Blimey! Perfect trading MemphisFlash.MemphisFlash wrote: ↑Sat May 23, 2020 1:32 pmNot a perfect market, but a perfect day 31/31 Boom!!!
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Inspiring.
Your perfect market
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TraderFred
- Posts: 194
- Joined: Wed Sep 26, 2018 7:55 am
Inspiring.
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Kafkaesque
- Posts: 886
- Joined: Fri Oct 06, 2017 10:20 am
1.
A football match where:
- Where both teams have an equal motivation/both teams need a result, ie. there's no chance of the market moving significantly against me, based on market assumption that one of the teams will not show up or they'll rest players.
- Where I have a strong confidence in what the prices should be, and they're off when I enter the market, giving a strong starting position
- Both teams have a starting 11 they'll in all likelyhood go with, but one or two key players are questionable. AND I know from experience how said player's absence is reflected in the prices by the market. AND I know when the market will know about said player's availability (I don't need to be the first to know, but rather to know when someone else is, so that I can react in time, both "defensively" by pulling unmatched in time, and "offensively" by catching the movement in time and/or catching a reverse if the market overreacts).
- The market is stable after the above to be able to maximise with small further investments, and has enough liquidity for final, position, adjustments.
- Probably missing something, that you'll add Kai
2.
Feel that's implied in 1.
3.
95%+
4.
Almost never on all the parameters, but close enough on a weekly basis (pre-Covid obviously).
A football match where:
- Where both teams have an equal motivation/both teams need a result, ie. there's no chance of the market moving significantly against me, based on market assumption that one of the teams will not show up or they'll rest players.
- Where I have a strong confidence in what the prices should be, and they're off when I enter the market, giving a strong starting position
- Both teams have a starting 11 they'll in all likelyhood go with, but one or two key players are questionable. AND I know from experience how said player's absence is reflected in the prices by the market. AND I know when the market will know about said player's availability (I don't need to be the first to know, but rather to know when someone else is, so that I can react in time, both "defensively" by pulling unmatched in time, and "offensively" by catching the movement in time and/or catching a reverse if the market overreacts).
- The market is stable after the above to be able to maximise with small further investments, and has enough liquidity for final, position, adjustments.
- Probably missing something, that you'll add Kai
2.
Feel that's implied in 1.
3.
95%+
4.
Almost never on all the parameters, but close enough on a weekly basis (pre-Covid obviously).
There are meetings, races, race types, distances that can be condensed to a single set of actions....
Never perfect...but not sure if that`s good or bad yet
Never perfect...but not sure if that`s good or bad yet
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Some very interesting replies, thanks to those that answered the questions so far.
But I do see it as an opportunity for everyone to have a little peek at what others are doing and what they're actively looking for, and I had a feeling it may especially be helpful for newbies without an edge since they can use it as an opportunity to both see where others have found theirs and to see just how diverse edges can actually be.
Not really, I had no intention of going anywhere specific with the thread, it's just something to potentially discuss while everyone waits for most of the markets to return, the questions are basically just a template of sorts and the forum itself decides which direction it wants to go, if any, figured it can go anywhere really depending on feedback. I think people on here do have the ability to help, inspire and improve each other, if they chose to do so that is, or under the right circumstances I guess.
But I do see it as an opportunity for everyone to have a little peek at what others are doing and what they're actively looking for, and I had a feeling it may especially be helpful for newbies without an edge since they can use it as an opportunity to both see where others have found theirs and to see just how diverse edges can actually be.
One where someone has left in some broken automation allowing you to back a selection at any price you like and then green up the next day for a healthy profit
(Two examples attached where I was able to back at as high as 220 and then laid at as low as 1.5 nearer the off)
Been a while since i've seen any as good as this though!
(Two examples attached where I was able to back at as high as 220 and then laid at as low as 1.5 nearer the off)
Been a while since i've seen any as good as this though!
