Okay so I got lazy with this and with all the summer evening racing and Greyhounds 4 nights a week I struggled to find the time for regular updates, well any updates really. Now that we are entering a period of the year which is traditionally more quiet I've decided to reboot the Blog and I'm going to start off with a challenge. My starting bank will be £20.
I'll be back later with an update on how day 1 has gone.
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Sunday, May 5, 2013
Who provides In Running liquidity?
Markets on Betfair In Running seem to go through distinct spells. There are the crazy price movement ones (a) where runners flying up and down in price constantly from the start of the race and then there are the markets (b) where the starting price is literally held until the very closing stages when the price either collapses to 1.01 or flies out to 1000. Those are the two extremes.
In my last update below you'll see that I had an extremely good Saturday a few weeks ago. That was an (a) day for sure, tons of liquidity In Running. The week that proceeded it was somewhere in between (a) and (b). and then last Saturday (27th April) the Markets just seemed to die, literally overnight. They didn't pick up again until the following Saturday. In those 7 days the liquidity was dire.
So the question is as in the title: Who provides the liquidity and why a couple of weeks into the start of summer racing did they decide to take a week off? I've had a feeling for some time that the majority of money matched In Running is that of a single person or bot or maybe at best a handful. If that is the case and that/those people decided to to do something else for kicks it would almost certainly spell the end of my time doing this for a living.
In my last update below you'll see that I had an extremely good Saturday a few weeks ago. That was an (a) day for sure, tons of liquidity In Running. The week that proceeded it was somewhere in between (a) and (b). and then last Saturday (27th April) the Markets just seemed to die, literally overnight. They didn't pick up again until the following Saturday. In those 7 days the liquidity was dire.
So the question is as in the title: Who provides the liquidity and why a couple of weeks into the start of summer racing did they decide to take a week off? I've had a feeling for some time that the majority of money matched In Running is that of a single person or bot or maybe at best a handful. If that is the case and that/those people decided to to do something else for kicks it would almost certainly spell the end of my time doing this for a living.
Saturday, April 20, 2013
Longwinded progress update
Its been 5 whole trading days since I posted the initial growth of my fiver to £52 and its been a bit of a hairy 5 days in all honesty. From the top of my head it went something like this:
Wednesday: Started well and I was up to £100 bank by 4pm. I thought it was going to be linear progression from then on but in the evening I had a mini disaster on the dogs markets. For anyone who trades Greyhounds you'll know that RPGTV has now extended its coverage to 5 nights a week. Coventry coming in on Wednesdays and Sundays. I havent traded a Sunday and don't intend to, it's only coverage of the single meeting and I have better things to do, but Wednesday I expected to have taken off a bit after a few weeks. I was getting hammered in every market and started to lose patience, and money. It wasnt until later that I realised there was a Sky Sports meeting being broadcast at the same time (Kinsley) and I suspect a fair bit of potential liquidity was being diverted that way. So started to try to trade that and RPGTV meetings. Basically I got caught short doing a last second trade and ended up with a large unwanted bet. Typically the dog lost. It was a big set back, and the reason that you'll see a decent sized minus in the Greyhound column on the Screenprint below.
Thursday: As is the case when you have a bad day its important to try to forget it and start a fresh, and that's exactly what i did on Thursday. With the Craven meeting on at Newmarket the markets were fairly lively and again I started extremely well. I seem to have a slight issue however at a specific time of the day, usually from 4.30 to 6.30 when liquidity starts to dry up a little and I continue to do what i have been but not being able to get matched and finding the fill rate fairly awful. So I began to give back what I'd made yet again. frustrating to say the least. Then i struck some luck in the 5f dash at Wolves, a speculative £2 on a rank outsider (Forrest Edge I think it was called). It looked to be travelling perfectly well to me and scooted up the rail to win and land me £88 in the process. I did some US racing in the later evening and eventually packed in for the day with a balance of £220.
Friday: I wasn't really on my game on Friday, I was starting to feel the effects of the previous 3 days and was trying to cheat and cut corners and look for big wins, rarely a strategy that is effective when you are growing a small balance. You simply can't sustain big swings in your P&L when you don't have much to begin with. I was punished for this approach and found myself yet again back at £50 come 9pm. That right there is exactly the sort of shit I need to cut out of my trading. I basically did too much Tues-Thurs and knackered myself out a bit and that resulted in me not caring as much as i should have. I pulled myself together enough trade late night markets on US racing and then straight into Oz. I managed £100 from the US markets which actually seem to have picked up considerably in the last week or two (more on that at a later date). Then £50 from OZ which would have been better had it not been for a couple of abandoned meetings which always has a adverse effect on markets.
