Quit my job to do this as a living!

[Kai]

it's completely subjective and spotting price misalignments (aka value) can only be done through experience

Actually my immediate reaction was this

Ah, I see you are a cultured person as well, if you enjoy the multi-layered humor that only a dank meme can produce

But again, this all comes back to auditing/journaling. How would we work out what was working & what wasn't, if we're trying hundreds of 'ideas' during a/several matches?

With data/spreadsheets, I could work it out - but I'm baffled about how to do it without spreadsheets. Trust me, I don't wanna be a data nerd, but the market forces me - cos usually my "gut instincts" are plain wrong

But I think everyone's gut instincts start off wrong??? Doesn't mean you should give up on them. But for the love of God never try any of your own football ideas, those markets are designed to torture you for all eternity Let the market show you the opportunities and give you ideas on the spot instead, they will be of much higher quality than anything you can think of because the market holds all of the information. I've spent so much time trying to somehow outsmart the footballing in-play markets with what I thought were clever concepts because I wanted to find my own way of beating the variance of football and I thought that I was getting close but I got nowhere, turned out it was all garbage and what minor edges I found along the way were very situational and not worth pursuing. I had to drop all of the naive nonsense and adopt the same approaches that everyone else had, if you look at what other football traders have to say you will see they all keep saying the same things and for good reason, including Peter in his videos. Nothing is stopping you from looking at what setups others look for, you are free to use their work.

I know we've had this discussion before but I have no idea why you'd need a ton of spreadsheets to find opportunities, taking a simple screenshot of a prerace market just before the off should already tell you where the best opportunity here was and how you should have traded it, if you just spend a brief moment analyzing what actually happened here. If it happened here that means that it will happen again in the future, probably already tomorrow.

Football can get messy, you can do everything right and end the day in loss through no fault of your own, but that doesn't mean your instincts are garbage. I'd imagine that's why most people prefer racing since the opportunities arrive one after another in an orderly fashion and the trades are nicely compressed inside a smaller time window, although it's not a fair comparison.

[SweetLyrics]

Love this.

It's that old cliche - walk before you can run.

I think the idea that you need to find some extremely complicated formula or obscure approach is understandably appealing. I think an aspiring trader wants to be the next Peter Webb or Adam Heathcote, not some guy doing bog standard stuff and making £10 K a year. However, it's wrongheaded. For a start, a tiny edge can yield huge returns if you are able to put enough money through the market. Plus, you should find something that works, your bread and butter, before you worry about venturing into exotic territory.

Do you have any pointers of the sort of stuff that works in football? Any videos you'd recommend?

But I think everyone's gut instincts start off wrong??? Doesn't mean you should give up on them.

[...]

I've spent so much time trying to somehow outsmart the footballing in-play markets with what I thought were clever concepts because I wanted to find my own way of beating the variance of football and I thought that I was getting close but I got nowhere, turned out it was all garbage and what minor edges I found along the way were very situational and not worth pursuing. I had to drop all of the naive nonsense and adopt the same approaches that everyone else had, if you look at what other football traders have to say you will see they all keep saying the same things and for good reason, including Peter in his videos. Nothing is stopping you from looking at what setups others look for, you are free to use their work.

[ShaunWhite]

How do you know your gut instinct is wrong? Have you proved it with data, journaled and audited it? Probably not, you've proved it by looking at your balance in the same way people do when they're not using data at all. I wouldn't think many people are blessed with good market reading gut instinct from day one, they aquire it by doing their apprenticeship. You can't get away from practice practice practice.

I'd also seriously question anyone's ability to simulate manual trading with an excel spreadsheet, in fact I'd say it was impossible, where's your scaling in and out or the speculative offers being hit by noise, and where's all the soft information that's informing your decisions? It's hard enough simulating automation in excel, manual trading is a whole world of different.

[SweetLyrics]

I don't think it's impossible to find stuff that works via a spreadsheet, but there are limitations, as you indicate.

