^ very sensible, and absolutely right.

aye robot

the distinction being made between "trading" and "position taking" simplistic to the point of being useless.

You are surely correct. In this Brave New World, a more sophisticated approach is needed other than backing (or laying) a single horse/event and letting the bet stand. We are clearly seeing a wide spectrum on perhaps several different factors which creates multiple  MO's and player types, nevertheless. I wonder if BF has gone through  a user segmentation exercise and if they have whether they would enlighten us on the constituents?

Sandown, a more sophisticated approach other than backing or laying isn't necessarily the only way forward. A more sophisticated to the backing and laying process is an equally valid approach.

It's horses for courses I guess. I have no idea about how the interface works etc & all manner of approaches taken by some of the faces on this thread. A lot of these issues hadn't even crossed my mind. I've spent my time exploring ways of predicting who will win/lose an event.

Dave E

I suspect that we are navigating the same waters.

Congratulations Dave, you are now part of my elite group of contacts.

I keep reading this thread and need to catch up with the last 30 posts when time permits.

But what the heck is this totally meaningless ROC metric? I have been involved in betting on horse racing for 20+ years. During that time I have met and communicated with hundreds of punters, most losing, some winning, a few big winners. Not one of them ever mentioned return on capital. Since joining Betfair this thread is the first I have ever read about return on capital being used as a metric for success. ROC is totally meaningless in the world of punting, even more so in exchange land. A guy with £10 of capital and turn over £10,000+ on a single race

Aye Robot 10:11:

Best Post Ever IMO

Thanks Lori & Bayes,

As far as football goes, I go pre k.o. mainy due to family constraints. When you've got the Wii on one tv & cbeebies on the other it's very difficult to look at in play!

Of course I take the point about modelling beyond the pre match odds. I did sit there and watch the match odds unfold along with a game very early this season and a glaring inefficiency jumped out at me. It's not something I've had the time to pursue as I'm spread rather thinly with other analysis, but it is ready to be pondered another day. This does actually tie in with the point made by Bayes about market sentiment. All very good food for thought.

My problem would be the issue of having enough in play odds data. I don't have any. Is that sort of information available for all the matches that have had in play betting?

Hello Chaps,

Very interesting thread.

I started the arbing route and with a bank of roughly 25k in 2009 I made around 35k.

At the end of 2009 i was having trouble getting bets on with bookies so i thought i could make the move to trading on betfair.

What happened was i found my trades getting bounced around by the market maker in illiquid markets. I also started betting and i have lost a lot of money this year.

A short summary is to;

1. trade liquid markets.
2. position take only if you see a price which is inefficient.
3. dont chase..

Thanks WWCD, I got bored with all the sniping & petty arguing tbh. I do look in from time to time, but most of the thread titles don't really catch my interest, especially the ones where multiple account users are talking to themselves.

Muqbil
Return on capital is the only valid way to measure if what you are doing with your money is better cpmparatively than doing something ese with it, forgetting the moral side of things.
( don't confuse it with return on turnover, as your post seemed to suggest).
Now I agree that traders turnover their capital many times in the course of an event, but they still require a degree of capital to do this, that is to open position(s) before they close them out.
And if they are trading mutiple items in multiple events, quite often simultaneously, their capital requirements will expand accordingly.
Also as they get more confident in their " trading " techniques they will start to trade in larger absolute amounts to get the sort of profit figures being mentioned on here.
But the bottom line as to why I keep referring to ROC is simply this.
Smart money migrates to where the best risk/reward ratios are.
And here we have people claiming to make ROCs of circa 20,000-40,000 pa, all without an insurmountable entry barrier , that is it can apparently be done by a lot of people as long as theyo are willing to put in the hard yards. It's not rocket science.
So I'm saying why isn't the field getting too "crowded"  for these returns to be disappearing sooner rather than later.
Also, perhaps more pertinently, as Sandown says, why isn't BF analysing all these techniques and replicating themselves at ground floor commission levels ( for them that is) and thus effectively cutting the feet out from under these bot players.

a) they trade/match bets totally in the thousands every day.

Assuming that you're hitting likely value the more bets you strike the better.

b) they do not care one iota what is causing an in play price fluctuation in a game /event

There's no reason to care. There are many ways of spotting probable value. The peaks and troughs along a price graph are where the value is. The game is all about hitting those points on the graph, if you do that then you're getting value. Over reactions after events (eg sending offs) are prime territory for finding value, what the the event is is neither here nor there, if you can identify a betting pattern that's typical of a market getting out of line then you can expect to get value. If you can do it thousands of times a day that's even better.

The theory isn't complex. It's the doing it that's hard.

Don't think the field will ever get too crowded Frog as not everyone has the discipline or knowledge to make it work. I'd guess most would agree things were certainly easier in the early days and new players are coming along all the time so you need to be prepared to adapt. Whilst there's a spread in the market and punters happy to cross that spread they'll always be a few crumbs to pick up.

As for Betfair cutting the feet out of bot players you only need to look at the cross matching, anything else would involve them effectively seeding the market which for now they don't seem to be doing but then who really knows what goes on in Malta :)

As it's said, sometimes fact is stranger than fiction.
I suppose I will just have to accept that this is one of those times.

Yeah I was waiting for some sort of half arsed reply like that.
In fact, I was more expecting something along the lines " There'e nothing strange about it if you read all the posts properly dumbo "
Well if you don't think that being able to employ your capital to return 20,000 % pa is not strange, then I'm afraid to say that you're living in some parallel universe.
But you will then probably say it's not scalable into huge amounts of money.
Well apparently it's readily scalable into circa 200K a year or maybe more.
And that, my friends, is more than 99.999999% of the world's population manage to earn and get by on. Which is the universe I populate.
And finally I'm probably more open minded than people like you BJ, who seem so readily to accept all they're todl or all they read as pure, unalduterated fact.
I question things, in case you hadn't noticed.
In fact, in the whole history of this thread, I think I'm the only person who has raised any doubts or questions on the whole matter.
Now that either says I'm the dumbest person in the world ( don't say the obvious) or the bulk of readers/posters on here are people who desperately want to believe these things unconditionally, because otherwise there would be no point them gambling.
Aye Robot makes some extremely valid, succinct points on the mindsets of most gamblers.
He's not one of the" mugs" quite obviously, but to use the well cliched phrase " If you can't see the mug in the room, it's probably you ".

That last post still sounds " muggy".
To clear it up, I was apologizing to BJ for my somewhat extreme response directed to him.
I stand by it's general content nonetheless.

No offence taken Frog , wouldn't be much of a forum if we all agreed

Btw part of this debate between me ( alone with perhaps a modicum of support from a few others like Dave Edwards and Sandown) seems to be boiling down essentially to the type of debate between fundamental analysis and charting techniques in the stock and commodity markets.
I guess it's pretty obvious which side I'm on.

haha, Froggy I'm not on any side of any debate here. In stock terms I guess you could call my approach fundamental analysis, but I don't think for one moment that a selection based approach holds any advantages over any trading methods.

For me there is a colossal range of opportunity here. Any approach can be valid and what was in vogue may go out and come back in again. The sands are shifting constantly, but at present (& for some time into the future too I would suspect) there is an issue with the pricing for football matches. Pre k.o. I'm talking now and as long as the market makers continue to cater for the price takers in anything approaching the current set up things should be fine for those who don't rely on the basic analysis that the majority follow.

Good question Sandown, perhaps we are navigating the same waters