Diary of a Beginner

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RollingR
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Nov 01, 2022 8:12 am

Hi everyone, I've been learning to trade the horse racing markets for the past two weeks or so (coming from some football trading success before that).

I've found trading the horses pre-off to be a very confusing affair, sometimes feeling like I have a firm handle on things, and then shortly after feeling like I know nothing. I aim to change this.

Right now I'm doing three things I think will certainly make a large difference:

1. Recording my trades.
2. Cataloguing trades captured on video by both Peter and the person from a course I'm following. This is going to involve taking screenshots and writing down what trade they made and why - I anticipate that training pattern recognition in this way will prove very beneficial.
3. Watching back my previous trades and videos of the market with no trades being placed, and watching for opportunities (patterns that I've picked up on or seen used by other traders) - and watching to see if they unfold successfully.

For context, I've read and am re-reading "Sports trading on Betfair: Profitable Betting Exchange...", am following Peter's free horse trading course and am following another course more focused on scalping (this was where I began Horse race trading). So I've read a lot of theory, tried to put a bunch of it in practice, and am now trying to tie it all together in my head using the three techniques I listed above.

I plan to use this thread to post my progress in these areas and to elicit feedback from you guys - hopefully this can help other beginners and help me too from people pointing out any flawed analyses I post.
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Kai
Posts: 6099
Joined: Tue Jan 20, 2015 12:21 pm

Hello there, people probably missed your post since first time posters go through a spam filter of sorts.

But that sounds like a sensible plan and methodology, have gone through a similar bootcamp. This market is a good place to learn overall, the lessons are conveniently scheduled inside those few afternoon hours and you get dozens of different quick opportunities to hone your skill.

Best of luck!
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ShaunWhite
Posts: 9731
Joined: Sat Sep 03, 2016 3:42 am

If you've only been trading horses for 2 weeks then you probably just need to relax, trade min stakes and just get a few thousand markets under your belt. If you start trying to look at how individual markets are moving you're very likely to fall foul of recentism and being influenced by standout situations. Human brains just aren't designed to look at 100s or 1000s of situations (especially Screenshot or notes) and identify the many small nuanced differences or commonalities. It's why manual trading takes so long to master, it's just not possible to shortcut the subliminal learning that only builds up over time at the screen.

Where the suggested analysis breaks down is that you can be doing the right thing and still lose, that's hard to see especially for a beginner. Even with experience you might be right only 50-70% of the time so if you spend all day trading and due to randomness you lose 80% of them how will you know if you were doing it right or not? The reverse is also true, you can trade badly and make money for a few days. In markets where a blind man can break even, understanding what's down to skill and what's just good fortune is something that you're unlikely to see in a pile of notes.
RollingR
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Nov 01, 2022 8:12 am

Thanks for the responses Shaun and Kai - I definitely recognize experience in the markets to be a non-negotiable, but I feel like as long as I'm training my mind to recognize certain setups in addition to actually trading the markets each day, eventually things should start coming together.

I was originally going to post my thoughts on various things I'm learning - for example, Peter uploaded a video soon after my post yesterday, and before he explained what he thought of the markets, I wrote down everything I saw and whether/what trade I would make. I was going to post what I had thought as it gives an insight into my thought process as a beginner, and what I missed and didn't miss. I've been doing a lot of that stuff lately though, so instead I'm going to try to make one post a day going through my plan for the day's trading, and how it actually turned out.

Hopefully this will also help structure my own learning, as I have to dissect what went wrong and what went right as objectively as possible.

Until tomorrow.
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The Silk Run
Posts: 902
Joined: Mon May 14, 2018 12:53 am
Location: United Kingdom

Two GOOD time-served mentors onboard their. Your onto a WINNER ;)
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Realrocknrolla
Posts: 1903
Joined: Fri Jun 05, 2020 7:15 pm

Good luck… I look forward to following just like the GOAT thread!
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ShaunWhite
Posts: 9731
Joined: Sat Sep 03, 2016 3:42 am

