Naffman wrote: ↑Tue Apr 28, 2020 9:28 am
I've seen tens of thousands of horses races but still imo you need to know quite a lot about the horse you want to trade ie.
- does it always pull during the run
- does it prefer a slow speed even though its ridden off the pace and does an on pacer prefer a faster gallop
- does it rally when looking beaten
- where is the best part of the track on that day
There are so many quirks to different horses that you really need to study in depth to make it work imo, not just laying one because you think it looks beaten or because they've gone too quick in front (which will probably be reflected in the price anyway)
I agree, I'm sure such knowledge can go a long way of making some of these approaches viable. But it's probably a bad starting point since some of the mistakes are both inevitable and costly.
Seen about a dozen of other inplay traders with their recordings, still didn't go through some of the average/smaller traders, but even the guys that have been consistent for 10+ years don't really know or study these things, certainly not the form etc, they only know a few bits and bobs and just focus on the general race reading on the spot or focus mostly on the ladder. Each have their own somewhat unique approach and the things they look for, some even go full purist by killing the pictures and/or opening just the one runner to focus on, that's for sure one way of filtering out the noise and all the distractions including the commentary in a fast market where concentration and zeroing in on an opportunity seems to be key, but by going to such extremes you miss out on the opportunity to build up your race reading skills to higher levels. Although anyone that has two working eyes and a trading mindset can see where some of the opportunities are if he spends the whole afternoon just watching the races and the markets unfold in all their glory, certainly don't need to look at what others are doing for inspiration.
That being said, my race reading is poor so I don't mind the commentators myself, they're practically teachers, teaching you how to race read by highlighting some of the interesting things that are going on, albeit maybe often too late to take advantage of but not too late to learn from, I'm convinced that some of them would make cracking inplay traders
However, I do bring a different skill set to the market which I feel is more than a good enough starting point, most order flow traders like noisy markets in general and I kinda feel at home in chaotic uncertain environments, but I believe the most efficient way is to ultimately use the best of both worlds, with some automation running in the background as well to catch the extremes of the market.
Overall the market has a surprising depth to it, like Naffman says every piece of information plays a role, the commentators, track knowledge, camera angles, equine body language and so on, even the colors, there's plenty of room to build up your skill set in multiple branching directions. A good chunk of the skill set seems to be reactionary (maybe a young man's game? considering the average age of the traders that I know is just below 30), so knowing what to look for in advance certainly helps as there's not much time to think about the opportunities or to properly frame them, this is probably best done in advance and it helps keep FOMO at bay.