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No, you Back or Lay ALL of the Ranks as directed by the calculation at the specific meeting. Penrith for example, you would Back Rank 1 in every race and Lay 2,3,4,5,6 every race.
When I take the race meetings the previous day the Promo sheets often have a different set of tracks so results from yesterday look different to original post but some remain.
It is a conceptual idea done on paper so PC, Tokens etc are not taken into consideration. Obviously assumes bets placed at SP but stakes only £25 so should be not too far off. Waiting for the UK racing to start when the results to predictions to actual races are in unison and during the day of course.
When I take the race meetings the previous day the Promo sheets often have a different set of tracks so results from yesterday look different to original post but some remain.
It is a conceptual idea done on paper so PC, Tokens etc are not taken into consideration. Obviously assumes bets placed at SP but stakes only £25 so should be not too far off. Waiting for the UK racing to start when the results to predictions to actual races are in unison and during the day of course.
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
If you're referring to https://www.betfairpromo.com/betfairsp/prices
For the AUS files, a filename with today's date 25/05 refers to all of yesterday's races.
Is that what you mean?
1. Do you have a perfect market?
Just something with lots of liquidity (not volume). The longer that persists the better.
2. What makes your market so perfect?
Liquid markets allow you to minimise the potential for loss and get more trades through.
3. How confident are you of getting a positive result on your perfect market?
99.9%, Betfair could crash
4. How often do you get the opportunity to trade your perfect market?
One a month, more in summer when big events are on. When there isn't a pandemic!
Just something with lots of liquidity (not volume). The longer that persists the better.
2. What makes your market so perfect?
Liquid markets allow you to minimise the potential for loss and get more trades through.
3. How confident are you of getting a positive result on your perfect market?
99.9%, Betfair could crash
4. How often do you get the opportunity to trade your perfect market?
One a month, more in summer when big events are on. When there isn't a pandemic!
Appreciate the answers guys, I guess it's only fair that I try answering some of my own questions then, if only to bump the thread a bit.
It may appear that I'm fishing for ideas or something but the questions are genuine enough and now I see that I could take them on in a few different ways, but as interesting as that sounds to me I think I've decided to take a more educational approach, to try and provide the maximum amount of value for all the newbies without edges who I'm sure are pretty annoyed with all the vague cryptic stuff and all the flexing attempts that go around with zero context and so on.
I don't really mind any of it myself, I even find it useful at times and I've often benefited directly off it, but I'm well aware that the context is all a newbie really cares about, because a black on white result only says what is possible to achieve which they already generally know, while the context itself says how they can get there and that is the most important bit after all.
So my general line of thinking is this, if I'm not particularly impressed with my own results then why should others be? If I were seeking validation from others it would feel like a pointless endeavour anyway, in more ways than one, and would most likely result in the opposite effect so I don't bother doing it, if you're not selling anything I think it makes zero sense to do it, but to each their own.
Maybe I would think differently if my daily P&Ls would be filled with Psychoff-style 4 or 5 figure markets, or maybe I would actually feel the same. But I definitely don't want to appear to be something I'm not, I would rather just be myself and try to enjoy myself along the way, I do like to overindulge on occasion but no matter what I do in general I just follow my whim no matter where it takes me, because if I have the freedom to do it then why waste this freedom.
Actually, didn't even Psychoff just months ago pull out his big black monstrosity in the form of a 6 figure video and nobody said a single word for days? I mean, if nobody was impressed by that then why does anyone think that an average sized willy would be far more impressive? It truly boggles the mind, but I digress, so onto the questions.
1. Do you have a perfect market?
Thankfully I do have a perfect market that I like trading which suits my skill set/mentality/schedule in that very order, although I also have a few favorite markets that I maybe enjoy more at times. I find those two to be very different things, depending on whether I want to be efficient or comfortable whilst trading, we sadly can't have both most of the time so I guess we all have to make due with less than perfect markets that fill up most of the P&Ls.
