How should the amounts of money showing on each influence your decision making?

[deggsy10]

Probably a dumb question but I am a newbie. Watching Peters videos, he often makes comments about how an order that is put in doesn't look right which then influences his next decision. Can anybody explain what is meant by this and how exactly the amounts of money showing on each side should influence your decision making on entry and exit points and whether to back first or lay first.

[ShaunWhite]

Probably a dumb question but I am a newbie. Watching Peters videos, he often makes comments about how an order that is put in doesn't look right which then influences his next decision. Can anybody explain what is meant by this and how exactly the amounts of money showing on each side should influence your decision making on entry and exit points and whether to back first or lay first.

Money which 'doesn't look right' is usually an amount which is disproportionate to the amounts around it, also of often characterised by it being moved or removed before a significant part, or any part of it, is filled.

The idea of it is to unbalance the WoM or to give the impression that someone wishes to back or lay the selection heavily, trying to cause the market to move away from this oversized unmatched bet.

If this attempted manipulation fails due to the pressure of 'real' money (ie backs or lays motivated by real world events rather than the prevailing micro market conditions) and the unmatched bet looks like it will be filled, it's often suddenly removed.

This has the effect of causing the market to move, often sharply, in the direction towards and through where this unmatched money once was. This move is accelerated by the combination of that real money pressure and the way that the 'fake' money's withdrawal has usually reversed the WoM, which in itself would often encourage trading money to anticipate or cause a move. When 'real' money and trading money are both on the same trajectory, that's when a significant move is almost inevitable.

That's a rather public bit of revision ....always happy to see teacher's red pen if I'm wrong or missed something.

[ShaunWhite]

Getting sick and tired of seeing red figures everywhere. I seem to have a skill for getting on the wrong end of extreme price swings. Really struggling to read these markets. It just seems so random. I think I have identified a good runner to scalp after opening the graph and seeing a steady line going across with very minimal ups and downs. I back it and then immediately see the price shooting off to the heavens never to be seen again. Really dont know how long I can stick this for. Would love to know the secret.

deggsy, I've replied to your other posting (above) on this thread, I ramble a lot and didn't want to clog up the Today's Racing thread. Going over this stuff is my way of helping to make the wise words I've heard others say stick in my mind. It's for me as much as you.


The day before a big meeting is one I swerve at my level, everyone's keeping their powder dry rather than playing horse bingo on a poor day's racing. Especially tricky with only two meetings, so what money there is arrives over a longer period, and less overall action to smooth out the lumps.

It sounds to me like you're getting involved just before the money starts to arrive, with 15mins between races, how long were you watching for and roughly what time did you get involved? I don't see anything even approaching normal until about the last 3 mins or even less. I'd also be looking for at least 250k matched and 10% or more of that on the fave. You also need to know when you sit on your hands and say 'the last 3 markets have been a mystery so I'm not getting involved untill I've watched a couple that seemed more predictable'. One good solid trade an hour is better than a dozen hopeful dips in and out. There's over 10k races a year, no need to trade them all.

I know it's too late now but today/yesterday was the ideal day for topping up your vitamin D, reading and editting your notebooks, and getting in the right frame of mind for Ascot. Today I managed to turn 4 notebooks of random scribbles into half a notebook of the good stuff, finished reading a book, started another and got slightly sunburnt. It's felt like the most productive day I've had for a while and I'm feeling positive about the next few days. That's why some of these replies sound like a list of do's and don'ts and notebook entries, my mind needed a bl00dy good and well overdue spring clean.

I'm sure you'll feel better when you've had a couple of less stressful days, sat watching Ascot on the telly, doing half a dozen decent trades... while plenty of other poor sods are out digging holes or up on a roof.

...you say you're scalping, people say that's an easy introduction but personally I've never got on very well with it. Tick, tick, tick and then a "b0llocks". I'm much more likely to just lurk around until I see conditions like I've described in my first answer above or try and play the old support and resistance game.

Ascot is on for 5 days so if Tuesday doesn't go well, spend Wednesday in your deckchair. You'll be guarenteed to break even, and you'll hopefully you'll come back fighting and bang on form for the remaining 3 days.

[Bluesky]

deggsy, Shaun has made an excellent reply to your question. I will add a couple of things which I have noticed over the last few months, which might help you. I think this is a subject that an expert could probably write a chapter of a book about.

When you spot one of these disproportionate amounts on one side of the book pay very close attention to what is happening but also (and this is difficult to do when you first start) also try and keep an eye on the other runners on the ladders.

This bit is difficult to explain and its not something that happens to me very often (I wish it did), but sometimes you can sense the pressure building against this large amount. I am sure in a lot of cases this pressure is actually the same person who has put in the large amount, slowly building an opposite position.

