Hey all i'm an experienced programmer and mathematician, but i'm at a loss about how one actually starts trading on betfair. I stupidly built some infra for betfair with the intention of collecting some l2 data for 6 months ish and then starting to trade in anger. This was clearly a mistake, as I was declined for the prod API key and directed to the historical data purchase to parameterise/research a model first.
This is understandable from their POV as I guess they have their own infra costs, but it seems like a bit of an unnecessary barrier to entry at £250/month of historical l2 data. I'd be interested to know what other people did before starting out, as I'm unsure what is the best approach. I could deploy some sort of low risk algo to generate some monthly volume very quickly, and then carry on with my plan, but this feels like the wrong way forward. Is there a minimum volume they expect you to generate before being granted a key - I assume so or I don't know why they would ask that question in their signup form. Did other people just buy historical data and then launch? From my perspective i'm just trying to derisk any up front costs if I don't even know I can find an edge.
Thanks for taking the time to read this!
How do I actually get started
At a basic level you might want to have a historical dataset. Maybe try https://www.racing-bet-data.com - it took me a while but over time I managed to download most of the historical data and I now have my own local DB with results that I am able to query easily. The service also produces a daily results spreadsheet with in_play data that you can import into your DB. You might find different data providers or try to scrape the data yourself, but scraping is not as easy as it used to be for huge historical data volume...
For Market data pre_off and Volume data in_play you will need to get "dirty" with excel and betangel or even using the betangel API (i have not done this but have read users loving the new API integration betangel has).
Other than that you will need to put hours, hours and hours of work into this to come to a point where things will start clicking a bit. I am 6 months into the project and just starting to break even, which Peter mentions as being the first objective....
Other more experienced users might have other suggestions...
For Market data pre_off and Volume data in_play you will need to get "dirty" with excel and betangel or even using the betangel API (i have not done this but have read users loving the new API integration betangel has).
Other than that you will need to put hours, hours and hours of work into this to come to a point where things will start clicking a bit. I am 6 months into the project and just starting to break even, which Peter mentions as being the first objective....
Other more experienced users might have other suggestions...