Automating an odds range (Horse racing)

[jamesedwards]

Thanks again James, reading back through the thread and your replies it looks like you told me that but I misunderstood as I clicked on the 'parameters' tab. Apols if it's a bit frustrating repeating.

Excited to giving it a go today and see what results I get.

Whilst I'm on, when I record the logs / excel files, they save as individual records (obviously), but does anyone know if there's a way that a master spreadsheet could look inside them all and report the results in one go for the day to save me manually going in and checking. Or perhaps there's another way that's even easier that I don't know about? Could anyone point me to anything?

The most common way to track profit by market is to use some extra rulelines in your rulesfile to keep track on the main Guardian screen. viewtopic.php?t=25455

[rkuk]

Oh I'll take a look at that! Thanks James.

So bot attempt 3 is working - it fires the lay bet and I can see it in practice mode, but it doesn't look like it is placing the back bets to then 'green up'. I either win a straight full £10 or lose the liability if it runs on to win. Obviously the £10 is more fun! Something I'm realising about this though is: if I fix this bot to do as intended my wins are going to be tiny and my losses therefore massively amplified. Hmmm. Maybe I ignore the back bets on this strat then and look to see if I can improve the strike rate / occurrence as I'm either winning £10 or losing around £40....I guess it's just how many -£40's I hit! But then I might as well just pick the horse I want to lay and straight up gamble which isn't really trading.

[jamesedwards]

So bot attempt 3 is working - it fires the lay bet and I can see it in practice mode, but it doesn't look like it is placing the back bets to then 'green up'. I either win a straight full £10 or lose the liability if it runs on to win. Obviously the £10 is more fun!

I can't see anything obviously wrong with your offset settings, but I never use this functionality so I might be missing something.

Something I'm realising about this though is: if I fix this bot to do as intended my wins are going to be tiny and my losses therefore massively amplified. Hmmm. Maybe I ignore the back bets on this strat then and look to see if I can improve the strike rate / occurrence as I'm either winning £10 or losing around £40....I guess it's just how many -£40's I hit! But then I might as well just pick the horse I want to lay and straight up gamble which isn't really trading.

People have different definitions of "trading". IMO trading doesn't mean greening up, it means actively entering and/or exiting a market at a price that delivers a long term positive expected value (+EV).

eg on a coin toss, entering with a back bet at 2.10 would be +EV. But exiting at 2.02 to green up would be -EV, and you wouldn't do it if your only focus was to maximise long term profitability. You would let the entry bet ride until you could green up at 1.99 or better.

[rkuk]

Thanks James, I need to do a bit more learning on this one. Take your point on EV, and it makes perfect sense in many ways. Why am I risking circa £40 every time to hit £1 (don't get me wrong I'm sure there are loads of strats that do exactly that and more but the first few runs of it look to be in the negative and it would take a lot of those £1 wins to claw back a few losses!). I could look to learn to put in a stop loss to reduce the liability, but given I'm struggling to get the back bets to fire on automation I could be in for a lot of headaches trying to work it out.

Possibly back to the drawing board for me.