Is BetAngel for me? I'm not sure

We were all new to Bet Angel once. Ask any question you like here and fellow forum members promise not to laugh. Betfair trading made simple.
PeterLe
Posts: 3727
Joined: Wed Apr 15, 2009 3:19 pm

D - Why dont you just simply try it using £2 stakes?
Quite often something looks great on paper, but its only when you run it in a live environment it can show any anomolies (run in practice initially)
Regards
Peter
(PS I know how much you software contractors earn! You can stretch to £2 a race! :D )
d4006
Posts: 25
Joined: Sun Apr 17, 2016 9:06 am

PeterLe wrote:D - Why dont you just simply try it using £2 stakes?
Quite often something looks great on paper, but its only when you run it in a live environment it can show any anomolies (run in practice initially)
Regards
Peter
(PS I know how much you software contractors earn! You can stretch to £2 a race! :D )
No reason not to, but I'm not thinking it'll make any difference really, except to my spreadsheet calculations which uses the current balance to show how much I'm up as a percentage. It'd just make things a bit more confusing. It's probably what a true gambler would be dying to do, which I don't really think I am. Yet. Not sure I ever will have a gambler's mentality.
PeterLe
Posts: 3727
Joined: Wed Apr 15, 2009 3:19 pm

The consistent winners on here arent gamblers nor have a gamblers mindset.
What Im trying to say is that if you genuinely have a good idea/system, you dont need a £100K bank, use a tiny bank and compound it, if it is a positive strategy, you will soon hit a ceiling (very quickly) and your other £99K will be safely tucked away in savings
regards
Peter
d4006
Posts: 25
Joined: Sun Apr 17, 2016 9:06 am

PeterLe wrote:The consistent winners on here arent gamblers nor have a gamblers mindset.
What Im trying to say is that if you genuinely have a good idea/system, you dont need a £100K bank, use a tiny bank and compound it, if it is a positive strategy, you will soon hit a ceiling (very quickly) and your other £99K will be safely tucked away in savings
regards
Peter
I think what I'll probably do is fund it with something between £5k and £50k and backtrail it removing the original investment over time. So, if it were 50k, then each time I hit 55k I'd take out 5k until I've got my original investment out (at which point I would have been at 100k but I'm actually still only at 50k). Then I can let it ride knowing that I'm basically only playing with winnings. That was my strategy when I played the stock market in 1998-2000 (the bubble days). It meant I got out unscathed during the crash, but lost a lot of on-paper winnings :( Started with $75k and got to $150k and exited with $75k (dollars 'cause I was living in America at the time).
d4006
Posts: 25
Joined: Sun Apr 17, 2016 9:06 am

Can I ask if I'm correctly interpreting this quick snapshot from the betfair exchange site?

Image

Supposing I wanted to put a £100 bet on Miss Buckaroo. If I just put in a bet to get the best price, then am I right to assume I'd get 62 @ 8.4 and the remaining 38 at 8.2 (leaving only 15 at the 8.2 price for the next guy).

If I was keen to get 8.4 (and had partial fills turned on, if that's a thing), then I'd get my 62 at 8.4 but then my remaining 38 would appear on the right hand side of other people's screens, and anyone who would be willing to lay 38 at 8.4 could take my action. True?
spreadbetting
Posts: 3140
Joined: Sun Jan 31, 2010 8:06 pm

d4006 wrote: If I was keen to get 8.4 (and had partial fills turned on, if that's a thing), then I'd get my 62 at 8.4 but then my remaining 38 would appear on the right hand side of other people's screens, and anyone who would be willing to lay 38 at 8.4 could take my action. True?
Yes, as soon as you'd taken all the money on offer any unmatched bets would now show @ 8.4 for others to lay. Most money comes into the markets around 5 minutes before the off so you'd usually have little problem getting a £100 bet matched closer to the off. Basically no one likes to show their hand early these days as big bets alert others to fancied horses, plus most pro's like to see how something behaves in the paddock or on the way down to post.
d4006
Posts: 25
Joined: Sun Apr 17, 2016 9:06 am

spreadbetting wrote:Yes, as soon as you'd taken all the money on offer any unmatched bets would now show @ 8.4 for others to lay. Most money comes into the markets around 5 minutes before the off so you'd usually have little problem getting a £100 bet matched closer to the off. Basically no one likes to show their hand early these days as big bets alert others to fancied horses, plus most pro's like to see how something behaves in the paddock or on the way down to post.
Thanks. Love it. Thanks for the tip on the last 5 minutes being when the action is.

Got my Betfair account all ready. I'm 90% sure I'll be using BetAngel too. :)
d4006
Posts: 25
Joined: Sun Apr 17, 2016 9:06 am

Thought I'd come back and update on my super successful system that gained 45% in 2 weeks on about 25-50 bets/day.

I got hold of 15 years of racing data in a spreadsheet and ran my system against it. First in the form I was using it, and then in all possible variations of it I could think of. After 15 years, very few variations had managed to not go bust. The ones that were still in profit were a maximum of 5% up. Which over 15 years is pathetic of course. Plus those winning variants only bet about once a month.

I had two major strategies (of which I tested a few thousand variations of parameters). The first one used a fixed bet amount and would start out fairly well, but eventually just slowly trend downwards. The betfair higher odds helped, but the commission neutralized it. The second strategy had loss recovery built-in, and that one would really make good progress but then a string of losers would slam it right back down. Eventually the string of losers would be sufficient to bankrupt it.

Luckily I've learned all this within my BetAngel trial period (I only switched to Betfair+BetAngel a little over a week ago).

I wrote a program that ran these strategies against the spreadsheet data and was able to test all feasible variations and parameters. I wrote a separate program that analyzed the data vs the strategy and found that they would always pick about 3:1 losers vs winners and the odds would therefore need to be > 3/1 to make a profit, and the average was usually about 2.65/1. That's a classic "the house always wins" scenario right there. You can have a lucky good run, as I did, but now I've stopped.

Thanks to all those that helped me revive an idea I've been sitting on for donkey's years and always thought it had potential. Time to ditch the idea. It was fun though.
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