I think I can see where Simon is coming from. For the sake of argument, if you've backtested a trading method, and it's yielded a decent profit and a fairly smooth equity curve over the last 10,000 trades, then there is a good chance you'll be onto a winner if you automate it and use conservative staking.

However, it's not the only way. I know a guy who makes hundreds of pounds a day from manual trading, and I'd be surprised if he ever ends the day empty handed. I would say that the chances he will make a decent profit over the next month are just as high as the chances that a bot with a good track record will.

The other challenge with manual trading is that it requires discipline, but so does bot trading, inasmuch as you have to deal with the temptation to tweak the bot, or manually intervene in trades where you think you know better than the bot, or to manually trade alongside the bot, just for fun.

How do you know your gut instinct is wrong? Have you proved it with data, journaled and audited it? Probably not, you've proved it by looking at your balance in the same way people do when they're not using data at all. I wouldn't think many people are blessed with good market reading gut instinct from day one, they aquire it by doing their apprenticeship. You can't get away from practice practice practice.

I'd also seriously question anyone's ability to simulate manual trading with an excel spreadsheet, in fact I'd say it was impossible, where's your scaling in and out or the speculative offers being hit by noise, and where's all the soft information that's informing your decisions? It's hard enough simulating automation in excel, manual trading is a whole world of different.

[ruthlessimon]

With respect, I think you are making heavy weather of this.

Always

I just enjoy probing alternate opinions, especially if I don't agree/understand. Anyone who advocates data, I aint got a problem, cos I get how powerful a well designed spreadsheet/sim is. But my trading always sucked when I only had videos - hence why I'm genuinely interested in how people use em/no data/hunches

[SweetLyrics]

Ages ago, I remember Switesh proudly saying that he traded with an amount of money such that, if his trade failed, it hurt.

That may ultimately have been part of the reason things never worked out for him.

You have to trade with stakes such that, if you have a failed trade, you are totally indifferent.

Perhaps if you were to do that, you might find that you approach the market differently, as you won't be so emotionally invested in the outcome.

Something else to bear in mind is that, when you try any new skill, you'll probably suck to begin with. If you learn a martial art, don't expect to kick anyone's ass after the first lesson with your new knowledge! You were probably rubbish at tennis once, too! But providing you set out with a plan, and try to take on board the feedback the market gives you, you'll probably improve over time.

A pro trader once told me that he could train someone who was really good at playing video games to make over £100 K a year, because of the way they approach gaming, i.e. being systematic and disciplined, and mastering one level before moving onto the next. I'm not sure those are the only ingredients for success, but I think he was onto something.

I just enjoy probing alternate opinions, especially if I don't agree/understand. Anyone who advocates data, I aint got a problem, cos I get how powerful a well designed spreadsheet/sim is. But my trading always sucked when I only had videos - hence why I'm genuinely interested in how people use em/no data/hunches

[Speculator_3]

I actually sent the OP a pm a month ago asking if he's still using this strategy and if it's still profitable. Got no reply. Make of that what you will.

[SweetLyrics]

I think we can safely assume that he's no longer using the method (not being bitchy, but it is what it is - sometimes the market will kick you in the nuts, many of us have been there, but on a more positive note, failure can be a detour on the road to success if you learn from it).

I actually sent the OP a pm a month ago asking if he's still using this strategy and if it's still profitable. Got no reply. Make of that what you will.

[Speculator_3]

What I'm puzzled about is why the OP revealed his "strategy" on an open forum, if he thought he had a genuine edge...

P.S. I am also astonished that the OP dared to lay at such huge odds. I always felt very uncomfortable laying anything over 3.0 or so...

[Derek27]

I actually sent the OP a pm a month ago asking if he's still using this strategy and if it's still profitable. Got no reply. Make of that what you will.

Did he open it? It would still be stuck in your outbox if he didn't?

[Derek27]

What I'm puzzled about is why the OP revealed his "strategy" on an open forum, if he thought he had a genuine edge...