2. What makes your market so perfect?
To be fair I have two viable answers here, not sure which one I prefer. The perfect market for me is a market where I don't have to speculate or insert a bias in order to trade it, so it's a market where I can ideally just trade the market noise around it. That's a simple way of putting it, I like not having to think too much while trading and just going autopilot.
The second answer would be that the perfect market is also a market where I'm free to employ my bread and butter approach which I feel very comfortable with. In other words, that's mostly on the football preoff market that has just enough uncertainty about it to generate a bit of market noise for me to actively trade, because if it has too much uncertainty then it's probably too swingy and gets a bit more speculative and challenging, while if there's zero uncertainty then there is very little genuine noise going around and in order to get involved I probably have to start speculating a bit, on the direction of price etc, which may open up new exciting opportunities but it does bring the strikerates down (which I guess this losing trade is a good example of).
3. How confident are you of getting a positive result on your perfect market?
I feel confident enough to say that it's very difficult to lose with this approach, trying to avoid any soundbites here, because of the sheer number of bets and trades, of which every individual trade has maybe 80% (?) on average of working out, so the math part is easy here and basically the more trades you do the less chance you have of losing in the end. But this is of course nothing new to experienced traders and scalpers etc, with scalping especially past a certain point it's nearly impossible to lose.
4. How often do you get the opportunity to trade your perfect market?
A couple times per week on average. But not often enough I think is the right answer here. This realization has helped me branch out in different directions so that I hopefully get to trade my "perfect markets" a lot more often, that's the next goal that I'm working towards.
Now, I don't really know how vague my above answers are, most of the time I feel like I'm talking pretty openly, and I'm sure that for some people every word makes sense, but for some it probably doesn't make much sense at all. I'll try and expand on that as much as I feel comfortable doing so that it may make it easier to digest overall. I know that describing order flow stuff textually is hard, but seeing as I don't own a Youtube channel I will give it a go, no matter how abstract it may seem to someone that is just starting out, I will try and include a bit of visual stimuli as well.
To be fair, I don't really want to discuss my perfect market per se any more than I already have, but I can go into a bit more depth about the other version of my perfect market which has been my bread and butter for years so it also qualifies as "perfect", and that in a nutshell is football preoff where I enjoy the game of scalping the most. I'm sure a lot of people have their own versions of b&b so it's an easy to understand concept, for me it's just a market where people feel most comfortable, it's probably not even the most exciting one since you know it so well that it gets almost boring at times, but it's certainly a market you can always count on because it's consistent and reliable. If I had to put a trading label on myself I would say that I am in part a speculator, but mainly I feel like a noise trader overall. While with the bread and butter stuff the most accurate description would probably be just a glorified scalper for the most part, that's sort of how it feels.
Never really did blow my mind but one of the main things I like about my b&b is that I've had no real variance with it, which used to be a source of pride, I had about a handful of smaller losing days with it over the past 5 years, the variance and the normal losses do come of course but from elsewhere. The losses on here are already absorbed in the markets and they don't usually show up on P&Ls which is something I really liked.
That is certainly one way I have found to beat the markets, beat the variance and maybe beat the emotions. The scratched trades that should be losses is just me ditching an unsuitable market, if I can't get matched anywhere or if it's just not worth trading it timewise, I guess some are also just crap filler markets where I wait on the bigger one. Don't see a point in forcing anything and lowering strikerates, I was always very happy to focus elsewhere or take a day off instead if I don't like anything.
If you ignore the fancy terms like higher frequency trading or order flow etc, to put it plainly I'm just placing bets on most prices around the traded price from both sides and then just managing my positions accordingly, just going with whatever flow the market is going with and trying to absorb some of that market noise, simply trying to get matched at favorable prices while avoiding the bad prices (in that very moment) and so on. So it's mostly just reactionary trading depending on what the market is doing, I still call it scalping but it's probably more than that, since the full position is never really closed and you just either keep adding or removing stakes or flipping sides or whatever, all to just win as many ticks as you can but protecting it all at the same time too, but if I sense a bias or some genuine momentum gathering I do start speculating a bit and adjusting accordingly to try and take advantage in anticipation of a potential swing. Hopefully that makes some sense, no idea really how that sounds from the outside.