Saturday: £200 starting point, £20 less than I started the previous day with. knackered from being up until 7am that morning I took a very slow and steady approach, it was all a bit up and down for the first hour and then it went mad, I'd suddenly been gifted the midus touch. Seemingly nothing could go wrong. The edited highlights would be: £78.88 in the 16.00 at Thirsk where i was trading 3 runners who all ended up in a photo for the win with rank outsider Itlaq coming out on top. £265.15 in the 16.30 at Naas where I had a speculative IR bet on Allegra Talk. It was one of those that I would have hedged far earlier than 1.33 but it literally collapsed in price (the bonus of being reactive as apposed to having predefined exit points is that on occasion you clean up). There were other good results of course, £70+ in the Hunters Chase at Bangor, another £70+ in a Naas race, and few decent enough wins at Nottingham in the early part of the evening. The Greyhounds however continue to to ellude me but at least I did manage £20 profit from the handful of races I did. Net result is that I had my best day in a little while at just short of £700 profit. Those sorts of days don't come along as often as they used to so needless to say I'm as happy as a fat kid eating cake :D
Still with me?? Congratulations if you made it through that lot! spare a thought for me, I had to live it! all 500+ markets!!
Anyway, it would be far too easy to go into Sundays racing beaming and over confident and fuck it up, so in the interest of protecting my hard earned I have withdrawn all bar £75 which will be my new bank when i wake up tomorrow lunchtime. Sun through to Tues can be tough so it won't do any harm to rebuild over those 3 days. Once I've made a few grand I'll adjust that strategy accordingly but the principle will largely remain the same.
Evening Turf racing is well under way now and unless we have similar weather to that of last year then I'm extremely optimistic of a cracking summer.
I'll update again in a few days regarding my progress with the £75 bank. before then I'll be back to post something that people might find a little more interesting.
Profit so far: £883.66
Wednesday: Started well and I was up to £100 bank by 4pm. I thought it was going to be linear progression from then on but in the evening I had a mini disaster on the dogs markets. For anyone who trades Greyhounds you'll know that RPGTV has now extended its coverage to 5 nights a week. Coventry coming in on Wednesdays and Sundays. I havent traded a Sunday and don't intend to, it's only coverage of the single meeting and I have better things to do, but Wednesday I expected to have taken off a bit after a few weeks. I was getting hammered in every market and started to lose patience, and money. It wasnt until later that I realised there was a Sky Sports meeting being broadcast at the same time (Kinsley) and I suspect a fair bit of potential liquidity was being diverted that way. So started to try to trade that and RPGTV meetings. Basically I got caught short doing a last second trade and ended up with a large unwanted bet. Typically the dog lost. It was a big set back, and the reason that you'll see a decent sized minus in the Greyhound column on the Screenprint below.
Thursday: As is the case when you have a bad day its important to try to forget it and start a fresh, and that's exactly what i did on Thursday. With the Craven meeting on at Newmarket the markets were fairly lively and again I started extremely well. I seem to have a slight issue however at a specific time of the day, usually from 4.30 to 6.30 when liquidity starts to dry up a little and I continue to do what i have been but not being able to get matched and finding the fill rate fairly awful. So I began to give back what I'd made yet again. frustrating to say the least. Then i struck some luck in the 5f dash at Wolves, a speculative £2 on a rank outsider (Forrest Edge I think it was called). It looked to be travelling perfectly well to me and scooted up the rail to win and land me £88 in the process. I did some US racing in the later evening and eventually packed in for the day with a balance of £220.
Friday: I wasn't really on my game on Friday, I was starting to feel the effects of the previous 3 days and was trying to cheat and cut corners and look for big wins, rarely a strategy that is effective when you are growing a small balance. You simply can't sustain big swings in your P&L when you don't have much to begin with. I was punished for this approach and found myself yet again back at £50 come 9pm. That right there is exactly the sort of shit I need to cut out of my trading. I basically did too much Tues-Thurs and knackered myself out a bit and that resulted in me not caring as much as i should have. I pulled myself together enough trade late night markets on US racing and then straight into Oz. I managed £100 from the US markets which actually seem to have picked up considerably in the last week or two (more on that at a later date). Then £50 from OZ which would have been better had it not been for a couple of abandoned meetings which always has a adverse effect on markets.
