A suitable language to build a bot for a complete beginner?

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johnsheppard
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firlandsfarm wrote:
Mon Jun 03, 2019 9:40 pm
It will have database modules where you subscribe to a module that allows you to do the research you want be it sports results or price history. It will have modules for each exchange and whatever each bookmaker has evolved into to facilitate placing bets across the whole market. It will have modules to analyse your betting/trading performance and help you identify where you could improve probably with machine learning functions. The biggest thing is, like Wordpress, it will be designed specifically for plug-in modules and like Wordpress 3rd parties could design and sell their own modules … tipsters would have plug-ins that administer their selections for you and some might get a module that automatically places the bets from the tipster plug-in to the Market Bet Placement module. it won't be tomorrow, it won't be next year, it may not be in the little that's left of my lifetime but it will be the future at some point. There is lots that will be done in the future, the industry is young but when it matures …..
I dont think you can commoditise bots. Once an edge is public its no longer an edge, hence unprofitable, and unsellable.
You can commoditise bot making tools. But while their application is more profitable than selling. They won't be sold. I would presume there are hundreds of people out there with the workings done bespoke.
I'm not knowledgable about the workings of markets (I spent my time at computing science instead, dang it)...but I would probably suggest one would want to learn that stuff before diving in to develop. That task in itself is complex and long. But necessary if you dont want to end up in a world of pain in 3 or 5 years (unless you have the knack for cutting balls and chain)...

I'm still learning about betangel as I just use the trader version at the moment, but seems to me the pro version and guardian and excel etc does much. The less bespoke code you can write the better...because bespoke code is expensive.... you can ask the market about that and it will tell you...(market presumably knows more than any individual)
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firlandsfarm
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johnsheppard wrote:
Mon Jun 10, 2019 12:03 am
I dont think you can commoditise bots. Once an edge is public its no longer an edge, hence unprofitable, and unsellable.
Fully agree John, I wasn't referring to individual bots but bot creators such as BA and others, tipsters who currently give out their tips via websites and emails, bookies so you didn't have to keep changing websites, tipster reviewers who are all over the Internet, odds monitors, data providers, blogs and columnists … the list of support facilities for punters goes on and on but the punter has to find them. Look at the way the financial markets have developed frameworks such as Metatrader that facilitates accessing accounts at multiple marketmakers, enables data from different sources on different securities etc. … I'm thinking along those lines. At the moment we search the Internet for data and other services. I was suggesting that in the future all of this fragmentation will be centralised inside a framework with common connectivity standards and protocols. The principle of "the Internet of things" will not just apply to fridges and car convoys. It will bring all fragmented sectors and suppliers together by way of centralised frameworks similar to the way Wordpress did for websites, eBay and Amazon have done for small online outlets and Oddschecker is trying to do for bookies and exchanges. Before Wordpress website designers had to go looking for add-ins but since Wordpress the Add-ins know the designers will be at Wordpress so they go thereto find them.
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johnsheppard
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firlandsfarm wrote:
Mon Jun 10, 2019 9:24 am
johnsheppard wrote:
Mon Jun 10, 2019 12:03 am
I dont think you can commoditise bots. Once an edge is public its no longer an edge, hence unprofitable, and unsellable.
Fully agree John, I wasn't referring to individual bots but bot creators such as BA and others, tipsters who currently give out their tips via websites and emails, bookies so you didn't have to keep changing websites, tipster reviewers who are all over the Internet, odds monitors, data providers, blogs and columnists … the list of support facilities for punters goes on and on but the punter has to find them. Look at the way the financial markets have developed frameworks such as Metatrader that facilitates accessing accounts at multiple marketmakers, enables data from different sources on different securities etc. … I'm thinking along those lines. At the moment we search the Internet for data and other services. I was suggesting that in the future all of this fragmentation will be centralised inside a framework with common connectivity standards and protocols. The principle of "the Internet of things" will not just apply to fridges and car convoys. It will bring all fragmented sectors and suppliers together by way of centralised frameworks similar to the way Wordpress did for websites, eBay and Amazon have done for small online outlets and Oddschecker is trying to do for bookies and exchanges. Before Wordpress website designers had to go looking for add-ins but since Wordpress the Add-ins know the designers will be at Wordpress so they go thereto find them.
ahh ic... Well, I can say I am not experienced enough to comment on the likelyhood of that occuring.