The thing with scalping here is that the first ticks are maybe the hardest to get, the market looks daunting at first glance, but if you get the first few right then it becomes rather difficult to lose after that since with each new tick you keep expanding your safety net on the ladder, plus you get increasingly more confident and the longer you're in the market the better you can read the activity and get more out of it. Also, from experience, when you do for some reason start out negative on a market I feel this can often bring out the best in you, because you shake off the complacency and start focusing harder to try and get the next moves right and can still bring it around, the math overall is definitely on your side with scalping.
For the most part it's just a numbers game with some muscle memory skills, but I do pay attention to the context behind the match (teamnews, form etc), so that I can be more comfortable on the market and to minimize the wtf moments, but also to be aware of potential opportunities so ideally I'd like to be aware of how the market could behave beforehand. If I have all of the relevant info and the market is doing something strange without good reason behind it this then gives me the confidence and the option to maybe oppose it, or subtle little things like that. The overround % also plays a role and if you watch the order flow you can tell in advance which price ticks are going to go next and on which selection, be it fav or dog or draw.
There's really not much preoff markets can do it terms of behavior overall, they're sort of either trending or ranging so you try to work out which one is doing which, naturally the psychology behind the market and the prices is massive and drives everything, you kind of generally know what the market wants to do but it takes ages to get there so patience here is a virtue, and some technical analysis helps a ton as well, I personally find the matchstick graphs invaluable for reading the market and measuring momentum etc, combined with the matched volume column and the plain Betfair chart it's all I really like using. I love trading momentum as well, it can be very exciting but that's far from scalping. A few friends tried doing the same but they were mostly trying to scalp stable markets and I never really like dead stable markets, I see it as a market that hasn't shown its hand yet, ideally I want the market to at least find either the bottom or the ceiling first, maybe both so that I know what range I'm operating with, but to be fair with enough experience you should just basically straight up guess the ranges and then just monitor the order flow to confirm it, but even if you miss by a bit it should still mostly be an +ev position overall depending on what you're trying to do.
Although I don't put blind faith into the trading range like I've seen some people/scalpers do, some trends just never bounce, ignoring order flow is not something I like doing, even when speculating against it. I also just hate evenly matched markets where both teams are around 2.50s, that's mostly just pure aids for me and I try to avoid it, I'm hardly surprised that the above loss on the Liverpool screenie came from such a game. Pardon the weirdly appropriate memes, they're just there to cover up which types of matches I skipped and which ones I focused on trading, not that it really matters anyway, just on the off chance that someone wants to send an army of bots to make 1 tick per match, to stop them from wasting their time.
Anyway, tried scaling most of it further but getting hit with the outages with no adequate cover changed my mind so turned elsewhere, even when I was fully covered I lost a couple hundred on the pricing difference, but I do have some plans to automate parts of it, it wouldn't be as effective but it can cover far more ground than I ever could manually, so that could be one way of scaling up in this direction, but to be fair it wouldn't be my first choice of auto. Think I've yet to see anyone doing footy auto and for good reason probably, apart from the large scale stuff I see on the markets themselves, just better opportunities elsewhere I guess.
It may sound great to someone but to be fair these markets are really not suited for these types of approaches, think Cheltenham volumes without the fillrate, it's been great practice to hone my craft but the fat stacks on football are just so fake that it gets obnoxious at times, they're really just sitting there to try and prevent you from doing anything, they are slow and this makes them predictable but I feel that scalping is just wasted on these markets for the most part.