P.S. I am also astonished that the OP dared to lay at such huge odds. I always felt very uncomfortable laying anything over 3.0 or so...

He probably put as much thought in protecting his strategy, as he put into the strategy itself.

[ShaunWhite]

I don't think it's impossible to find stuff that works via a spreadsheet, but there are limitations, as you indicate.

I work purely in the quant camp so I fully appreciate data, and lots of it. But from what I know about discretionary trading (and I tried it for 18months fulltime, real money) is it's a lot more subtle in interpretation and execution. My sim is pretty damn good if I say so myself but I wouldn't even know where to start coding something that could simulate manual trading and even if I could then executing it would be, intense.

I think as so often we're all basically in agreement but talking about 3 or more types of trading; discretionary, quant, and everything inbetween.

Quant trading uses a fixed set of rules to determine trade timing and direction in a systematic way.
Discretionary traders use intuition and “market feel” in order to make technical decisions and the discretionary trader does not always make the same interpretation of a market indicator or use it, in the same way, each time it’s applied. This trader uses personal judgment to determine the value of that indicator at any given point in time.

...and no doubt some people use a blend of the two and I think that's the ground Simon wants to occupy. I sometimes think there aren't many who do that and that's why I think poor old Simon gets in these battles with people who are from one polarised camp or another. He and I both know where each other stand and we still swap 100s of emails arguing (debating) our cases.

My take, just from personal experience rather than asserting as a fact, is that edges found in freely available data tend to be so small that they require implementation a larger scale than a manual trader can sustain. So small infact that it pales into insignificance against the value a skilled discretionary trader can add, or the value a poor discretionary trader will take away. I think what I mean by that is that a poor discretionary trader will lose money even following a profitable quantative plan, but a good discretionary trader can make money even without a hard and fast 'plan' by just reading and reacting. If you're going to be a flesh-bot sat pressing buttons I don't think you can get away without working on the discretionary side of your game, and that means that on some weeks you have to stay away from the spreadsheets completely to work on your intuitive side.

[SweetLyrics]

Quant trading uses a fixed set of rules to determine trade timing and direction in a systematic way.
Discretionary traders use intuition and “market feel” in order to make technical decisions and the discretionary trader does not always make the same interpretation of a market indicator or use it, in the same way, each time it’s applied. This trader uses personal judgment to determine the value of that indicator at any given point in time.

...and no doubt some people use a blend of the two and I think that's the ground Simon wants to occupy.

I'm not sure it is, although I could be wrong and hopefully Simon will clarify.

I was under the impression that Simon is looking for a pure quant method (possibly executed manually) that he can backtest, meaning that he can go into the market essentially making value bets (as far as one can be confident that one's bets are value bets).

I have suggested to Simon earlier in this thread that you tries using the approach you describe, experimenting with small stakes initially until he is regularly profiting, and entering and exiting using set criteria, but using his judgement to determine when those criteria are met (for example, if he is swing trading, using his judgement rather than a moving average to determine if the market was previously steaming).

I think that is his best way forward. I admire his determination in routing through historical data, but frankly, if he were going to find the needle in the haystack that he is determined is hiding there somewhere, I suspect he'd have done so by now.

[Atho55]

Going back to the opening post of Laying 3-3, if the odds you place your bet at are "value" then any losses should be covered by the wins. I see the break even odds to be 109.61538 albeit based on Premier League data but finding sufficient games to make any strategy worthwhile is always the issue.

Assuming odds of 100 then £50 stake is I believe just under the liability of 5k. Looking for 100 games per month, 25 per week does not look unrealistic.

There are a few in the Premiership today as it happens.

[SweetLyrics]

Not necessarily, especially as this is an outright lay rather than a trade.

You need enough value to overcome commission.

I have spreadsheets of historical data that show I'd have made a profit with particular systems if there had been zero commission, but commission would have resulted in me losing my shirt.

Going back to the opening post of Laying 3-3, if the odds you place your bet at are "value" then any losses should be covered by the wins.