Results Summary spreadsheet

Kudos to Matt over at Mind Games for helping me load my lifetime Betfair profit-and-loss log into his excellent Results Summary spreadsheet.

For a couple of quid this thing is the biz. I've finally got an idea of how I'm doing on other events besides the horse racing and the answer is...rubbish!


I'm pleased that I haven't got too much to claw back on the football and golf, as I'm intending on becoming consistently profitable in these sports within 12 months.

What did surprise me was how much I typically lose on the horse racing every month in order to make an overall profit. Take my total so far for August and you'll see that £3,270.26 of positive trades were eaten into by -£1,078.00 of negative ones


August to-date


with my strike rate averaging around 60%


last 4 days

It'd be interesting to hear from other pro traders re their typical losses across the month as a percentage of their overall profit, as I think I'm letting too much of my hard earned slip through the net.

World Domination

Well, my US PGA Championship golf picks landed out-of-bounds. Despite playing well a week before in the Bridgestone Invitation, Ishikawa managed to hit an 84 on his first round. Great. Ryan Moore drifted like a barge too, Choi and Snedeker were scratches, and I had greens on Mickelson and Jiminez for the win...but neither of them did much in the end.

I hexed John Senden by backing him at 120, prompting a drift to 150+. I thought I was fortunate to get a scratch on him but he ended up -4 and trading in the 20s by the end of day 2...ho-hum!

I backed a couple of top 10 hopefuls at the beginning of day 3 but they both had poor rounds and soon drifted too. Tenner loss overall.

I'm no further forward with my golf stats database since last Wednesday, as I've now become distracted with building Football Brain as I've now christened it - an EPL monitoring system that will take into account historic data, in-play stats and lineups, and player ratings which will all be processed as an EPL match unfolds to give me a real-time forecast of each game. It's quite an undertaking as it involves lots of data processing, but I'm convinced I can build it.

The manual horse racing trading continues to go from strength-to-strength, with £200ish days becoming more common now


I'm really incentivised to make consistent profits on other sports, a la Handy Andy, who has developed a successful football trading strategy alongside his horse-racing activities. I don't want to have my eggs all in one basket in case the horse racing rug is pulled from under my feet.

The angles in tonight's Thun v Stoke game are Thun's plastic pitch and the altitude. Think Spurs against Young Boys away last season and you get the picture. I'm looking at the 2-0 and 3-0 as possible trading options, with the 3-0 at 50 on Betfair currently. I might even consider revisiting my dormant Twitter account so I can post up these pearls of wisdom more easily ;)

US PGA Championship 2011 picks

The WGC Bridgestone Invitational golf tournament last week left me -£6 worse off. I read a lot of column inches in the lead up to the tournament and was certain of achieving some profit. At one point I was 26 notes in the red but some good trading during days 2 and 3 helped me reduce the liability. At this point in my fledgling golf trading career, I'm happy to just get back to 0.

Golf trading is something I've been wanting to get my head around for quite a bit. I'm not a follower of the game by any means, and didn't see a single ball hit at Bridgestone, yet it doesn't mean I shouldn't get involved. The way a 4-day tournament plays out usually sees the lead change hands many times, and there are lots of scalping opportunities. Unlike in-running horse trading, the golf has a nice slow pace to it and i'm happy just to get some back bets matched and lay my stakes at lower prices, leaving the profit on the player if the lays are matched.

I'm not going Billy Big Stakes on the golf until I've got some decent stats together in my database, which I've been busy importing this week. I was hoping get done before the start of the PGA Championship but, despite burning the midnight oil last night, I don't have enough data enable me to make solid predictions yet. So at this point, I'm just going to guess!


Actually, it's more like educated guessing, since I've been keeping an eye on the golf markets for a whopping two whole tournaments now, and have noticed a few trends. Day 1 is more guessy than 2 & 3 anyway because you can't really get an idea of a player's chances until they've completed at least a round. Most of the value has been sucked out of the market by Day 4 and you have to use decent sized stakes to get anything back.

We'll see what happens :)

WGC Bridgestone Invitational 2011 picks

Current Odds bets Order by Matched Date
 
Hunter Mahan 32 £4.00 £124.00
Bubba Watson 55 £4.00 £216.00
Zach Johnson 55 £2.00 £108.00
Justin Rose 85 £2.00 £168.00
Retief Goosen 120 £2.00 £238.00
David Toms 110 £2.00 £218.00
Darren Clarke 110 £2.00 £218.00
Heath Slocum 410 £2.00 £818.00

Graphs "Я" Us

Been tinkering with the Betfair C-SharpAPI6ExampleV1.1 code again this evening (this is the sample code you can freely get from the Betfair Developers Program website once you sign in).

I've been looking for way to automate the grabbing of graphs from the Betfair site so I can gain some perspective on certain tournaments, mainly golf ones at the moment. With the WGC Bridgestone Invitational 2011 starting this week, I once again have absolutely nothing to go on from previous years in terms a player's chances.

So my tweaks to the core code have yielded quite a nice solution. You basically fire up the app



Select "Show Active Event Types" and drill down to the event that you want



and it spits out all the runners' graphs for that event. Simply rename the directory to something a bit more meaningful - in my case WGC Bridgestone Invitational 2011 - Day 0 - lob the directory somewhere that Picasa (other photo viewers are available!) can see it and you get a snapshot of the event as it stands with the each graph labelled with the "runner's" name and ordered alphabetically



I'm not sure if I'm allowed to reproduce the whole code here but if anyone is interested, drop me a line via the email address printed on my blog's banner and I can email you the frmMain.cs file.

That's 3 hours of my life I won't get back - I'm off to bed!!