Another bad thing is something I think I heard Peter once say in a video, it's not something specific to this but to seemingly perfect P&Ls, I've never heard anything like that elsewhere and it stuck with me, because it rings so true whenever I do some deeper thinking on it. He said something along the lines of, if your trading has no real losses then you're not taking on any real risk and in turn not profiting as much as you should be, therefore you're not trading effectively at all. What you're doing is just avoiding the variance completely by sacrificing scalability and cutting yourself short, which really resonated with me and it made perfect sense, because I was always happy with my b&b and though it was pretty good trading and healthy P&Ls but I realized later that it was actually kind of crap in the grand scheme of things, that it's a trading overkill in a sense, plus I was doing it on the wrong markets/sport and was practically completely misusing a good chunk of my skill set. I did start speculating a lot more and increased the variance but I still felt that it's just not a natural fit.
The way I see it now is that a good healthy P&L will have some losses on it too, if not then this perhaps means that you're only going for the lowest hanging fruit, it's really not a bad thing to have the market remind you of that on a daily basis, I feel it's healthy for the head as well to get hit with an occasional loss. If there's one key takeaway point that I am trying to make here I guess, I would like it to be this one.
Funnily enough I actually still have the very first market that I tried scalping preoff, this Forest match below made me pursue this direction from very early on in my first year in 2014. As a complete newb with no trading software I used the Betfair website to scalp the Forest game, I remember trying to watch the weight of money building up so I was just moving my stakes and scratching when needed, maybe got lucky because I probably wasn't very fast, but it worked out well so I decided to pursue it further. I later heard that racing was more suited to scalping so switched to it and had a blast, learned a ton mechanically, couldn't properly swing to save my life so it felt pretty grindy and felt too much like a day job, then when I tried football again with a lot more experience under my belt it just seemed much more casual in comparison so stuck with it.
I generally feel that scalping is one of the core trading skills, a universal one that works nearly everywhere in some way, shape or form, I feel it's embedded into pretty much every facet of trading so I'm really glad that I focused on it and managed to use it as a sort of a springboard. I really see it as one of the ideal starting places for sure, maybe that's why I'm talking about it so much. I used scalping on most sports besides cricket with similar strikerates, both preoff and inplay, but these were pretty basic variations early on so I haven't really truly tested all the waters yet, that shouldn't even count. Because I see a few others that are using very similar approaches/skillsets on different markets and are just flying, so I think I'll follow in their footsteps too.
I guess this turned out to be a bit of an essay, I never really plan on making one but that's just how it turns out sometimes. If I can't stop flipping talking about it then it truly must still be my favorite market, ah, the joys of overindulging!
It may appear that I'm fishing for ideas or something but the questions are genuine enough and now I see that I could take them on in a few different ways, but as interesting as that sounds to me I think I've decided to take a more educational approach, to try and provide the maximum amount of value for all the newbies without edges who I'm sure are pretty annoyed with all the vague cryptic stuff and all the flexing attempts that go around with zero context and so on.
I don't really mind any of it myself, I even find it useful at times and I've often benefited directly off it, but I'm well aware that the context is all a newbie really cares about, because a black on white result only says what is possible to achieve which they already generally know, while the context itself says how they can get there and that is the most important bit after all.
So my general line of thinking is this, if I'm not particularly impressed with my own results then why should others be? If I were seeking validation from others it would feel like a pointless endeavour anyway, in more ways than one, and would most likely result in the opposite effect so I don't bother doing it, if you're not selling anything I think it makes zero sense to do it, but to each their own.
Maybe I would think differently if my daily P&Ls would be filled with Psychoff-style 4 or 5 figure markets, or maybe I would actually feel the same. But I definitely don't want to appear to be something I'm not, I would rather just be myself and try to enjoy myself along the way, I do like to overindulge on occasion but no matter what I do in general I just follow my whim no matter where it takes me, because if I have the freedom to do it then why waste this freedom.