Realrocknrolla wrote:
Tue Nov 15, 2022 9:12 pm
Good luck… I look forward to following just like the GOAT thread!
Me too. Goat had the skills to go in a very specific direction I had knowledge of, I'm looking forward to seeing how others guide this guy to profit with his/their skillset and approach. I don't think I could add much to this one.
RollingR
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Nov 01, 2022 8:12 am

Finding the patterns

Since I posted a few days ago, I've had a slightly different strategy almost every day - but the one constant is I've traded a lot, and I've recorded almost every trade. The trades themselves have been up and down, although probably the most dramatic change has been drip feeding my exit order - both when greening up and when I lose some confidence in a trade. I began by trying to get 1 tick profits, but this proved as hard, if not more difficult than trying to get more than 1 tick, because the price would often blow away in the other direction, leaving me with many ticks loss for just 1 tick profit on profitable trades.

Now, I was making obvious mistakes. Laying at the top of ranges, or when the second favourite was just passing through an incremental point causing a big spike in price on the favourite...

So I made a checklist:
  • How much time is left?
  • Where are the key points?
  • What’s drifting, what’s steaming? (pressure)
  • Which horses are correlated/ready for a break?
  • Is your selection at the bottom/top of its range?
This has helped me somewhat to avoid very silly trades, but I still find myself going through periods of trading multiple races with a profit, and then trading multiple races with a loss. So, I'm taking action.

Training the Brain

A lot of opportunities come around the key points in the market (2,3,4,6...), so I'm compiling a string of videos where the price either bounces or passes through a key point within 30 secs or so. I have so many videos of me trading by this point that I couldn't for the life of me tell you by memory whether it did or not - so I'd have to use my market reading abilities to do it.

My goal is to use these videos to predict whether it bounces, pass through, just tinkers over etc.
Paying attention to order flow, other runners, and everything I can to predict the result - as well as this,
I'll be predicting as much as I can about market moves that I see in the video. I'll be wrong a lot. And that's fine.
The point is to predict and get rapid feedback, which is a big help when learning.

I've already done the exercise on a video of these trades this evening and it's certainly been enlightening.
Thus far my predictions have been FAR better than my actual trading, and a number of times I predicted the exact price at
which something would reverse. This probably a lot of luck, but it might also indicate a more dispassionate reading of the market being available to me when I'm not trading it. We'll see.

Either way, I plan to spend most of tomorrow predicting - in as much detail as I can (I can also make 50-50 predictions if I'm truly not sure) - how the market will move. If I bombard my brain with as many data points as possible, then I can give it the best chance of success.
Failing that, maybe I can construct some statistical model of which prices are likely to break through or bounce from the key points with the data from all the videos I've recorded.

Thanks for all the positive responses guys, it's very much appreciated - your enthusiasm gives me fuel to carry on this great journey.

Until next time.
RollingR
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Nov 01, 2022 8:12 am

First Profitable Day

So, you might be forgiven for thinking I had disappeared.
The truth is, the difficulty of becoming profitable finally hit and I had a bit of a hermit/knuckling
down phase doing everything possible to get to a halfway decent level of competence in this skill.

The false dawns have been truly astonishing - many days I'd start off very well, but try as I might,
I would inevitably end the day in the red. Every day. I was using small stakes anyway but went back to practice
mode and started staking using tick size. I also intensively examined steamers, drifters, and bounce trades, as I think
they're all closely related.

In addition to all this, I started taking screenshots of my trades (the entry) and comparing them
to screenshots of the entries of actual traders (for the same type of trade e.g steamer, drifter, etc).

And finally I had a day in profit. This is the P&L:

0.6
-2.59 (tried to trade out for break-even, but was too slow. Going to use the 'c' shortcut to close my position when price rockets away in future)
-0.08
-1.01
-1.53
2.9
0.46
0.78
2.36
-1.15
0.88
0.83
0.43
1.00
2.61
-0.63

Total = 5.86

This is by no means conclusive evidence that I've cracked things, but it does feel like an important landmark along the way.
I'm starting to recognize patterns and tie things together - I had a phase (right in the beginning) of only looking at WOM, then I had a phase of only looking at other runners, then very recently I had a phase of only looking at the order flow and chart patterns.

I feel I'm now tying all these together and not zoning in on only one of these aspects - and I'm learning (slowly) to weight them accordingly.
Although I say this as someone who's only had 1 profitable day.

