The number of people viewing my blog has shot up since getting mentioned by Betfair Pro Trader, so a big thanks to him.

Below are the charts for last week. The UK dogs has performed pretty consistently for the last three weeks without much interference from me. The chart looks like it had a slow start but the % return is similar to previous weeks. The Australian markets did ok with non of the errors experienced last week (the API error was down to Betfair but I’m still waiting for answers on the others). The chart has a more consistent trend than the UK dogs but return is similar.

The UK dogs is trading with more open settings than the Aus horses except for the odds range. I reduced the upper odds limit but may reduce it some more as trades over 5.00 are less frequent and they don’t appear to give any net gain. I wont change it yet though as it’s not costing at the moment and further analysis may give more detail.

Having three full months of trading completed, I feel happier letting the bot run, which is one of the main benefits of automated trading for me. The only thing I need to do once a week is save and clear my logging sheet as it can run to over 20000 rows. Bot3 has a macro to save a page as an individual file with a unique name (includes date) once a day and means that it runs with no input from me at all. A little bit of work can get that code in to Bot1 but I’ll tie it in with improving the data collection which should move me forward with optimization.

The bot’s been plodding along uninterrupted all week as I’ve been busy with work. I’ve checked in and I don’t think there’s been any errors like last week, I’ll post a chart when I can. I’ve had some good hints from Betfair Pro Trader (www.betfairprotrader.co.uk) on how to improve the bots performance. There’s so much for me to do that I’m going to add a projects page to keep track of things. Along with the good advice I’ve received to optimize entry/exit and stake, I’d also like to – add US horse markets to Bot1; run a version of Bot1 on Betdaq for UK horse win markets; move forward with Bot2 as I’ve already put a lot of time into it; set Bot3 going as it does actually work, as in, as a program it works and it’s data collection ability is probably useful with Bot1, just need to refresh myself with it’s function. I don’t think I can do much before Christmas though, too much work on. I’ll keep posting.

Here’s last weeks charts. The first is the UK dogs. Not a bad show with an overall positive trend.

And here’s the Australian chart. 3 stand out points. The two large wins which were lay bets even though the offset lay had already been made. The first lay didn’t show in the “MyBets” page in excel though, so when it came to greening another lay was made. I cant work out why. The large loss was due to an API error, something I’ve experienced before but only on Australian markets. Sometimes it has no effect but the wait time before registering the error is 30 seconds, so if it happens less than 30 seconds before the off there’s no time to get another bet in. I could move last trade time to, say, 35 seconds before off but this requires some code fiddling as the section associated with time is before the market type selection. This is something I’m looking at doing anyway to allow the easy addition of US horses (and possibly others) to the bot. Each error could have gone either way, it just happens to have been 2 wins 1 loss. The chart is a lot more consistent than the UK dogs chart above and a 5 times better return.

BPT asked this question –

Any thoughts on increasing your % profit on turnover?

After some time thinking, I replied –

This made me think. My initial thoughts were to find the profitable trades and target them, cutting out the bad trades through restricting market entry conditions. As this is a relatively simple bot (Bot 1 is basically a WOM calculator with some conditions) I’ve come to realise I’ve probably got as far as I can with it. This is why I’m looking at US horses as a way of increasing turnover rather than increase % profit. I think to make an increase in profit the bot needs to do a lot more work, monitoring movements as well as WOM. This is where I’ve been focusing with Bot 2 but it’s almost like starting the learning process from scratch. Handling large data arrays and working out how and what to calculate, which indicators are useful, what time frames to work in, is bigger than anything I’ve done before in programming. It’s really interesting learning and moving to VB is another challenge. I enjoy programming, working methodically and problem solving, more than trading. Hopefully I’ll make a more profitable bot, one day.

After the UK dogs have finished my bot isn’t trading until 2am when it refreshes markets and starts on Aus horses. During this time there are plenty of US horse races going on. I’ve been reluctant to get involved because my previous experience was that the start times were often wrong. It’s not too much of a problem if a race goes off late, probably less activity and less trading. But if it starts early and suspends I could be caught mid trade. This wasn’t unusual back then. I’ve had an eye on them recently and have seen them delayed(without updating on betfair) but I haven’t noted any early suspensions.

I’m going to restructure my bots flow to allow for easier addition/removal of different event types and then add US horses for late night, early morning trading. I’ll aim to get this implemented within a week.

My bot started to trade these markets on the 18th using settings from a few years ago. After the first couple of days I decided to change the settings, restricting trades to more favourable conditions.

This is where the balance has to be found. If the settings are too loose, the bot will trade many times but may have more losing positions and will likely show a net loss. As there are always going to be some losing trades, if the bot is restricted too much there wont be enough opportunities to make losses back.

The changes were made at around the 27 point and from then the graph has gone in the better direction. This was the Saturday and Sunday markets which may be significantly different to weekday markets in Australia, I don’t know, time will tell. A good first graph though.