SHOULD YOU GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN

It depends what you do, are you methodical or random? There's often no profit advantage to greening up over the long haul, but if you want to reduce volatility (the length of losing streaks) then greening up at a consistent point is one way of doing that. Some punters then increase stakes to return double the profit but with the same original volatility.

thats like saying you should only place a bet on something that wins!

cpfc i'm not so sure 'bout that, cutting losers short and letting winners ride...sometimes you might back something, say at 1.5 (at value), it drifts to 1.6...you cut your losses..it wins. Therefore why should it matter, surely all that matters is price relative to chance of the even occuring?. Getting value and then trading out at "correct" price might be a different argument as regards commission.

I agree, i meant in running if you backed at value of 1.5 (say you thought the correct price was 1.47)  and the 1.6 was the current price in running that you also deemed to be correct at that time.

If it's horses you are talking about , any race under 2 miles get out before the off , if the liability is a front runner get out before the off , otherwise let it go IR and proceed with caution.

There is only one correct response to the question "should you get out while you can when trading?" and that is Yes.

The only time you can't get out (apart from when the site goes down) is when the event is no longer open. More often than not this is when the event is over or when it goes in-play and in-play trading is not available. Anyway if you don't get out when you can you are not trading you've just had a bet.

There seems to be an implication in the question that you can't get out of a trade if it means you have to accept a loss no matter what, I find that a dangerous way to trade.

Hi Alex, apart from the technicality that if you don't get out of a bet then you haven't traded it, there is a problem with your "get out if it is value to so and if it is not value then run it". An example of this could be trading pre-kick-off for football. If you trade then you would trade with much higher stakes than a bet.

Say Man U and playing Chelsea and you think the correct price for Man U pre kick-off is 2.3. You lay them at 2.2 and they drift to 2.24 just at kick-off. If you have a bank of £10K you could easily have a 2K position on this prior to kick-off. Once the game starts are you saying that you would leave that £2k on because you don't think it's value. I certainly wouldn't. Keep trading and betting separate.

In the example given, as long as you still feel the correct price is 2.30 and there was enough liquidity in the market to lay as much as you wanted when it was 2.20, then you should be closing part of your bet out by backing at 2.24.

Because it will mathematically increase the long-term growth of your bank by doing so.

Your price at the beginning is 2.30, therefore you would find value in either laying 2.28 or backing 2.32 and there is an optimal amount for each. Once you have laid your optimal amount at 2.20 (which by Kelly is laying just over 3.6% of your bank), you would now find value in either laying a bit extra at 2.18 or backing a bit back at 2.22, amounts of which are trivial to calculate and will each have a positive effect on long-term growth.

If you have already got your fill at 2.20, then absolutely, yes.

Hi Alex, I think basically the problem is in the understanding of a bet and a trade.

When betting you are absolutely spot on, in that it is all about value. Everything you do is about finding value bets.
When trading it is all about which way you think the prices are going to go. I read somewhere and I agree with someone who said that they would back an outcome of a coin toss at 1.9 if they truely believed that they could lay out at say 1.8. The only affect that value has when trading is the impact it may have on price movement. This is why when you said in my example that i was overstaking I believe that I am not. Because there is always the intention of trading out before kick-off occurs.

I agree with what you are saying but I believe that all about betting and not trading. This is just based on my beliefs of what trading is. I totally appreciate that different people have different interpretations of what trading is as opposed to betting.
For what it's worth I don't actually believe that trading exists when a football game is in-play, with the exception of half-time. It is all betting. That's just my belief though, i'm sure others will disagree.

I absorb both of your comments and can summarise this now.

There is only one correct response to the question "should you get out while you can when trading?" and that is NO, unless it is value to do so or if you are recycling.

How is that?

I do have a question for you though just out of my curiousity. If you place a bet as per the Man U example above and the price is then always worse than what you consider true value so that bet just stays there until the game is over, would you classify that as a "Bet", a "Trade" or both.



I guess that if that was the only bet then it would be an outright bet despite an intention to trade.  I am never in that situation as I will have already recycled and traded horizontally and if the price stuck at a price that was out of synch with my assessment of where it should be then I would ask myself if sixty million Frenchmen can be wrong.  But I won't trade out at poor value for the sake of greening unless it is to recycle.

FAFH - ???????

No its not overstaking because you can get out with a small loss. It's called having another account with with another company froggy, so if something totally strange does happen like Betfair going down, you can trade out with another account. There is gambling life outside BF.

No I'm saying that even if you're trading you should treat each bet as an independent wager.
If it doesn't make sense on a stand alone basis then you shouldn't do it.
IF you can trade out later at even better value, the all and good.
And that is probably the real difference between traders and gamblers.
If and when even better value comes along the gambler will increase his exposure, whilst the trader will take a profit and move onto other areas of interest.

There's no simple answer to the question of whether or not you should green out value bets- it depends on the exact circumstances and it's not as easy to work out the implications of greening as many people seem to think. 

On the face of it it appears that there are many situations in which you will maximise your returns by greening out a position even though the closing bet may be only true value or less, you can think of this as being like taking only the value portion of the bet and giving the rest back. The way comm works often appears to make greening more profitable, many people will use an example like the following to argue this position:

let's say you can consistently back horses at 2.1 that have a true value of 2, if your comm rate is 5% then the expected return on 100 of these horses if they are straight punted at level stakes is 2.25 stakes (no argument there I hope).

Ardent "greeners" will often argue that if you greened all of your horses out at 2 (true value) then you'd be left with 4.75 stakes after comm, which is more that twice as much as outright punting them. on the face of it that looks impressive but actually it's missing so much of the point that we can call it flat wrong.

That's because this approach doesn't allow for all the horses that you backed at value but nevertheless never got to 2. If you want to make a fair comparison of greened or non greened strategies then you have to allow for that too. This is not as easy as it first appears, normally you can infer the likelihood of a selection going to X price to Y price from it's true price, for example you would infer that a horse with a true price of 4 has a 0.5 (or 50%) probability of matching at 2, but how do you calculate how many horses that match at 2.1 with a true price of 2 will fail to even match at 2? Worse yet, how many of those that do match at 2 will only do so after having drifted out and matched at 2.2 first? How long are you going to wait to green out before you give up and red out? How many of the horses that you could have greened out end up redded because they drifted before they came back in? what is the probability of your lay getting matched at 2 even if the price does go there? All of these things (and more besides) make it extremely difficult to make a simple comparison of most greened and non greened strategies - even when the opening bets are identical and the scenario appears simple. Simple answers to this question just don't cut it, you need to do some fairly intricate maths and be very careful not to miss anything before you can make a call on the best way to play any particular set of bets.

The only examples that I can think of where greening is unambiguously advantageous are when both bets can be struck and matched simultaneously, and even in these strategies there is the probability of "non matches" to deal with.


In my own betting I never deliberately green up but I do very often end up with green markets because the markets that I work in are so volatile that if you're looking for value all over the place then it's likely enough that you find good bets to cover every eventuality. It doesn't bother me one bit to see some red on the screen though.

aye robot is that why you chose IR horse markets?

UA
All I know is that if prices open at 1.01 bet and 1000 lay, then bet price will lengthen and the lay price will shorten.
That's why I don't trade price trends pre-off.
I do not have the skills.
As far as trading IR, I fail to comprehend how anybody can predict the vagaries of any game as it unfolds.
People like robot who take advantage of IR horse prices moving too far due to emotions I sort of understand where they are coming from, but all the others no way.

Actually don't think of it like that