BF Trade Testing
 

Hi Guys,

Further to ET's thread I signed up to trial BF Bot Manager yesterday and gave it a crack. Tested it in simulation mode for first half of the day and all seemed well then tried it on real money for last part of the day and was definitely a different kettle of fish. Basically in sim mode everything gets matched every time so it looks like the trades are happening easily. Real Mode sees some trades go unmatched which can cause issues but I think I also found that was down to some of the settings I had in place.

I'll see if I can put it in place for all of today and see how I go. Essentially I was backing 5 secs before the start time and laying in running for 5 ticks profit on horses I thought would be forward in running. The things I noticed was that it seemed much easier to get matched on anything under $15 odds and so i'll stick to that today.

I'll post full results later today. BF Bot Manager is quite simple and effective to use, i'd like to try to V2 version to see if I could still achieve what I want on a one off payment rather than having to use the monthly subscription.

Test mode on any trading software is just rubbish, betfair is not just a click and bet is placed platform, i always use real money, even if it is a small amount.

Yeh was only using the Sim stuff to start with as I was playing around with the strategies and options - hadn't used the program before.

It would probably be more relevant/accurate if there was more money in the pools where getting instantly matched might be more likely.

25 Trades completed with 3 additional trades that had unmatched lay sides that were all losses for a loss for the day of $13.51 on $10 stakes. So basically if those 3 managed to be match for even just break even it would've been a +$16.49 day on only 28 trades which isn't too bad.

It seems those that went unmatched were above $10 - looks to me might have to adjust the odds range to be even tighter then the $1-$15 odds range.

I still think this could work its just a matter of tweaking a bit. Majority of other trades were matched almost instantly and probably even could've had more ticks squeezed out of them.

Do you know why the 3 bets didn't get matched? Maybe the horses didn't go forward or missed the start? Maybe the race started a bit late and the horses drifted away from your initial back bet meaning that the 5 ticks may have become 15 or 20 ticks by the time the race started.

Did you have a stop loss in place? (I know the price can go through that area or may get triggered with the price then coming back down again anyway - so sometimes it might be worse to use it).

All this talk of trading has inspired me to do some research on a trading strategy.

I tend to only trade the faves as they have enough money on them and I have noticed in the past that beyond the first few faves BF doesnt get much money on the other runners and this leads to sudden upswings in their price which is not good for a back to lay strategy.

I tested a strategy last night on the UK races, it was another back to lay.

I was backing the current price of the fav a minute out, once matched i was then laying it @20% lower price than i backed it with a greenup, i also had a price that was 20% higher as a stop loss, if the back bet was taken then the lay bets could be taken in play other wise they were cancelled before the off.

Am going to try this today on a few venues in Aus.

Hope it went well for you traders today...
my day was good.
I traded on 43 races and won 42 of them.
My one loss was due to the phone ringing but luckily was only a 0.1 unit loss.
Made 4.38 units for the day and refined my processes a bit more.

I feel like I am getting the hang of this now.

ET