Regardless, I am excited to keep improving.
Anbell
Posts: 2007
Joined: Fri Apr 05, 2019 2:31 am

Good for you. There'll be many more humbling days to come, and that's ok.
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ShaunWhite
Posts: 9731
Joined: Sat Sep 03, 2016 3:42 am

It can be difficult to know how much is ability and how much is being fortunate. If you trade with your eyes closed then 50% will be profitable/loss making anyway. Its also the case that you can be doing the right thing and lose on some days or visa versa. To give a clearer picture and to prevent down days from being demoralising you should judge your results on a rolling 7 or even rolling 30 days rather than looking at 1 day at a time.
worldplaywithangel
Posts: 16
Joined: Tue Jun 28, 2022 7:05 pm

I started trading for 9 months ago, never traded before. I have sometimes come home 1 am and just started reading about horse race trading, so I'm extremely dedicated but my motivation is in decline, however I'm still working hard.

Looking back since when I started that might help you as a beginner:
- completely forget about going into profit. I mean COMPLETELY forget about going into profit. Do not care about P/L as it's hard to measure anyway in the beginning. Very experienced traders even have random weeks or even months with unexplainable losses. Or they might win when they are actually doing the wrong thing due to luck (as someone else said in this thread already). So imo trading is about seeing the same things many times over and over, eventually you suddenly feel like you have seen this before and you just know how to trade it. This will at least take around 3-6 months probably even 2-3 years depending on how you cope with being irritated or have other negative emotions in extreme degree. I can assure you you will physically feel pain and you will need days or weeks away from trading to heal as you will take damage from trading. So again: forget about profit, actually just chill, look at markets and maybe trade but dont care about losing. Just chill, go very slow and find your deep interest for trading and ride the wave of genuin lust :) As time progress you will find that markets arent that complicated to figure out its yourself thats hard to deal with.

Also the biggest improvement I made when learning to trade was that it's NORMAL even for very experience traders to skip 20-30% of markets because they dont understand it. So I stopped trying to win every market, but only trade maybe 5 markets out of 40 (during summer this year) and I only traded the markets that seemed VERY easy and VERY obvious to trade and THAT make a huge difference for me, that actually it's normal especially during winter not to trade an entire day or even week. That many markets arent that good to trade
RollingR
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Nov 01, 2022 8:12 am

Thanks for all the comments guys.

Anbell, you were right - the day after I made that post I was in the negative again and everything seemed to be going wrong.
I've been reading Goat's thread, and the fact he had so much trouble in the beginning and is now doing quite well is definitely a source
of motivation - although also dread, because no one want's to think it might take approximately two years to learn something! We all want to learn it now, instantly (which of course is rarely possible).

Shaun, I completely agree, it just felt like one of those good signs along the path - one that I'll hopefully see more and more of as I continue, even if I still see mostly reds in the meantime.

On skipping markets, that was a very timely statement Worldplaywithangle - there's something I've been exploring that I'll write about below that seems to work very well on certain markets, but breaks even and might actually be losing on other markets.

Hope on the horizon

TL;DR: I noticed something in the markets, tested it, built automation around it, and it's turning out far better than I thought it would.

So, as I mentioned above, after that 1st day of profitability, I had a terrible day, and I started to think... I NEED to be more systematic about this.
At least in the beginning. So I figured, let me try to define a good entry point in the market, and then using that same entry point every time, focusing on managing the trade.

My first thought was - the time at which the majority of the money arrives is probably an important variable. So, I watched through a load of my old trading videos to see if I could spot a pattern, AND I DID.

Now, the majority of times I think I've spotted a pattern, well... as any of you who struggled at the beginning will know, it usually turns out to be a dud. So what I did is I came up with some entry criteria around this pattern that seemed sensible, and then I collected data.

I used my old trading videos, and raw market footage from a trading course I had bought at the beginning of this journey for the data collection - I did this so I could have data from multiple times of year (I've only been trading horses for around 2 months now, so my videos only really cover the autumn/winter period). I also tried to avoid using Peter's videos as he's actively (and successfully) trading in them, which would bring a high risk of sampling bias.

