Guardian switching with excel - improvement suggestion

[toptrader]

Hi,
I really want to be able to do fully automated high frequency trading of the day's markets using excel whilst keeping a very busy '9-5' job and social life. I've spent months writing code to get round the limitations below but can't quite get there...

The current guardian excel feature is excellent which allows you to have multiple sheets but cycling through a pre-populated list of each market that is going to be in play for the whole day takes it a long time to get back to the first one even on a 200ms refresh (which by the way when set so low this often 'misses' the refresh in excel at each pass, probably due to computer speed and size of excel with dozens of sheets)

A way round this is to use the excel feature in betangel itself (not guardian's own built in excel link) which limits you to 1 sheet in excel and then use the switching feature in guardian so it only swtiches to the market in betangel a set period before the off - in fact this would again be excellent except i want to monitor 2 markets going in play at the same time - the win AND the place market.

So.... I thought, could i have 2 betangel instances and use the betangel excel feature to update different workbooks, or different cell ranges in the same workbook. Alas betangel starts a complete new instance of excel rather than opening a second workbook, so the user cannot manually link the two together in excel as there are multiple different versions running on the PC.

Please please can one of the following be incorporated into the next release:
1) ability in guardian's own excel feature to only populate the excel sheet if a certain market is within X mins of the start time

OR

2) betangel's own excel feature doesn't open a new instance of excel each time you click 'open workbook' and instead can just open a new workbook in any existing instance of excel on the PC

does this make sense? Either of these routes would allow fully automated day trading in multiple markets which isn't 100% possible at the moment (but we're very close!).

thanks

[Bet Angel]

A way round this is to use the excel feature in betangel itself (not guardian's own built in excel link) which limits you to 1 sheet in excel and then use the switching feature in guardian so it only swtiches to the market in betangel a set period before the off

It does this already. If you do the auto switching from Guardian but load the spreadsheet from the Excel tab then it switches at the predetermined time.

Unless I have misunderstood what you are saying here?

As far as cycle time is concerned Guardian ignores closed markets so it doesn't unnecessarily refresh these markets it just skips straight over them.

[toptrader]

I'm sorry, you've missed the point.
I'm saying its great that it does this anyway, but the betangel excel feature only lets you monitor 1 market at a time, so if you had a WIN and a PLACE market then you can only monitor one of these. Once the next market gets withn X mins off the off betangel will switch fine, but again only monitor one market.

Again, i know guardian skips markets that are suspended - again this is great, but it will still cycle to a market that doesn't start for several hours, thereby wasting time if you have dozens of markets loaded.

The ideal feature would be for the guardian to have a function NOT to switch to a market either (1) with zero bets matched, or (2) which is >X mins before the start time

Make sense?

Alternatively, does betangel really have to open a new instance of excel each time you click 'open workbook', or can it first check if excel is already open and open a new workbook in the existing instance? I'm sure this would only be a couple of lines of code

thanks! I would really love this feature (and would pay for it!)

[Bet Angel]

OK, That's made it clearer.

You know you can import multiple sheets into one Excel workbook?

[toptrader]

Yes i know this, but not when the worksheets are in different instances of excel. There is no way to update multiple sheets in excel and switch to the market a set number of minutes before the start time in the current BA version (it's sooo close though....)
- guardian's own excel integration allows you to update multiple worksheets but then cycles between all of the markets in the list, regardless of how long it is until the market is in running, which slows everything down far too much when you are talking about several dozen markets
- the betangel excel integration manages this swtiching great, but only allows 1 market to be updated in excel at a time

I've still got it pretty automated using Guardian with multiple sheets in the same workbook and am able to run about an hour or twos worth of markets before i need to go in and update guardian for the next races(i have a few hundred lines of VBA code managing my spreadsheet and bot!), but I strive to have it fully automated for the whole day's racing

[Bet Angel]

Thanks for your feedback. We are working in Guardian at the moment but on this build it's unlikely we can implement this as we are too far into the current project. But we will bear this in mind for future work.

