Obviously depends on whether you view automation as just a bonus approach or your main trading goal, I personally feel that the opportunities that manual trading offers are far too good to turn down and getting your own hands dirty is a lot more interesting than leaving all that fun for your bots.
Not much more I wanted to add, it all looks daunting at first but you can learn how to use Bet Angel and its auto features inside of a few weeks, the amazing work of Dallas and a few others makes sure of that. Automation in general may sound daunting but it's really not if you start small and simple at first, you can probably get a ton of data advice from people if you asked nicely, but if you're attacking automation via the manual trading route then you wouldn't really need to.
By starting small I mean say you develop the ability to trade (grind) smaller markets like greyhounds or daily Aussie racing and things like that, that would mean you should then have the ability to automate some of it, because in order to trade them you would need to understand the structure of that market and how it behaves. And if you can manage to do that then you should be ready to attack the next bigger market if you wished, and so on, with each previous success giving you exactly the right tools to attack the next market (because they are all linked in some way, shape or form). Same thing for manual trading, how convenient is that?!
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Because a greyhounds market is practically the same market as a horse racing one, it just never gets the opportunity or the time to fully mature. A lot of markets share the same structure and similar characteristics, and learning more about those will unlock all sorts of automation doors for you, should you wish to open some of them.