My experience with the CMS world (which is not extensive) is that in complex instances its cheaper to develop bespoke (a successful trading bot app that can scale is complex). Wordpress' market is low budget and no room for customization. Jam it all together bobs ur uncle sort of thing. Not really sure that works for botting...

I would be inclined to think that you would suffer the same problem with commoditising tipsters. Imagine for example there was a succesfully central tipping site with api where every tipster on earth put their tips. The edge would be quickly eroded. I also suspect successful (or perhaps professional) tipsters have a vested interest in not using centralised frameworks but I havent thought that through fully :)

As an aside, In the begining when I started out with betfair's api, I was also experimenting with scraping tipster sites etc.....In terms of scraping websites it's not all that difficult to do it's just that websites change...and crossmatching runners etc is not always easy...
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firlandsfarm
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johnsheppard wrote:
Tue Jun 11, 2019 5:13 am
ahh ic... Well, I can say I am not experienced enough to comment on the likelyhood of that occuring.
Neither can I John I was just speculating on what could be.
johnsheppard wrote:
Tue Jun 11, 2019 5:13 am
My experience with the CMS world (which is not extensive) is that in complex instances its cheaper to develop bespoke (a successful trading bot app that can scale is complex). Wordpress' market is low budget and no room for customization. Jam it all together bobs ur uncle sort of thing. Not really sure that works for botting...

I would be inclined to think that you would suffer the same problem with commoditising tipsters. Imagine for example there was a succesfully central tipping site with api where every tipster on earth put their tips. The edge would be quickly eroded. I also suspect successful (or perhaps professional) tipsters have a vested interest in not using centralised frameworks but I havent thought that through fully :)

As an aside, In the begining when I started out with betfair's api, I was also experimenting with scraping tipster sites etc.....In terms of scraping websites it's not all that difficult to do it's just that websites change...and crossmatching runners etc is not always easy...
John, I think you are still missing my point. I'm certainly not referring to the market for people like you who can build their own bot. I am looking at how the market for serious, semi computer savvy people made up of the thousands like myself and many others on the BA forum and other websites might mature to in say 10 years or so as computing cost come down and users become more accustomed to facilities and services becoming more integrated.

I'm not looking at bespoke builders. I'm not suggesting tipsters would make tips available to all and so dilute their edge. I'm not looking at traders though if they are currently trading on BA I see no reason why they shouldn't continue on what might be a BA type module. I'm looking at the current 'popular' market … I'm just saying that market could bring all it's sub-markets together within a common framework so that the various modules can interlink and cross communicate. A common marketplace, not common products.

I wasn't referring to Wordpress for quality of product, just for representation of how something might work with plug-ins. (And a debate on the Wordpress market is a debate for another day. :) )
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ShaunWhite
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The big cost is making it robust enough for public use, look how much people struggle with Guardian and that's pretty straight forward. And let's say it earns you 10k a month in subs, wouldn't all that time and effort be better spent finding another 10k/mo strategy rather than dealing with customers 247?

And also the issue that any system that was specifically designed to retain data would breach just about everyone's ts&cs. Millisecond horse data from BF is 200quid a month, tread on those toes at your peril.

Even BA just breaks even by all accounts, building an even more specialised complex system from the ground up (2 man yrs+) and supporting it, incl updates for all these different apis would need a huge customer base and subs before you saw a dollar in profit. Trading as been around for 20yrs, I don't know where that boom in numbers would come from. "I'm out" :)
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ShaunWhite
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I've always wondered why BF haven't adapted Tradefair to work on the exchange. It's certainly over half way there and with a redesigned interface and a few more features it would become the goto platform.