Saturday: £200 starting point, £20 less than I started the previous day with. knackered from being up until 7am that morning I took a very slow and steady approach, it was all a bit up and down for the first hour and then it went mad, I'd suddenly been gifted the midus touch. Seemingly nothing could go wrong. The edited highlights would be: £78.88 in the 16.00 at Thirsk where i was trading 3 runners who all ended up in a photo for the win with rank outsider Itlaq coming out on top. £265.15 in the 16.30 at Naas where I had a speculative IR bet on Allegra Talk. It was one of those that I would have hedged far earlier than 1.33 but it literally collapsed in price (the bonus of being reactive as apposed to having predefined exit points is that on occasion you clean up). There were other good results of course, £70+ in the Hunters Chase at Bangor, another £70+ in a Naas race, and few decent enough wins at Nottingham in the early part of the evening. The Greyhounds however continue to to ellude me but at least I did manage £20 profit from the handful of races I did. Net result is that I had my best day in a little while at just short of £700 profit. Those sorts of days don't come along as often as they used to so needless to say I'm as happy as a fat kid eating cake :D
Still with me?? Congratulations if you made it through that lot! spare a thought for me, I had to live it! all 500+ markets!!
Anyway, it would be far too easy to go into Sundays racing beaming and over confident and fuck it up, so in the interest of protecting my hard earned I have withdrawn all bar £75 which will be my new bank when i wake up tomorrow lunchtime. Sun through to Tues can be tough so it won't do any harm to rebuild over those 3 days. Once I've made a few grand I'll adjust that strategy accordingly but the principle will largely remain the same.
Evening Turf racing is well under way now and unless we have similar weather to that of last year then I'm extremely optimistic of a cracking summer.
I'll update again in a few days regarding my progress with the £75 bank. before then I'll be back to post something that people might find a little more interesting.
Profit so far: £883.66
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
A Pleasing Start
So a better than expected start. a handful of US races post midnight followed by a few hours of Autralian action. both returning a nice enough profit given the very small bank.
With Oz markets I find the start to middle of the day to produce the best markets with opportunities tailing off somewhat in the later stages. I've never been able to decide if it's me getting bored and tired or the markets themselves. I guess I should start with 90 minutes of racing left one day to find out. Anyway, despite the ropey ending I'm pleased with my progress.
My £5 starting bank is now worth £52.
Profit so far: £48
With Oz markets I find the start to middle of the day to produce the best markets with opportunities tailing off somewhat in the later stages. I've never been able to decide if it's me getting bored and tired or the markets themselves. I guess I should start with 90 minutes of racing left one day to find out. Anyway, despite the ropey ending I'm pleased with my progress.
My £5 starting bank is now worth £52.
Profit so far: £48
 |
| US |
 |
| OZ |
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Hello and welcome
Hello. I'm Keefter and this is my first of what I hope will be many blog posts.
Some Background:
As long as I can remember I've had a fondness for Betting. As young as 5 years old I would watch horse racing on tv and try to pick the winner, almost always selecting the horse with a number 2 on its saddlecloth. I'm not sure why always number 2, I guess I just liked that number. Of course back then no money was changing hands, though the thrill of being right and the disapointment of being wrong was enough to captivate a young Keefter and I've maintained a keen interest in both betting and horseracing since then.
Sometime around 2006 I stubbled by complete accident on an advert for a piece of software which enabled you to trade Betfair prices before a horse race and lock in a profit which was unaffected by the result of the event in question. The concept was immediately fascinating to me and I gave it a go. Initially I had some minor success but ultimately decided that price movements were largely random and unpredictable. At this time i was in a full time job and whilst I continued to use the software for betting I never traded much until in 2008 I was made redundant. At that point I decided to give trading another go whilst I job searched. I've been trading ever since and the job hunting is a distant memory.
Now I'd like to be sat here at 3am writing about how my life was forever changed from that point forward and that I now live in a small castle and drive a Ferrari but I'm afraid that is far from the truth. Don't get me wrong, I've done okay out of it and I'm not complaining but make no mistake this hard hard graft. It takes time, dedication and a lot of blood sweat and tears. When trading Betfair is your single source of income it can be difficult to grow a significant bank. Often your earnings are swallowed up by your outgoings, no different to any other occupation. Over the years I've developed an interesting skill set and a unique forte. Give me £10k and I'd likely blow it. Give me £10 on the other hand and I'll sit here at this desk for as long as it takes to turn that tenner into a significantly larger amount. I've never in my trading years come accross anyone else who was able to or more accurately; willing to do the same. Now that sounds like me bigging myself up a bit but trust me, it isn't a skill I should be proud of, it's simply a by-product of multiple fuck ups and lack of discipline resulting in me finding myself in an extremely 'short stack' situation. And like anything, if you do it enough you will inevitably become very good at it.