To better manage the trades (after data collection) and escape this cycle of intuition giving me red after red, I collected detailed stats around what tended to happen after the entry point. The max drawdown, max profit, drawdown before achieving 3 ticks profit, profit at the off, the time at which my entry occured etc.

And....

Well, the results are far more promising than I expected.

Overall there are now 74 trades in the data set, and if entering at the proposed entry point, then exiting at the off (only 57 trades had the profit at the off available though, for various reasons), I would have achieved 158.5 ticks in net profit. Making an average of 2.78 ticks profit per trade. I took the midpoint of the tick profit and tick loss on each trade such that it mirrored asking for the price at one point, and taking the price at another point, so the final real life profit could either be 1 tick less (1.78, or 1 tick more, 3.78) depending on if you asked for the best reverse price on entry and exit, or just took the price on entry and exit. In reality I think it would probably be pretty close to the 2.78 figure as you would likely do a mixture of both depending on how much force the price arrived at the entry point with.

Something interesting - the method may not be profitable at all on Handicaps.
The average tick profit (taken at the off) on handicaps is just 1.19 vs 4.98 on non-handicaps.
There are similar numbers of each in the dataset (not exactly the same, but close enough), so a difference
of that magnitude is highly unlikely to be down to chance.

Something else exciting is that the method is pretty easy to automate - I've created a basic bare-bones bot
that seems to be working, I just need to learn a bit more about automation to prevent certain conditions from clashing and multiple bets
being fired. Haven't run into those bugs yet, but if I don't change the programming, I'm sure to.

I ran the bot on practice mode yesterday using £5 stakes and it managed to turn a profit across 7 races (4 profitable).
The strike rate for the system is nothing special, hovering around 55-60%, but its average win (9.66 ticks) is far more than its average loss (-5.72 ticks). And for non-handicaps, 11.28 vs -4.27 Ticks. That's almost a 3 times difference in average win vs loss for non-handicaps (the win rate is 61% on non-handicaps excluding break-even trades)...

This all originally started around me trying to find a good entry point, and I expected to have to do more work in terms of optimizing the exit point, and I still intend to do that work, but simply entering at that point and exiting at the off by itself seems to be very profitable.

This is the most bullish I've been from a rational perspective on succeeding at trading since I began. I've tried to analyse the data and add more data points to prove the system will collapse at some point, but my confidence in it keeps growing. Especially since I'm using trades from varied times of the year, it seems it doesn't disappear from season to season. I'm extremely excited, but feeling kind of nervous and also kind of weird, because this feels like a tipping point, more so than any of the others - and yet at the same time, I'm not experienced enough in this area to KNOW that I'm on to a winner. It just feels like I am.

So, the attitude in the next fews weeks and months is predominately going to be test, test, test, test, and test some more.
Going to be testing the bot with small real stakes soon, so it should be interesting.

I think having and collecting this sort of data will also make me a better manual trader, as I'll be far more aware of the intricacies of the different race types, their volatility, and how the money moves within such markets.

Hooray for progress! And thank you to anyone still reading so far, I feel like I may have just written far too much, but if I edit it too much I'll never end up publishing the post.
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ShaunWhite
Posts: 9731
Joined: Sat Sep 03, 2016 3:42 am

RollingR wrote:
Thu Dec 15, 2022 12:27 pm

I've been reading Goat's thread, and the fact he had so much trouble in the beginning and is now doing quite well is definitely a source
of motivation - although also dread, because no one want's to think it might take approximately two years to learn something! We all want to learn it now, instantly (which of course is rarely possible).
.
The takeaway from goat is that if something isn't working then be prepared to change. He went from 100% manual to 100% data driven so quite a change

The time.... I don't think 2 years is too bad at all. I don't know any other 6 or 7 figure job (potentially) you can just stroll into and most require a degree then an internship. You wouldn't buy a pencil and call yourself an architect and buying software to place your bets doesn't make you a successful gambler.

But knowing its a couple of years at best should guide your direction. Ie do you want a desk job every afternoon or work towards a passive income. Most just want to make money fast or think they have to copy the methods of others and end up with a lifestyle they didn't necessarily bargain for.
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