You can get a very strong feeling (I suspect this is the intuition that some experienced traders talk about) that within the next few seconds that large amount is going to be withdrawn, if your quick this is the time to jump on the other side of the market to the large amount.

When I get this feeling it almost always happens this way, but as I said earlier this is not a feeling that I get in every race, I wish it was. Quite often when the large amount is withdrawn (this is usually after the trader has matched enough money on the other side of the market), the large amount will appear on the other side. This will give an extra boost to the market in the opposite direction. So if you have managed to spot this activity and got into the market this can give you a few extra ticks profit.

Spotting this activity, then acting upon it, and then getting out of the trade with a profit it not at all easy. An expert trader can perform all these tasks almost on instinct and if you see them doing it on video or real life it looks extremely simple. In reality it takes hundreds, or for many people thousands of hours of screen time to get to the level where doing this kind of thing is almost second nature.

[deggsy10]

Thanks for the replys guys. So are you saying that for example an amount of say 10000 appears on the back side and the other amounts of money on that side are around 800 I should expect that 10000 to disappear so should get ready to place a lay bet when it does disappear? I find it hard to work out wether the big money disappearing means it has been withdrawn or it has been matched. The way I am trading at the moment is If the amounts of money on the lay side are generally larger amounts than the ones on the back side I am interpreting this as more support on the lay side meaning a likely price rise so I will lay at that point providing there is another horse that is being backed in and vice versa. I am also using the total amount traded column as a guide so for example if a horse gets backed in to a price were there has been no previous trading activity (the column has 0 next to it) II make the assumption that it is not likely to be backed in any more so I get ready to lay but again keeping an eye on which prices the other horses are going. If they are being backed in then his supports my assumption that my horse will indeed start to drift again. Am I on the right lines here? What is he relevance of the volume percentages on each horse? I have been to one of Peter's horse racing workshops and the trainer was talking about money horses which are horses which are not the favourite whose volume figure is higher than the IP percentage and that these horses are likely to have significant backing activity. However since using the software the only horses which seem to fit this criteria are the favourites.

I actually had a good day today. I had positive trades on 12 out of 14 races. One of them I had to deal with an issue with my son and forgot to hedge up a profitable trade which left me exposed to a loss if one of the horses won. Of course that horse did go on to win. I'm not that concerned though as this was purely down to me getting distracted and forgetting to hedge.

[deggsy10]

I am finding it extremely hard to resist the temptation to increase the stakes after a series of successful trades. I have told myself to stick to £2 stakes for the first few months with the emphasis on training only and trying to read the markets rather than it being about how much I can make. But I am finding I am getting bored with trading with such small amounts. I am sure this is a typical newbie mistake!

[welshboy06]

I am finding it extremely hard to resist the temptation to increase the stakes after a series of successful trades. I have told myself to stick to £2 stakes for the first few months with the emphasis on training only and trying to read the markets rather than it being about how much I can make. But I am finding I am getting bored with trading with such small amounts. I am sure this is a typical newbie mistake!

Two approaches. Try not to look at the monetary profit, but the % of profit compared to your stake.
E.g think of a £1 return from £2 as 50%

Or bump up your stakes. Not too drastically.but maybe to £10? I'm using stakes of between £5 and £10 at to your he moment. As it allows me to see bigger profits (and losses) and I feel I'm more invested in protecting my bank.
Using £2 stakes I could lose £50 in a day and not be bothered.

[cybernet69]

I didn't create it but I normally stick to this when LTB trading.

But sometimes, depending on conditions in the market then I will increase/decrease the Stop Loss.

[ShaunWhite]

I am finding it extremely hard to resist the temptation to increase the stakes after a series of successful trades. I have told myself to stick to £2 stakes for the first few months with the emphasis on training only and trying to read the markets rather than it being about how much I can make. But I am finding I am getting bored with trading with such small amounts. I am sure this is a typical newbie mistake!

Two approaches. Try not to look at the monetary profit, but the % of profit compared to your stake.
E.g think of a £1 return from £2 as 50%

Or bump up your stakes. Not too drastically.but maybe to £10? I'm using stakes of between £5 and £10 at to your he moment. As it allows me to see bigger profits (and losses) and I feel I'm more invested in protecting my bank.
Using £2 stakes I could lose £50 in a day and not be bothered.

Small stakes can make you feel like that, and welshboy is right in saying that one way to deal with it is to just focus on your % return. It's much more encouraging to look back on your day and see a decent %age rather than seeing it as less than it's cost you in electric.