It's those infrequent but monumental fuck ups which have inspired me to start this blog. Over the past couple of years I've written a diary on the Geeks Toy forum of my crazy challenges, all starting with an extremely small bank. You can read that here if you're interested: http://www.geekstoy.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4298 and here http://www.geekstoy.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7385
I found that during these challenges my discipline was much better and I was far more focussed and showed the markets more respect than I usually would. There is something about committing yourself to public scrutiny that brings out the best in me. And that folks is what I'm doing here. Yes my reasons for blogging are 100% selfish ones. But that said perhaps I'll gain the opportunity to meet likeminded people and perhaps even inspire one or two along the way.
I don't want this blog to be one P&L screenshot after another. I do intend to track the results here and discuss the days trading if it's interesting enough to warrant that but I'd also like to write the odd article and perhaps post the odd video from time to time. So this blog will be something of a mixed bag and hopefully an interesting read. There is a great deal of room for improvement in my trading and I will be working toward better and more consistant results. As of now I trade Horse Racing and Greyhound Racing. Horse Racing UK US and OZ (up to the 49 race limit). I'm not going to lie, some of what i do is strickly speaking gambling and not trading, and these days 90% of my UK trading on Horses is done In Running. Leave a comment if you'd like to know more and I'd be happy to answer any questions.
Now in classic Keefter fashion I'm starting with £5 in my Betfair account. by the time Christmas is here that fiver will be worth thousands. Hopefully tens of thousands.
Some Background:
As long as I can remember I've had a fondness for Betting. As young as 5 years old I would watch horse racing on tv and try to pick the winner, almost always selecting the horse with a number 2 on its saddlecloth. I'm not sure why always number 2, I guess I just liked that number. Of course back then no money was changing hands, though the thrill of being right and the disapointment of being wrong was enough to captivate a young Keefter and I've maintained a keen interest in both betting and horseracing since then.
Sometime around 2006 I stubbled by complete accident on an advert for a piece of software which enabled you to trade Betfair prices before a horse race and lock in a profit which was unaffected by the result of the event in question. The concept was immediately fascinating to me and I gave it a go. Initially I had some minor success but ultimately decided that price movements were largely random and unpredictable. At this time i was in a full time job and whilst I continued to use the software for betting I never traded much until in 2008 I was made redundant. At that point I decided to give trading another go whilst I job searched. I've been trading ever since and the job hunting is a distant memory.
Now I'd like to be sat here at 3am writing about how my life was forever changed from that point forward and that I now live in a small castle and drive a Ferrari but I'm afraid that is far from the truth. Don't get me wrong, I've done okay out of it and I'm not complaining but make no mistake this hard hard graft. It takes time, dedication and a lot of blood sweat and tears. When trading Betfair is your single source of income it can be difficult to grow a significant bank. Often your earnings are swallowed up by your outgoings, no different to any other occupation. Over the years I've developed an interesting skill set and a unique forte. Give me £10k and I'd likely blow it. Give me £10 on the other hand and I'll sit here at this desk for as long as it takes to turn that tenner into a significantly larger amount. I've never in my trading years come accross anyone else who was able to or more accurately; willing to do the same. Now that sounds like me bigging myself up a bit but trust me, it isn't a skill I should be proud of, it's simply a by-product of multiple fuck ups and lack of discipline resulting in me finding myself in an extremely 'short stack' situation. And like anything, if you do it enough you will inevitably become very good at it.
It's those infrequent but monumental fuck ups which have inspired me to start this blog. Over the past couple of years I've written a diary on the Geeks Toy forum of my crazy challenges, all starting with an extremely small bank. You can read that here if you're interested: http://www.geekstoy.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4298 and here http://www.geekstoy.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7385
I found that during these challenges my discipline was much better and I was far more focussed and showed the markets more respect than I usually would. There is something about committing yourself to public scrutiny that brings out the best in me. And that folks is what I'm doing here. Yes my reasons for blogging are 100% selfish ones. But that said perhaps I'll gain the opportunity to meet likeminded people and perhaps even inspire one or two along the way.
I don't want this blog to be one P&L screenshot after another. I do intend to track the results here and discuss the days trading if it's interesting enough to warrant that but I'd also like to write the odd article and perhaps post the odd video from time to time. So this blog will be something of a mixed bag and hopefully an interesting read. There is a great deal of room for improvement in my trading and I will be working toward better and more consistant results. As of now I trade Horse Racing and Greyhound Racing. Horse Racing UK US and OZ (up to the 49 race limit). I'm not going to lie, some of what i do is strickly speaking gambling and not trading, and these days 90% of my UK trading on Horses is done In Running. Leave a comment if you'd like to know more and I'd be happy to answer any questions.
Now in classic Keefter fashion I'm starting with £5 in my Betfair account. by the time Christmas is here that fiver will be worth thousands. Hopefully tens of thousands.
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