Actually, didn't even Psychoff just months ago pull out his big black monstrosity in the form of a 6 figure video and nobody said a single word for days? I mean, if nobody was impressed by that then why does anyone think that an average sized willy would be far more impressive? It truly boggles the mind, but I digress, so onto the questions.
1. Do you have a perfect market?
Thankfully I do have a perfect market that I like trading which suits my skill set/mentality/schedule in that very order, although I also have a few favorite markets that I maybe enjoy more at times. I find those two to be very different things, depending on whether I want to be efficient or comfortable whilst trading, we sadly can't have both most of the time so I guess we all have to make due with less than perfect markets that fill up most of the P&Ls.
2. What makes your market so perfect?
To be fair I have two viable answers here, not sure which one I prefer. The perfect market for me is a market where I don't have to speculate or insert a bias in order to trade it, so it's a market where I can ideally just trade the market noise around it. That's a simple way of putting it, I like not having to think too much while trading and just going autopilot.
The second answer would be that the perfect market is also a market where I'm free to employ my bread and butter approach which I feel very comfortable with. In other words, that's mostly on the football preoff market that has just enough uncertainty about it to generate a bit of market noise for me to actively trade, because if it has too much uncertainty then it's probably too swingy and gets a bit more speculative and challenging, while if there's zero uncertainty then there is very little genuine noise going around and in order to get involved I probably have to start speculating a bit, on the direction of price etc, which may open up new exciting opportunities but it does bring the strikerates down (which I guess this losing trade is a good example of).
3. How confident are you of getting a positive result on your perfect market?
I feel confident enough to say that it's very difficult to lose with this approach, trying to avoid any soundbites here, because of the sheer number of bets and trades, of which every individual trade has maybe 80% (?) on average of working out, so the math part is easy here and basically the more trades you do the less chance you have of losing in the end. But this is of course nothing new to experienced traders and scalpers etc, with scalping especially past a certain point it's nearly impossible to lose.
4. How often do you get the opportunity to trade your perfect market?
A couple times per week on average. But not often enough I think is the right answer here. This realization has helped me branch out in different directions so that I hopefully get to trade my "perfect markets" a lot more often, that's the next goal that I'm working towards.
Now, I don't really know how vague my above answers are, most of the time I feel like I'm talking pretty openly, and I'm sure that for some people every word makes sense, but for some it probably doesn't make much sense at all. I'll try and expand on that as much as I feel comfortable doing so that it may make it easier to digest overall. I know that describing order flow stuff textually is hard, but seeing as I don't own a Youtube channel I will give it a go, no matter how abstract it may seem to someone that is just starting out, I will try and include a bit of visual stimuli as well.
To be fair, I don't really want to discuss my perfect market per se any more than I already have, but I can go into a bit more depth about the other version of my perfect market which has been my bread and butter for years so it also qualifies as "perfect", and that in a nutshell is football preoff where I enjoy the game of scalping the most. I'm sure a lot of people have their own versions of b&b so it's an easy to understand concept, for me it's just a market where people feel most comfortable, it's probably not even the most exciting one since you know it so well that it gets almost boring at times, but it's certainly a market you can always count on because it's consistent and reliable. If I had to put a trading label on myself I would say that I am in part a speculator, but mainly I feel like a noise trader overall. While with the bread and butter stuff the most accurate description would probably be just a glorified scalper for the most part, that's sort of how it feels.
Never really did blow my mind but one of the main things I like about my b&b is that I've had no real variance with it, which used to be a source of pride, I had about a handful of smaller losing days with it over the past 5 years, the variance and the normal losses do come of course but from elsewhere. The losses on here are already absorbed in the markets and they don't usually show up on P&Ls which is something I really liked.
That is certainly one way I have found to beat the markets, beat the variance and maybe beat the emotions. The scratched trades that should be losses is just me ditching an unsuitable market, if I can't get matched anywhere or if it's just not worth trading it timewise, I guess some are also just crap filler markets where I wait on the bigger one. Don't see a point in forcing anything and lowering strikerates, I was always very happy to focus elsewhere or take a day off instead if I don't like anything.
