets quite difficult to read today and was expecting a lot more reversals. In fact what tended to happen were huge steamers or drifters. I was left wondering why I wasn't on one of these. By the time the whole ladder had been gone through I always feel that it is a little late to join the party.

There were a few humorous moments (even trading can be fun!) when someone thought it was amusing to put £14K bets into the market.  The strange thing was that it had very little influence on them, despite the fact that it was several factors bigger than anything else available. I just found myself having a chuckle thinking that if that actually got taken up someone would be having a headache.

I've been working on some longer posts, which are nearly written and just need some images which I will be sharing in the next couple of weeks.

Another good day today trading-wise. However, the day's P&L was down today through no fault of my own. The BetFair API went down. I have been aware they've been having issues and wasn't surprised that it happened but I did think they may have resolved their issues since the last couple of months record is not good for them.

A new trick learned today, have another copy of Bet Angel open in non-API mode (mode 1), make sure auto-refresh is off so not to incur additional charges.  This means that when the API is down you will still be able to close out your position. Too bad for me today but thankfully it was a manageable amount. I will definitely be using this trick going forward!

Exeter saw the horses start, then disappear, then one would be announced the winner. This was today's amusement due to the heavy mist that was experienced at their race course.

Looking at a new strategy and there may be some promise with this.  BetFair graph reading, entry points are still the same but exit points and especially when to take the exit is my emphasis at the moment. I can get a high percentage of moves correctly in the past but the occasional wrong move would put me disproportionally out for the day (or month!)  Having previously decided what my maximum loss for a single race is I can make sure to cut any losses before they become big. The issue with this is a lot of profit can be cut in choppy, more volatile markets.  Today I made sure I was out of all markets before 10 seconds before the off and had a happy, no heart attack day of trading. Yesterday's trading went well although overall the P&L was -£1. Today was positive and is re-enforcing the new attitude. As I have indicated in previous posts, if I can get the consistency which must be from the discipline then this may have a chance of working. I'm a long way off at the moment, but understanding that is at least a rung on the ladder!

Happy trading! :)

I have now managed to track down what happened on Thursday last week and will be a useful hint for those traders just starting out and something to watch for. One thing in particular to do with trading is making sure that all trading has been finished before going in-play for horseracing. If you have been on Peter Webb's course then you may be aware of a little trick to help with this.  Ideally, if you have pictures you can see when the race is about to start and make sure all trades are exited in sufficient time. If like me, you're still trading without pictures then it is essential to make sure you are out of all trades at 10 seconds before the off on the timer. Actually, very rarely do the races start on time which brings in this ill-discipline of closing out at the correct time.  One tactic to squeeze out some extra seconds would be to select 'Take SP' which if the price hits the requested price then fine, but if it strays and goes in-play then the Betfair starting price of the race will be used instead.

Great I hear...well, it always, always pays to read the rules for whatever market you trade on.  The reason I say this is that if you use this particular tip to help out in tricky situations, then make sure you're using big enough stakes. If you are just short of a back at a certain price you will almost always get this filled at the current SP. However, if you're looking to lay and take SP you must have a liability of over £10. So if you're using small stakes to learn, then £4 at 3.20 odds would only have a liability of £8.80. This would cause the bet to lapse when it goes in-play rather than take the expected SP which could've been odds of 3.8.

This post is from an original article that was published in 'CTCN' by "Anonymous Trader".

I found this article whilst looking over other trading forums and it amused me so wanted to put it up here for feedback from other traders and observers. I quite like the steps and feel a lot of it is true. I would say that I have definitely got to step 14 but feel I am at or around step 24. I really am looking forward to reaching step 38 but at the moment it feels a distant dream!  The difference between success and failure in trading seems to be a really thin line.  Over confidence is as bad as no confidence and fear is terrible for situations that require clear thinking. It is interesting that according to the steps that you have to learn about yourself before you can be successful. Another post I saw is that there are actually only 3 rules to trading, discipline, discipline and lastly discipline.

1. We accumulate information - buying books, going to seminars and researching.

2. We begin to trade with our 'new' knowledge.

3. We consistently 'donate' and then realize we may need more knowledge or information.

4. We accumulate more information.

5. We switch the commodities we are currently following.

6. We go back into the market and trade with our 'updated' knowledge.

7. We get 'beat up' again and begin to lose some of our confidence.

 Fear starts setting in.

8. We start to listen to 'outside news' and to other traders.

9. We go back into the market and continue to 'donate'.

10. We switch commodities again.

11. We search for more information.

12. We go back into the market and start to see a little progress.

13. We get 'over-confident' and the market humbles us.

14. We start to understand that trading successfully is going to take more time and more knowledge than we anticipated.

Most people will give up at this point, as they realize work is involved.

