Consistent Pennies Make Consistent Pounds (Horses and Dogs)

[Crazyskier]

Evening all.

As many of you know from my penny-pinching risk-averse scalping posts over the last year or so, I have learned the hard way that I don't have the patience, skills or time to learn to be a 'trader' so I just run a nice little daily £3-6 'set and forget' horse trading (gap finding) bot that I manage from a BF bank of just £200...

However this evening I was away most of the day and decided to scratch my gambling 'itch' with a few scalps on the doggies (as the horses finished early), which as you all know are a different beast, both figuratively and literally, due to the at times absurd lack of liquidity there.

I realised that the very same principles and triggers and signals that I have automated and refined down for the horses can actually prove true on the doggies too!

I normally manage around 80-90% strike rate on the horses, (20/21 winners from today's races) but for the hour or so I traded the dogs, I managed a 14/14 strike rate = 100% without loss - very rare in my experience of the dogs. Of course my stakes were to my usual liability of just £2, and actually if you look at the first race at 18.56, you'll notice that I didn't realise that I hadn't set the green up all at xx seconds before the event start (as I usually do) and got lucky with the winner having a bet still active on him.

So the purpose of my post is not to show the pennies I'm making, but rather how over the days they mount up and if the system strategy and principles are sound, how it can work on any race be they dogs or horses, of any distance, at any time, unlike the manual or swing traders where it's much more difficult to get such consistent (if more profitable) results.

Hopefully this may provide food for thought as PeterLe did for me when I kept having great successes, followed by bigger failures and bank wipes when I messed up trading. This slow and steady automation approach is far less stressful and easy to manage and actually even a 1 pence win, that I made in tonight's second dog race, is better than a loss of ANY size.

Sometimes less is more people -just be really keen to keep them GREEN!

[Bluesky]

Hi CS nice trading.

I wanted to ask you something about your horse racing results from today. Its good that you only had one loss and all the rest wins, but that loss does seem rather large in comparison to most of the wins you got.

I know you did have a £2.59 win and a £0.99 but most of the other wins were a lot less than that loss of £2.17. Does your system usually have lots of small wins, and one or two larger wins that balance out larger losses? Or is this not a typical days trading for you?

Is there something you can do to your system that could cut down the size of the loss, or would that mean you end up with more losses even if they would be of a smaller size.

[xitian]

Well done Crazyskier!

I can definitely relate to your advice of testing strategies in other markets which you didn't originally intend. I now operate in as many markets as I possibly can, and many of my strategies are just variations with tweaked parameters, or even identical. Lots of small income streams eventually become one large one.

One comment about your greens so far though. Although I'd certainly advocate concentrating on avoiding losses as a good starting point, at some point you need to try to scale up (otherwise it doesn't justify your time). For me, seeing 100% greens across the board kind of signifies to me that I've not taken full advantage of the opportunities. For example, if you doubled your stake, you might perhaps see 10% losses, but the 90% greens are big enough to offset those losses to produce an overall higher profit.

Now of course you need to take into account the level of risk you're winning to take, and your level of risk aversion before your stomach starts to feel sick. But I've found with my experience that in order to make serious profits that you can't avoid losses, and as time has passed, I've become more and more comfortable with taking those calculated risks.

Anyway, the point of my post is that if you're consistently seeing 95%-100% greens every day, then I'd recommend pushing the boundaries a bit.

Disclaimer: In no way do I accept responsibility for you losing your bank though

Side Note: A very good point mentioned by Bluesky there too. If you did scale up, then there's a possibility that that loss would balloon to an unacceptable level. So you should address that first.

[Crazyskier]

Hi CS nice trading.

I wanted to ask you something about your horse racing results from today. Its good that you only had one loss and all the rest wins, but that loss does seem rather large in comparison to most of the wins you got.

I know you did have a £2.59 win and a £0.99 but most of the other wins were a lot less than that loss of £2.17. Does your system usually have lots of small wins, and one or two larger wins that balance out larger losses? Or is this not a typical days trading for you?

Is there something you can do to your system that could cut down the size of the loss, or would that mean you end up with more losses even if they would be of a smaller size.

Good point and that really was a bad one where I'd layed several horses at high prices only for them to tumble in price and not recover before my green/hedge all kicked in. Each market can have upto 50 trades on it, (I must limit this due to the charges I used to get when I first used BA for over 1000 transactions per hour' ) for pennies as bear in mind at higher odds (8+) a £2 liability is a tiny amount actually traded. If you see my typical days trading screen logs here, you'll see my average loss per event is MUCH lower than £2 generally, which is part of what makes this system so consistent.
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[Crazyskier]

Well done Crazyskier!

I can definitely relate to your advice of testing strategies in other markets which you didn't originally intend. I now operate in as many markets as I possibly can, and many of my strategies are just variations with tweaked parameters, or even identical. Lots of small income streams eventually become one large one.

One comment about your greens so far though. Although I'd certainly advocate concentrating on avoiding losses as a good starting point, at some point you need to try to scale up (otherwise it doesn't justify your time). For me, seeing 100% greens across the board kind of signifies to me that I've not taken full advantage of the opportunities. For example, if you doubled your stake, you might perhaps see 10% losses, but the 90% greens are big enough to offset those losses to produce an overall higher profit.

Now of course you need to take into account the level of risk you're winning to take, and your level of risk aversion before your stomach starts to feel sick. But I've found with my experience that in order to make serious profits that you can't avoid losses, and as time has passed, I've become more and more comfortable with taking those calculated risks.

Yes I agree about the multi-market approach though Dogs and horses seem to be best suited in this regard; I'd have far less faith in football or tennis markets personally.

Regarding scaling up, I hear this a lot from both forum members and other guys I know that have tried automating systems on BF, and I know it makes sense from a financial logic perspective, however when you bear in mind that I'm the wrong side of 40 and was for 20+ of those years a typical 'mug punter', with sooo much money lost to bookies, and more recently BF - I've pretty much accepted that I'll never reach the exalted heights of the likes of PW or Mega Rain or any of the consistent PC payers that lurk hereabouts. I simply lack the discipline and don't have the patience to try and develop that unique skill set. The ONLY way I seem to be able to turn a profit is to remove the 'clicky clicky' temptation, especially in play.

So, given my mindset as a decades long losing punter, you'll appreciate I hope just how rewarding my penny-pinching enterprise is and the warm fuzzy feeling I get each day looking at GREEN numbers, the amounts are almost secondary in terms of motivation, it's the principal of taking part WITHOUT LOSING that counts.

In short, I have promised myself that I'll wait until £300 bank (today's was at £248.72) and actually scale up my increments from 2p / 3p and 4p per trade to 3,4 and 5p per trade. This means my liability per trade will increase beyond £2, though I've not done the math yet. Dangerous times ahead haha!!

[spreadbetting]

I'd agree with xitian, now you've got some consistently profitable bot the next step if to look at increasing the profit not strike rate. In my experience strike rate and profitability don't usually go hand in hand, I think my bots win probably around 75% of the time.

I'd look to up your stakes slowly and also get them to play in line with the money available or currently churning thru the exchange at the time of bet placement.Luckily bots couldn't care less about losses or strike rates so as long as it's winning to it's max potential you can leave it running over as many markets as possible.