If you ignore the fancy terms like higher frequency trading or order flow etc, to put it plainly I'm just placing bets on most prices around the traded price from both sides and then just managing my positions accordingly, just going with whatever flow the market is going with and trying to absorb some of that market noise, simply trying to get matched at favorable prices while avoiding the bad prices (in that very moment) and so on. So it's mostly just reactionary trading depending on what the market is doing, I still call it scalping but it's probably more than that, since the full position is never really closed and you just either keep adding or removing stakes or flipping sides or whatever, all to just win as many ticks as you can but protecting it all at the same time too, but if I sense a bias or some genuine momentum gathering I do start speculating a bit and adjusting accordingly to try and take advantage in anticipation of a potential swing. Hopefully that makes some sense, no idea really how that sounds from the outside.
The thing with scalping here is that the first ticks are maybe the hardest to get, the market looks daunting at first glance, but if you get the first few right then it becomes rather difficult to lose after that since with each new tick you keep expanding your safety net on the ladder, plus you get increasingly more confident and the longer you're in the market the better you can read the activity and get more out of it. Also, from experience, when you do for some reason start out negative on a market I feel this can often bring out the best in you, because you shake off the complacency and start focusing harder to try and get the next moves right and can still bring it around, the math overall is definitely on your side with scalping.
For the most part it's just a numbers game with some muscle memory skills, but I do pay attention to the context behind the match (teamnews, form etc), so that I can be more comfortable on the market and to minimize the wtf moments, but also to be aware of potential opportunities so ideally I'd like to be aware of how the market could behave beforehand. If I have all of the relevant info and the market is doing something strange without good reason behind it this then gives me the confidence and the option to maybe oppose it, or subtle little things like that. The overround % also plays a role and if you watch the order flow you can tell in advance which price ticks are going to go next and on which selection, be it fav or dog or draw.
There's really not much preoff markets can do it terms of behavior overall, they're sort of either trending or ranging so you try to work out which one is doing which, naturally the psychology behind the market and the prices is massive and drives everything, you kind of generally know what the market wants to do but it takes ages to get there so patience here is a virtue, and some technical analysis helps a ton as well, I personally find the matchstick graphs invaluable for reading the market and measuring momentum etc, combined with the matched volume column and the plain Betfair chart it's all I really like using. I love trading momentum as well, it can be very exciting but that's far from scalping. A few friends tried doing the same but they were mostly trying to scalp stable markets and I never really like dead stable markets, I see it as a market that hasn't shown its hand yet, ideally I want the market to at least find either the bottom or the ceiling first, maybe both so that I know what range I'm operating with, but to be fair with enough experience you should just basically straight up guess the ranges and then just monitor the order flow to confirm it, but even if you miss by a bit it should still mostly be an +ev position overall depending on what you're trying to do.
Although I don't put blind faith into the trading range like I've seen some people/scalpers do, some trends just never bounce, ignoring order flow is not something I like doing, even when speculating against it. I also just hate evenly matched markets where both teams are around 2.50s, that's mostly just pure aids for me and I try to avoid it, I'm hardly surprised that the above loss on the Liverpool screenie came from such a game. Pardon the weirdly appropriate memes, they're just there to cover up which types of matches I skipped and which ones I focused on trading, not that it really matters anyway, just on the off chance that someone wants to send an army of bots to make 1 tick per match, to stop them from wasting their time.
Anyway, tried scaling most of it further but getting hit with the outages with no adequate cover changed my mind so turned elsewhere, even when I was fully covered I lost a couple hundred on the pricing difference, but I do have some plans to automate parts of it, it wouldn't be as effective but it can cover far more ground than I ever could manually, so that could be one way of scaling up in this direction, but to be fair it wouldn't be my first choice of auto. Think I've yet to see anyone doing footy auto and for good reason probably, apart from the large scale stuff I see on the markets themselves, just better opportunities elsewhere I guess.
