Analysis of November 2009

Hello,

Another month is over and it is time for a summary.
The way I am working on Betfair changed a little during November, so I will change my analysis too. There will be a part handling the betting bot performance and a part related to my personal trades:

Personal Trades:

American Football: €47.20
I was a little lucky this month. Missed a few bets, because I was not at home to place some bets. The bets I missed all lost.

Horse Racing: -€20.77
My horse laying selections did not worked well this month. It was quite difficult to identify good laying opportunities, so I just had a few bets. Three of those won so I finished the month with a loss.

Motor Sport: €15.40
A small profit from the start of the month. Nothing interesting to say. I am looking forward to the next season.
Will Schumacher come back and drive for Mercedes GP?

Soccer: €10.52
Inspired by Psychoff I had a look at trading on soccer with Soccer Mystic. The good news is that I know how to trade on soccer. The bad news is, it is really boring. I do not enjoy trading on soccer. It is quite exhausting to watch the matches and the odds closely. Quite different to trading tennis.

Tennis: €45.17
I am happy about the result of trading tennis for November. There were not many matches, but I traded really well. During the last three months I think I have found my way of trading tennis: Just lay low!
That’s it. The earlier you lay low, the higher is the chance that the selection you laid will trade at higher odds. There are matches were I can not identify such a situation, but if so, then I do not trade this match. There is no reason to waste money.
Staking has been a big issue for me on trading tennis during the whole year. During the last three months I always traded with a fixed stake of €20.00 which worked quite well. With that staking it is also easy to evaluate my trades afterwards. For the next tennis season I will raise that stake size, but I will write about that in detail in my preview of 2010. I just need to avoid over staking, a mistake I made this year and which let me struggle during the mid season in tennis.

Total P&L: €97.52
Overall a really pleasant profit for the month. My time/trading ratio decreased too, which is another motivation. I do not need to fight to make a profit like this. Just need to do, what I know.

Betting Bots:

Both bots started exceptional profitable, but this month was not that good as the past months on simulation mode:

HorstBecker
LaylaCheval
  
HorstBecker had a really awful month, but I assume this should just happen to separate the boys from the men. We need to have balls and trust the system. There will be winning streaks and there will be losing runs. You can not avoid one of them. You need to deal with both. Have a look at an article from Harry Fox:

Losing Runs versus Winning Runs in Horse Race Betting

Layla had a profitable month, but made all the profit in the first two weeks of November. The last two weeks have been not that good and Layla produced a loss. All in all LaylaCheval made a decent profit in November, but we just started putting money on it from mid November. It had to happen to start with a loss :)

At the beginning of the month I was watching many of the races the bots were involved, but this will make you crazy. I will not do it anymore. It is too stressful. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. A single race or a single days is not important. Getting a long term view is what you need, if you are doing something like that.

Both bots are now running on a windows server. No need to run a personal computer for the bots. We just need to log in the windows server via remote desktop and we can watch both of them working. The bots are doing their work reliable. No crashes, no bugs so far.

There are still a few things to work out:
Firstly, we want to have a central tracking platform for tracking the bets and market activities on Betfair for both bots. So we want to be able to have a real time overview about both bots performance. This also includes to get a daily report about the profit/loss figure and other indicators.
Secondly we want to implement a reporting and alert system to get emails and SMS when there is an issue with the bots or with the Betfair API.
You see, there is still a lot of work in front of us.
I will keep you updated.

Cheers, Loocie