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firlandsfarm
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ShaunWhite wrote:
Wed Jun 12, 2019 6:22 pm
The big cost …
Those are fair points Shaun but they are based on today's knowledge … I was trying to put forward a tomorrow view. First we had the growth in betting now we are going through a trading expansion. Betting won't stop there, there will be more growth elsewhere. Where? I don't know. I wasn't thinking of one person developing the industry, maybe a 'big boy' will look at it one day and say "here's an opportunity, nobody has yet developed a monopoly set-up in this industry". One thing the Internet has brought to society (commercial and personal) is monopolies (they call it critical mass). There is no critical mass in this industry yet but it's slowing moving there as bookmakers merge and services are developed, all it takes is for a standard protocol to be adopted by a few and if it proves advantageous others will gradually jump on.
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firlandsfarm
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ShaunWhite wrote:
Wed Jun 12, 2019 6:25 pm
I've always wondered why BF haven't adapted Tradefair to work on the exchange. It's certainly over half way there and with a redesigned interface and a few more features it would become the goto platform.
Wellcome aboard the journey into the possible future! :)
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johnsheppard
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I think in the context of this thread...

There's a lot of risk involved in choosing technology or language or anything..... It's easy to forget that taking risks demands a larger pay off when you're plotting out the fun bits of building a system...

But then...theres that vs analysis paralaysis I guess...lol..

I mean, say for example that James Butler guy that wrote Betfair Trading Techniques...he's using winforms and VB.Net ...I would presume his sunk costs are covered by now...but...you wouldnt find too many people choosing that tech right now...because things change...
LinusP
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johnsheppard wrote:
Sat Jun 15, 2019 2:03 am
I mean, say for example that James Butler guy that wrote Betfair Trading Techniques...he's using winforms and VB.Net ...I would presume his sunk costs are covered by now...but...you wouldnt find too many people choosing that tech right now...because things change...
He doesn't trade/bet anymore, even implied he may have never made any money.
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Euler
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Difficult to forgive him for the way he acted as an 'expert' and then got stuck into me to imply I'd never been profitable to any extent. I even contacted him from half way around the planet to invite him to a meeting, so he could see I was genuine. But he declined and was incredibly disrespectful and patronising. It was along the lines of 'I'm more intelligent than you and if I can't do it, then neither can you'. Intensely arrogant, but somewhat amusing that he was forced to admit that he was unprofitable.

I think it shows that there is an intelligence trap when trading. I'll always have a lot of respect for people that trade profitability, however they do it. But I've got none for people who pretend to trade or are dismissive of those that do. They are many ways to make this work and if you may it work, then you deserve some respect.
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Euler
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I'd echo the comments about time taken to develop something. You seem to spend most of your time debugging and testing, it can take ages.

Very often it's not the things you know about that catch you out, it's the stuff that you didn't that has the biggest impact.
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ShaunWhite
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Euler wrote:
Sat Jun 15, 2019 2:43 pm
I'd echo the comments about time taken to develop something. You seem to spend most of your time debugging and testing, it can take ages.
:D So so true. The last 10% often takes 90% of the time.

This is why we always used to massively frontload all our development and spend as much as 40 or 50% of the budget on analysis, design, speccing etc etc.

The best advice I have is to write your unit and system test plans before even a line of code is written. Otherwise you just end up testing what you wrote, not a testing vs the original objective.
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firlandsfarm
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ShaunWhite wrote:
Sat Jun 15, 2019 4:20 pm
The best advice I have is to write your unit and system test plans before even a line of code is written. Otherwise you just end up testing what you wrote, not a testing vs the original objective.
Great advice Shaun
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ShaunWhite
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firlandsfarm wrote:
Sat Jun 15, 2019 4:28 pm
ShaunWhite wrote:
Sat Jun 15, 2019 4:20 pm
The best advice I have is to write your unit and system test plans before even a line of code is written. Otherwise you just end up testing what you wrote, not a testing vs the original objective.
Great advice Shaun
Sounds a bit OTT but it's amazing what can slip through the net between speccing and delivery if you're not careful, especially when coding gets split between a dozen people who don't know the big picture. I started in dev when there weren't really any formal methodologies like there are today, I was writing my own rule book and things like that which are now common practice had to be learnt the hard way. :)
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