New to Automation From Manual Trading

[lm1994]

Hi all,

I am new to the world of automation using bet angel and I'm looking for some pointers and advice to get me started on implementing some of the characteristics that I'm looking for.

I find the basics of using automation really easy to understand e.g. place a backorder if price is above X but below Y, on the favourite, if the volume traded within the market is over 100,000 and green up 5 seconds before the scheduled post time etc.

I was wondering if there would be a way of adding more complex rules, such as, if the amount of unmatched money on a selection, on the back side, across the best 5 prices outweighs the amount of money across the best 5 lay prices by X percentage

And…

If the runner has traded within a range of X ticks with that range accounting for XX percentage of the overall matched money on the runner, place a back bet.

If I was to take a guess, I would imagine this could involve using various complex stored values, but in all honesty, I'm not really sure where to start.

Any advice is much appreciated!

[ShaunWhite]

It's the same as starting with any software really, begin with something really simple and then add complexity incrementally. At each step you'll learn a little more about how to do what you want. If you dive straight into something really involved you'll either never figure out where the bugs are or more likely it'll be an unmanageable mess of rules. Basically start by drawing a stick man rather than expecting Toy Story.

Everything you mention is quite straightforward, but probably not for someone just starting to use it unless they have some previous experience of writing or configuring software.

It's an old chestnut but do read the user guide a few times, I'm sure the penny will drop.

[gazuty]

It's an old chestnut but do read the user guide a few times, I'm sure the penny will drop.

+1

I would add - experiment and try things out and supervise (watch what happens - don’t just set it up, Go to work and come home expecting mega millions - not saying you would do that). Scale sloooooowwwwwwlllllyyyy. In my humble opinion, too many people focus on scaling rather than other ways of optimising.

[Derek27]

Hi all,

I am new to the world of automation using bet angel and I'm looking for some pointers and advice to get me started on implementing some of the characteristics that I'm looking for.

I find the basics of using automation really easy to understand e.g. place a backorder if price is above X but below Y, on the favourite, if the volume traded within the market is over 100,000 and green up 5 seconds before the scheduled post time etc.

I was wondering if there would be a way of adding more complex rules, such as, if the amount of unmatched money on a selection, on the back side, across the best 5 prices outweighs the amount of money across the best 5 lay prices by X percentage

And…

If the runner has traded within a range of X ticks with that range accounting for XX percentage of the overall matched money on the runner, place a back bet.

If I was to take a guess, I would imagine this could involve using various complex stored values, but in all honesty, I'm not really sure where to start.

Any advice is much appreciated!

Like all things, BA seems complicated to begin with but creating rules quickly becomes second nature. If you want to fire a bet when 3 simple conditions occur you would place those conditions in a single rule that fires the bet.

If they are complex conditions you can have 3 separate rules each of which set a signal or stored value. Then you have another rule that fires the bet when all three signals or SVs are set.

You can use history lists to track a runner's trading price over time and a simple rule that sets a signal when it has traded within the desired range.

[ShaunWhite]

. In my humble opinion, too many people focus on scaling rather than other ways of optimising.

Yep, Profit is edge * stake * opportunity. Of those widening opportunity is the most important initially otherwise you won't have a big enough sample quickly enough to even know if you've got an edge or how to improve it. Strategy is a bit of a numbers game, you'll probably have to try a lot before you find something with promise so you need look to things that will build a lot of bet history quickly, then you can fail fast and move on. If its something that only makes a handful of bets a day you'll be a lifetime guessing if it works.

Automating manual strategies is tough because you can easily underestimate the number of soft decisions you're making when you have to translate that into a set of hard rules. Bots are inherently suboptimal at that task. I prefer to think about what manual traders can't do and it then becomes the right tool for the job. It also helps you to produce strategies that place 00s or 000s of offers/bets a day and satisfy my point about fast info. You learn more in a day than some strategies reveal in a months. And then when you find the one that works scaling 200 bets is a lot easier and far more lucrative than scaling 20 bets especially as you can break a strategy with relatively small stakes.

Others may have different views, there's lots of ways to do this.

[Kai]

Yep, Profit is edge * stake * opportunity.

Others may have different views, there's lots of ways to do this.

I always thought profit equaled opportunity minus dodgy psychology minus botched execution