Here are the charts for the previous 4 weeks.
The UK dogs performed below its recent average of 0.061% but with no errors being recorded, this is ok.
The Aus markets returned nearly double the recent average but the errors are obvious. Interestingly, if the errors are removed the end result isn’t much different. This could be an example of the random nature of the errors and has a nil impact over the long term. Still, I’d rather the errors didn’t occur.
I’ve spent the last two weeks working every hour, with little time for anything else. Starting early and finishing late is not what I want to be doing but that’s the joy of self employment; the workflow is too much or too little but never steady. I’ve also started working towards a new qualification to upskill and enable me to get a ‘normal’ job, giving me more time for family and hobbies (trading).
The bot is still running OK, the only thing I’ve done with it recently is restart after Betfair maintenance. I really like the fact that even though I’m busy and not thinking about trading, the bot is working away regardless.
The next week or two will see similar levels of work for me, what joy, so probably won’t be doing any coding but will do a recent chart if I get chance.
I received an email from Betfair warning me that I now qualify for the aus turnover charge. It’s explained in their help pages but basically comes down to paying 1.2% on the aggregate of all back bets on qualifying markets, win or lose, once total is over aus$2000. It’s more than my profit so I can’t continue as is. Rules are rules.
I can still participate but keeping track of the matched back bets for a week is causing some brain ache. Also not sure at the moment how to accurately identify turnover markets as not all aus races qualify. I think.
As this has just happened, I could temporarily adjust my stake to £2 to reduce my overall turnover whilst i modify my bot but it isn’t a guarantee of avoiding the charge. And I’ve used my grace week so no more warnings, if I owe it I pay it (on a Wednesday like the premium charge but without the success).
An overall good week. UK dogs made a good return with 0.084%. Looking at the chart, the sharp drop early in the results was on one runner in a very active market – 46 settled bets in less than 3 minutes. Of those, three backs were placed around 5.8, followed by a fast drift against which my bot chased and partially matched at 6.2 and 7.5, then finished on 8.
The Aus chart looks good but holds a warning. The two big wins were due to errors. The first was a Lay placed when there shouldn’t have been. The log shows a Lay placed with no Fill/Kill or Tick Offset. My bot only places these during greening so I can only think a matched bet was showing as unmatched and then changed afterwards, as my records show all as matched.
The second was a Lay placed 15 seconds after the start time. This should not be possible as my bot jumps to next race at -1 second. I can only assume that the connection was hanging and this had an effect.
I think it’s safe to say that after a number of errors recently that have left me with a profit, I will soon experience a loss from an error. As they tend to be Lay errors, I assume the loss will be large.
As requested by Betfair Pro Trader, here are some charts.
The first is the best continuous data I could get together, covering over 6000 UK greyhound markets from 28th September 2015 to 31st January 2016. This covers a lot of changes with the settings and even trading rules such as allowing multiple open bets on one runner. (Ignore chart title, it is from 28th September)
I have mentioned before that the AUS horses ran a lot tighter on the settings and that early in January I changed the UK dogs to the same limits. So below is the period 3rd to 31st January, cut from the above chart. This period saw an increase greater than 1.5 times the previous 2 periods combined. So far this confirms the settings are now more beneficial despite my concern they may have had a negative impact on activity.
Another week and the swing from Aus to UK being more profitable has continued. The UK chart is very pleasing on the eye. The Aus chart not so. Another day was missed, Wednesday, which is quite a busy day on the Aus horses judging by the number of tweets I get from @Betfair_Aus. Apparently this is due to missing info from the Aus API when market refresh is triggered in Gruss. I must get round to adding more code to try and prevent this. The large loss was another one of those things, no errors or missed bets, just quite a few losing trades in a row on one market.
With reference to my last post about costs, Januray’s P&L was £32.97 pre costs and £17.87 after. So I achieved my goal of not being a loser.
I’ve been monitoring my computers energy use since October and on average it costs £9.10 per month to run (this includes UPS). Added to the Gruss subscription, that’s £15.10. I’ve looked into putting it on a virtual server (VPS) but it’s a bit costly at the moment. Although monthly fees for a windows setup can be found for less than £9, adding Office to be able to use Excel pushes the price up.
When my own bot is running OK, I should be able to move to a VPS, reducing my costs. There are other benefits to this, such as faster connection and better up time. Also being able to access from anywhere would be good. I could access my own computer remotely but I’m sure that would interfere with the bot’s response time. Anything I do seems to effect it, even sending a small file causes Gruss to pause.
Well they are to me. Towards the end of last week, the total number of markets I’ve taken part in topped 40,000. I like numbers. To think my bots have monitored at least double that amount of markets is amazing.
The second point came on Sunday when my balance hit three figures. In reality it’s irrelevant but visually, it’s encouraging.
And last but not least, bring out the bunting, I’ve started coding my very own bot using Programming For Betfair. Once I started I found visual studio easy to get on with, similar to the VBA IDE but better, a lot better. It was a little annoying at first with it’s auto correct and finish features (it adds end statements automatically but I keep typing them, giving two lines of the same thing) but I’m getting used to it. Can’t wait to get it running my own algorithms, the possibilities are endless…
The UK dogs performed well last week. The large loss at point 85 was just one of those things, no errors involved. I’ve also changed staking to same as AUS as a percentage of bank.
The AUS horses started with a large win, once again due to a lay placed in error after the software failed to recognise a matched bet. Went my way this time. Still a good performance, PL/TV would have been around 0.07% without error.
The data collection is working perfect and isn’t having any impact on the trading, by which I mean it isn’t slowing it down at all. I use timer to track code execution times.
The issue is file size. At the end of each day’s trading, the data is saved to a new file. These are around 150mb in size. I keep all my trading stuff in cloud storage, which has its limits (capacity). It got me thinking, firstly to store locally, secondly, how to make use of it. This takes me back to where I started with data collection- what to do with it.
It’s all about analysis. If I work out the process of analysis, find the relevant data points I need to monitor, I can perform the calculations live and save the results only, rather than everything.
Having a good few days worth of data will be useful for testing but I don’t want to have endless reams of stuff I might never go back to. So once I’ve got a couple of gigs stored, I’ll stop the collection and start the analysis.
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