[sjoc20]

Hi,

Actually I raised this issue (Or something very similar if i'm understanding right) with support about 3/4 months back which i guess rightly so they said to put it to forum to see how many people would be interested in having it implemented. .... I was lazy and didn't do it ... ...coz i guess it could of been implemented by now if so...

anyway, my understanding of this or what i would like to see is this,

Guardian connects to excel (Not from the main application). At this stage (with the current version) you can have excel switch markets to 10 (i believe) or more markets (depending on how many 'Bet Angel (1), (2) .. etc sheets you have) by indiviually selecting on the markets which sheet in excel that market should update to. The problem here is,

1. Either you can have 100 sheets in excel to switch for the 100 markets you have selected for the day in guardian, but then this becomes a drag on processing power (at least for me anyway). and on top of that it then doesn't help where you can switch to market if < x seconds but stop it from switching/updating to market if > x seconds, good point toptrader .

In fact, this should be so simple to implement for the coming next version now as the switch to market if < x seconds already exists that i believe creating the 'other side' to that programming equation should be no more than afternoon's work. In fact, that would solve all of the problems being raised in this thread...and very simple to implement, Of course hopefully simple if that part of the code is not somehow tied with how guardian monitors the markets away from actually switching to them.

2. Or, if you go through the markets loaded into guardian that load into excel periodically by selecting market 1 to open in sheet 1 and market 2 to open in sheet 2 etc by the time you exuast the bet angel sheets you start again, so market 11 on the list opens in sheet 1, market 12 in sheet 2 etc. The problem that occurs which is a nuisance for toptrader is that in this instance sheet 1 in excel keeps switching between market 1 and 11 every few seconds making it impossible to trade on both markets let alone one of the them. In this case market 11 is an hour away, market 1 a couple minutes away from the off. With the don't update to excel/switch to market in main application if market is more than x seconds would stop sheet 1 continually updating/'rotating' back and forth between markets every 200ms for example.

...so, with that said, I would like to see this implemented as soon as possible (maybe even the next version, tho i know you say you can't). sign me on with Toptrader (if toptrader doesn't mind) as at least two users that would like to see this happen....

Now, as bet angel support suggested...anybody else??

[sjoc20]

..oh, and one more thing (a little unrelated)...

It would also be nice that when markets are loaded into guardian (by pressing add today's markets in the quick selection bit) that it either has the option to only add markets from betfair that will go in-play or when the markets are loaded in guardian it would be cool if there were an extra column saying whether that market will go in-play or not. This way i could go through and get rid of the markets I do or don't want.

(unless this is already possible, if it is, Where/How?)

Thanks

[toptrader]

Thanks for the response BetAngel
I did actually raise this before (thread 'Guardian Switching...') and others did also think this would be a good idea at the time

The logic already exists in guardian not to swtich BA to a market more than X minutes before the off, so all that is needed is this logic to be applied to the market cycling process if a user selects some new check box. (Hopefully therefore not too difficult to build, and I am happy to help UAT!)


I still think BA is fantastic by the way and you are not obliged to make any changes, but it would be very nice if it could be made!

[sjoc20]

yes agreed. BA is fantastic (otherwise i would'nt be using it). Guardian works just fine too. But of course improvements to anything can always be made, so onwards and upwards and hopefully these changes come to fuition.

Cheers BA

[DMJC1989]

toptrader seems to have exactly the problem I am experiencing at the moment with Bet Angel, as it is difficult to get two markets from the same event in line to analyse at once. This is because the markets will only be in the Excel sheet at the same time for a very short period, especially if you have many markets selected to auto trade throughout the day. If the guardian could update two or three markets at once for a particular event, and then once this event has suspended, load in the next event with the same markets into the same sheets as before.

This would be very useful, cheers.

[Bet Angel]

We have tried several implementations of this in the development edition but not found a satisfactory solution as yet. Work continues and the request is noted.

[toptrader]

Great, thanks - look forward to it
Happy to be a 'guinea pig' if required.

[Nero Tulip]

We have tried several implementations of this in the development edition but not found a satisfactory solution as yet. Work continues and the request is noted.

That's great to hear.

[nagyz]

resurrecting this old thread, just wondering what the current plans of development are. is it (or when will it be) possible that guardian loads a market into a previously suspended market?
thanks!

edit: for those interested, what seems to work is to have auto-bind and auto-clear binding on, and also restrict refresh from some seconds to startTime until a large number after Start Time. this will make guardian rebind sheets when their corresponding event is finished.