15. We get serious and start concentrating on learning a 'real' methodology.

16. We trade our methodology with some success, but realize that something is missing.

17. We begin to understand the need for having rules to apply our methodology.

18. We take a sabbatical from trading to develop and research our trading rules.

19. We start trading again, this time with rules and find some success, but over all we still hesitate when it comes time to execute.

 20. We add, subtract and modify rules as we see a need to be more proficient with our rules.

21. We feel we are very close to crossing that threshold of successful trading.

22. We start to take responsibility for our trading results as we understand that our success is in us, not the methodology.

23. We continue to trade and become more proficient with our methodology and our rules.

24. As we trade we still have a tendency to violate our rules and our results are still erratic.

25. We know we are close.

26. We go back and research our rules.

27. We build the confidence in our rules and go back into the market and trade.

28. Our trading results are getting better, but we are still hesitating in executing our rules.

29. We now see the importance of following our rules as we see the results of our trades when we don't follow the rules.

30. We begin to see that our lack of success is within us (a lack of discipline in following the rules because of some kind of fear), and we begin to work on knowing ourselves better.

31. We continue to trade and the market teaches us more and more about ourselves.

32. We master our methodology and our trading rules.

33. We begin to consistently make money.

34. We get a little over-confident and the market humbles us.

35. We continue to learn our lessons.

36. We stop thinking and allow our rules to trade for us (trading becomes boring, but successful) and our trading account continues to grow as we increase our contract size.

37. We are making more money than we ever dreamed possible.

38. We go on with our lives and accomplish many of the goals we had always dreamed of.

With all the Denmania hype and Kauto Star's incredible record, who was going to be this years Cheltenham Gold Cup hero?

Imperial Commander

Okay, I am being slightly harsh and the race was great fun to watch. Kauto Star wasn't jumping well at all and took an ugly fall. Denman looked like he might have got it but ran out of steam at the end.  The amusing thing from a trader's point of view is that of the £10.8 million traded on the race, £7.4 million was matched on Kauto Star alone. This is ludicrously out of proportion.

I've been given a few tips on how to manage my account - this is to hopefully prevent the large losses that I encountered and instead of thinking about how much to make from each race my focus will be more on how little to lose on each race.  Having said this, today I've hit another interesting area of Betfair and their starting price calculations. To make sure I wasn't going in-play I accepted to take the SP on the lay side for £16. I know I did this as it is very clearly in my Bet Angel logs. When trying to find these lay bets though in Betfair they appear under the lapsed bets. The only thing I can think that has happened here is that there wasn't enough back bets to cover my £16. I find this highly unlikely and will continue investigating. In the meantime I'll not be using the take SP button though!

It has been really good fun watching Cheltenham races and seeing how friendly the jockies are to each other even though they're racing against each other. A really nice touch was when AP McCoy handed over his armband to Ruby Walsh when Ruby had just landed another win.

From a trading point of view, I have been doing well but getting frustrated with the smaller stakes. Another day of no in-running trades so I think it is worthwhile forcing and emphasising this habit. I can't see that the trading is really any different from more volatile meets with small stakes, as the way the money is moving around it is a lot easier to get out of difficult positions if only a small amount of money needs to get matched. The experience is fun still and confidence is slowly being rebuilt!

The festival is in full swing and it is totally awe inspiring seeing how much money is traded on these races. Before it was a good race if £700k is matched by the end of the race. The first race of the festival had £8 million! It is still good to see that the races vary even with the higher levels of liquidity.  Some stuck to their trending patterns and took a while to get matched but you knew the price wasn't going to shoot off.  Others the price fluctuated much quicker but again you knew that the true punting money was making sure the price didn't go too far.  Both of these extremes were much easier to read and I managed to get money through the markets but with reduced stakes whilst I get used to the feel.

I got to the bottom of my difficulties I was having, and in essence I was right with my previous post. The underlying issue, which is obvious when thinking about it, was to have greened up at the current price it would've exceeded my total bank as liability. Therefore, if the runner did manage to get over the line first I wouldn't have had sufficient funds in my account for Betfair to have settled.  To regain some composure and think things through I have reduced my stakes again.  This will give me a solid base to try out differing tactics and really work on closing bad positions and changing between speculative and aggressive styles. Today I used just £2 stakes, right back to basics. I managed to get these through the market more than ever before and had a positive day.  Nothing like the losses I have incurred, but a 2% increase with those stakes.

I was asked the other day whether an increase in stakes would result in bigger P&L. This is a multi answer question, but based on my particular progress to date, is that the bank must be sufficiently large to allow for the bigger stakes.  The positive here, is that I am readdressing the basics to help with an increase in stakes.