Sports Trading Life

[jamesg46]

I don't know James, It's not possible to know what the true value of any individual animal is in any one race, no matter what the charts do. If its feeling belligerent then 10/1 might not be a value back, if its main opposition is destined to be a non-trier then 1.5 might be good. The concept of value is only evident on larger sample(*) . It's why I said its fairly irrelevant to race-by-race traders, but as it's the maths that underpins why winners win and losers lose it does no harm to be aware of it.

(*) eg BSP is known to be 'correct' on large samples but it's a statistical impossibility that it's correct on everything that that's ever run or will run.

Anyway James it's not my made up view it's just the way betting works and whether you have 1 bet or 10 bets per market they're still just bets.

In fact I couldn't see it myself at first either but knowing it had to be the case through pure logic, it became a matter of understanding how and why it was true no matter what method you used. Doing that unlocked ways to bet profitably I'd never considered before and definately stopped me from having losing bets that would otherwise been seen as OK because the bottom line was positive.

... Even I'm bored with me now so I'll stop.

I don’t have an agenda against value Shaun, my gripe is with “it’s the Only way to make money”. If it’s impossible to know what the true value is of any one animal, in any one race, then we also have uncertainty/volatility which is also a valid way to make money, & although I agree an understanding of value is helpful I don’t think it needs to be a consideration for order flow traders. I’d probably go as far as suggesting it’s unhelpful to think about value as an order flow trader but that’s my opinion.

I wouldn’t want to be responsible for boring you too much more, it’s obvious that there are conversations within other threads on this trading forum, that hold a much greater weight of insight to others, yourself or I…. there is some wonderful educational material on offer to all of us in the Rant thread.

[jamesg46]

If someone’s strategy is to scalp pre off horse racing would it be reasonable to suggest that they aren’t looking for a value price or even thinking about value? It would make more sense (to me at least) to wait for the market to conclude at roughly what it thinks is a fair price… for example closer to the off time when near conclusion with reduced volatility and greater liquidity?.

[Euler]

It could be an interesting debate. Because I don't tend to flow with the mantra that you need to know the price of something to profit when trading, but some things, like in-play trading you really do need to know what the true price should be.