One idea I saw that I followed for a while was to increase my stake after a +ve day and reduce it after a -ve day. For instance add £2 if yesterday was a winner and reduce it by £1 if it was a loser. I found it gave me a bit more incentive to focus on the profit rather than the amount....but....that had it's own problems. I started being over cautious because I just wanted a profit even if it was tiny and then the losing days would blow 2 or 3 days gains. Then there's also the issue that you shouldn't have a target for a day because it's a long term job.

....or try a different staking plan, I was finding that using a fixed £x was distorting my results. 3 or 4 good trades at say under 3.0 and then a losing one at 6's and I'd be showing a loss. I'm quite liking using the 'By liability (Back and Lay)' lately as it gives a more level per tick gain/loss. I found the 'by tick size' fairly useless because it doesn't factor in the hedging and a tick at 6's was much smaller than a tick at evens after hedging. Maybe give yourself a 'by liability (back & lay)' of a tenner. That will put your £2 on up at 6.0 and a much more exciting whole tenner on at evens to keep it interesting. But per tick hedged, they come out at about 6p for your trade at 6.0 and about 10p for your trade at evens...ish.

Things get very interesting though when you get long odds on so watch out for that one! First time I tried it using a tenner liability at 1.1, it put a £100 trade in on the lay side (slightly frightening but still just risking a tenner)....but then used the same on the back side! (very frightening and way waaaay more liability than I had planned). Swiching to (lay only) down there is a good idea to fix your liability at a max of a tenner.

The best thing about getting off that £2 min is you can try other things. You can open with say £10 and then take it out in 2s...it's much more like the way you'll be trading when you open with say £100 and strengthen/weaken your position in £25 chucks. It really starts to feel like trading when you first do that, and the red/green boundary moves nicely away from you as you secure a bit of profit and let some of it run If it really runs you can add a couple of 2s back in... It's a whole new angle that I guarentee will keep you interested and much much more like 'proper' trading than putting your whole stake in or out in a lump.

Now's the time to have a play as well as be ultra serious, so try a couple of new staking ideas before you find that your boredom is making you have 3 or 4 clicks with your £2 to spice it up without any real rhyme or reason. (been there, done that)

[Bluesky]

But I am finding I am getting bored with trading with such small amounts. I am sure this is a typical newbie mistake!

I had the same problem when using £2 stakes in particular when trading on very short priced favorites. I found increasing stakes to £5 helped with this. I like some of the ideas welshboy and ShaunWhite wrote in this thread regarding stake sizing, I think I will look into that some more.

[Bluesky]

Thanks for the replys guys. So are you saying that for example an amount of say 10000 appears on the back side and the other amounts of money on that side are around 800 I should expect that 10000 to disappear so should get ready to place a lay bet when it does disappear?

Unfortunately (and your not going to like this answer) it depends. This is why I wrote in my earlier post that a trading expert could easily write a chapter of a book on this subject alone.

To try and give a bit more info that might help you with the above question (just want to make it clear though I am NOT an expert).

The WOM figures quoted at the top of the ladders are if memory serves correctly, only calculated on the first three prices. I think this can be changed in settings, but I'm not sure, and its not relevant to this discussion anyway.

So if we see that 10,000 figure always staying in the first three places, say position two and three but hardly ever in position one. We can assume the trader is trying to influence the WOM figure (at one time lots of bots were strongly influenced by the WOM figures, I suspect most bot writers have now wised up to this and have altered their bots, maybe a bot programmer might comment in this thread).

The thing is and I made reference to this in my previous post, you need to spend time (lots and lots of time) watching what is happening on the ladders, watching the behaviour of the other traders. Watching what happens when these outlier orders suddenly appear on the trading screen. The more you watch the more info you will start to pick up and the more things start to make a bit more sense to you. This however is a long process its not something that happens over night for most people. Most people do not have the patience to go through this week after week and month after month (I struggle with this myself) making very little financial progress, even though their pre race reading skills will have improved enormously from when they have first started.

This is the reason why I think its a fairly good idea to re take some sports trading training after you have spent some time in the markets, as you are likely to take in far more the second time than you did the first.

[spreadbetting]

You'll learn a lot more watching the money being matched than you will watching the money showing.

[deggsy10]

You'll learn a lot more watching the money being matched than you will watching the money showing.

How is it possible to see money being matched? I just see the amounts of money on each side going up and down. I find it hard to work out whether the changing values signify money being matched or orders being pulled.

[spreadbetting]

Probably shows on the ladder interface

[ShaunWhite]

You'll learn a lot more watching the money being matched than you will watching the money showing.

Wise words beautifully phrased. It even sounds like ancient chinese philosophy if you say it slowly in the right voice

(I think I've just been watching too many 'Kung Fu' clips on youtube.)