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.

Going back to original settings but with some programme flow improvements has increased turnover to nearly double previous week. Settled bets has also increased by over 50%. Happy with a profit but the chart isn’t showing a consistent trend. The initial period, up to around 133, was basically flat, then on to 337 looks good but the tail end is showing a downward trend. As it’s in profit I’m letting it carry on with no adjustments, see what happens. (I’ll update on Aus results later)

No bug to exploit. It happened due to cross-matching and rounding. Someone got matched via cross matching which took a fraction of a penny of my back bet. When my bot cancelled the bet the rounding returned£2, although the real value would have been less. As I still had a part bet on the market when the selection won it returned a rounded £0.01.
I don’t think you could ever be in a position to exploit this as it’s always going to require a cross match that works partly using magic (or a method not fully disclosed by the exchange). Although saying that, you’d think they’d prevent this type of occurrence. Or do they let it happen to suggest there is no manipulation? The mind boggles. Good day.

I see this “risk free” headline a lot but this was actually risk free (only 1p but still). My bot placed a back bet on an Aus horse market and then cancelled (Fill/Kill) after 5 seconds. However I won £0.01 on the market?

This is the place and cancel log entries in Gruss (3719 and 3720)

This is the Cancelled bet in Betfair bet history (2. Archytas)

And this is the Settled bet in Betfair bet history (2. Archytas)

I’m trying to work out if this is a bug I can exploit. Doubt it but just think of the possibility, this time next year…

I’d traded the aus horse racing markets with my previous bot a few years ago, it made sense to give the bot something to do during the night if I was going to leave the computer running. Back then most of the parameters were in cell formula and started with an if statement to determine whether the market was a dog or horse event. Different settings were used depending on the type of event.

When I started up again this year, putting all the program into VBA, I hadn’t allowed for the different event types and the result was I gave up on aus shortly into the project. I’ve now modified the code to allow for different event types.

The settings I’m using for the aus horses are taken from the last couple of months of the old bot. They’re a lot more restrictive of market entry conditions, waiting for more activity than the dogs before starting to trade.

From what I’ve seen, there seems to be a lot more money on the aus horse markets than I remember. I had traded the UK horse win markets with my first ever bot but found the trading too complex for my simple strategy. That’s when I moved to dogs and then aus. I have trialled my scalping bot on the UK horse place markets and depending on aus results, may try aus place markets. First things first, see if I’ve a bank left in the morning.

A good early run kept the rest of the month in profit. From around the 1000 point the staking plan was changed and there is a noticeable difference in the loss impact. the rise at the end reflects the move back to the original staking plan.

The bot has run since Saturday and it’s slowly drifted downward. I’ve been a bit puzzled by the results as initially there was an upward trend. As the changes have been made its gradually switched to a net loser. To stop this I’ve adjusted back to settings I’d used at first but still no joy. This week’s settings were the same as those that saw the most consistent profit and so far the bank hasn’t really changed.

There was one thing that was different though. I’d had a problem with missing greening trades. To solve this I prevented the bot from trading again on a selection before the tick offset or stoploss had been matched.

Thinking this through I could see the possibility of missed opportunities on strong weight and also potential trades occurring within the stoploss zone. Obviously there’s also the possibility of more losing trades based on spoofing. I still think that the opportunity of spoofing by others is limited by the fact that they don’t know any more than anyone else which way the market will go. Yes they can trigger some quick trades but their hope is that their spoof is to suggest a wrong movement. If their spoof is on trend it doesn’t really have any effect on me.

Well I changed it late last night and the last few events saw increased activity. Maybe things will turn out good.

I wont be able to get to computer for a few days but wanted to share this weeks progress so far.

I adjusted the stake, on Thursday evening, back to a flat £2 after thinking that the current poor performance was related to the last staking plan change. As can be seen on the chart there was an immediate change in trend, the losses were less significant. I still think that the flat £2 (or any set number) is a bit crude and there may be a better way of staking but I need to do some proper testing and checking before implementing. For example around the whole numbers, ie at 2.00, 3.00, etc, the change in step per tick from say 0.02 to 0.05 can mean a disproportionate loss at 3 ticks than profit from 1 tick.