It may sound great to someone but to be fair these markets are really not suited for these types of approaches, think Cheltenham volumes without the fillrate, it's been great practice to hone my craft but the fat stacks on football are just so fake that it gets obnoxious at times, they're really just sitting there to try and prevent you from doing anything, they are slow and this makes them predictable but I feel that scalping is just wasted on these markets for the most part.
Another bad thing is something I think I heard Peter once say in a video, it's not something specific to this but to seemingly perfect P&Ls, I've never heard anything like that elsewhere and it stuck with me, because it rings so true whenever I do some deeper thinking on it. He said something along the lines of, if your trading has no real losses then you're not taking on any real risk and in turn not profiting as much as you should be, therefore you're not trading effectively at all. What you're doing is just avoiding the variance completely by sacrificing scalability and cutting yourself short, which really resonated with me and it made perfect sense, because I was always happy with my b&b and though it was pretty good trading and healthy P&Ls but I realized later that it was actually kind of crap in the grand scheme of things, that it's a trading overkill in a sense, plus I was doing it on the wrong markets/sport and was practically completely misusing a good chunk of my skill set. I did start speculating a lot more and increased the variance but I still felt that it's just not a natural fit.
The way I see it now is that a good healthy P&L will have some losses on it too, if not then this perhaps means that you're only going for the lowest hanging fruit, it's really not a bad thing to have the market remind you of that on a daily basis, I feel it's healthy for the head as well to get hit with an occasional loss. If there's one key takeaway point that I am trying to make here I guess, I would like it to be this one.
Funnily enough I actually still have the very first market that I tried scalping preoff, this Forest match below made me pursue this direction from very early on in my first year in 2014. As a complete newb with no trading software I used the Betfair website to scalp the Forest game, I remember trying to watch the weight of money building up so I was just moving my stakes and scratching when needed, maybe got lucky because I probably wasn't very fast, but it worked out well so I decided to pursue it further. I later heard that racing was more suited to scalping so switched to it and had a blast, learned a ton mechanically, couldn't properly swing to save my life so it felt pretty grindy and felt too much like a day job, then when I tried football again with a lot more experience under my belt it just seemed much more casual in comparison so stuck with it.
I generally feel that scalping is one of the core trading skills, a universal one that works nearly everywhere in some way, shape or form, I feel it's embedded into pretty much every facet of trading so I'm really glad that I focused on it and managed to use it as a sort of a springboard. I really see it as one of the ideal starting places for sure, maybe that's why I'm talking about it so much. I used scalping on most sports besides cricket with similar strikerates, both preoff and inplay, but these were pretty basic variations early on so I haven't really truly tested all the waters yet, that shouldn't even count. Because I see a few others that are using very similar approaches/skillsets on different markets and are just flying, so I think I'll follow in their footsteps too.
I guess this turned out to be a bit of an essay, I never really plan on making one but that's just how it turns out sometimes. If I can't stop flipping talking about it then it truly must still be my favorite market, ah, the joys of overindulging!
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TraderFred
- Posts: 194
- Joined: Wed Sep 26, 2018 7:55 am
You write some good stuff, Kai.
You seem to have a good knowledge of the international trading scene, I’m sure you could market some of your stuff, if you are not already doing so abroad. Some sort of online training courses and ebooks etc.
You could call yourself....... The Jazavac !
You seem to have a good knowledge of the international trading scene, I’m sure you could market some of your stuff, if you are not already doing so abroad. Some sort of online training courses and ebooks etc.
You could call yourself....... The Jazavac !
Hah, I think there are enough badgers out there already.
I do know what sells best but I feel that going in some of these directions is a bit of a slippery slope, if you're not careful you stop being a student of the markets and you start becoming something else instead.