Analysis of February 2010

Hi,

the second month of the new year is already over. Let’s have a look how I did:

Personal Trades

Tennis: -€47.27
 
Total Trades 53
Win Trades 21
Loss Trades 29
Scratched 3
Strike Rate 42.00%
Average Win +10.80
Average Loss: –9.45

The disappointing run in tennis continues. I am really annoyed about my tennis trading.
When I have a look at the numbers I must admit that the absolute value for average win and average loss can not produce a satisfied long term profit. Even a 50% strike rate will not produce a decent enough profit. The absolute value of my average loss should be much lower than the absolute value of my average win.
It is hard to say, but it seems that my way of trading tennis does not work.
The problem with my way of tennis trading is that I can not trade every match. More often than not I am just watching the matches without getting involved. I am just waiting for situations where I think the price is wrong, but when the price is wrong it does not mean that the player I backed will win because of the wrong price.
I am in my third year of trading tennis, but I am not yet progressing as desired. Skipping the tennis is an opportunity I am thinking about.

Horse Racing: €33.23
Only four selections for the month, but all of them lost, so I have another pleasant month on the laying front. I hope the bad weather is behind us and I hope I will have more selections during the next few months.
Last year at the end of March I started my horse laying selections so very soon we will have their first “birthday”. I will give a few more details about the selections in another post at the end of March.

Winter Sports: €4.75
I laid Lindsey Vonn @ 1.1 with a fiver on the Ladies Super G : Gold Medal Winner market. The track was difficult with lots of runners struggled, Lindsey too.

Total P&L:  -€9.29

February 2010 has been the second negative month in a row. I am not too worried about the amount I lost, but more about the tennis trading. I have not yet decided what I will do with it.

Betting Bots

HorstBecker
It was running the whole month in simulation mode and made a small profit of 7 points.

LaylaCheval
In February it made a total profit of 42 points. We started putting money on the selections at 10th February and made since then a small profit of 7 points.

All in all, nothing to be too euphoric about, but there are signs that the bad run (and weather) might be over.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selection:

2010-02-25    17:20    Sthl    ISITCOZIMCOOL  13th

Update:
What a gift this selection was! I got matched @2.18 while Betfair starting price was 1.80. Lowest inplay odds of the selection was 1.77. Never in doubt.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

BET_IN_PROGRESS

Hi,

during the last few days I had some issues with the BET_IN_PROGRESS problem of the Betfair API. Not only my betting bots, but also my personal trading was affected by this issue.
When placing a bet I got sometimes a message “BET_IN_PROGRESS” instead of getting the bet placed. LaylaCheval, the laying betting bot missed some profitable selections.
I know also some traders who had problems to get out of a trade caused by this issue. What a shame!

Today Betfair made a post in the official Betfair Developer Forum about this issue:

“Our technical teams have now identified the root cause of this issue and are now looking to schedule the fix as soon as possible this week. Unfortunately we don’t yet have a release date – we will update you with further information on this as soon as we receive confirmation.“

It is good to know they are working on that issue and that they are communicating about this issue.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

Update:
Tomorrow I will be out of office, so no selections.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

2010-02-19    14:45    Sand    ANY CURRENCY 5th

Update:
13 days without any selections and we are back with a profitable selection. I got matched @4.5 while Betfair starting price was 3.8.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

LaylaCheval Back in Betting Mode

Hello,

today we will give LaylaCheval another try with placing bets on the selections.

During the last days we analysed the data and here is an overview of the progress of the p&l figure with the applied new rules:

Again I marked our previous entry point. The downswing was inevitable, but the downswing is not that huge (ca. 50 points) as before. The graph also looks more steady. At the moment we need to build a bigger bank so we need a stable graph for raising stake size.

So fingers crossed for today!

Will update later how the day went so far.

Update:
Nothing spectacular to report about. A small loss for today, nearly a half point loss.
This result is good news. Without the new filters it would have produced a loss of -21.40 points.
I am really excited about the next few days.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Betfair is down…again

Betfair crashed 30 minutes ago. It is not that good for the betting bots. All the advantages of automated betting and trading will not work if the exchange is not available.

I am really excited about Betfair’s promise about having a better communication about issues and outages.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Betfair Service Apology

Hi,

during the last few weeks the Betfair API Service was not that reliable.

Betfair announced an apology on the Betfair Developers Program Website:

Betfair Service Apology

Quote:
“In the past, we have not communicated the exact details of what planned upgrades/outages are for. Going forward we want to improve that and where we are doing large planned pieces of work we will look to communicate them in a more open way so you can be more aware of the benefits and risks involved.”

Sounds interesting…

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

2010-02-06    13:45    Weth        MONOGRAM 2nd

Update:
I got matched early @4.6 while Betfair starting price was 4.77.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

2010-02-05    16:30    Catt    DESOLAIT  6th

Update:
I got matched early at 3.9 while Betfair starting price was 3.88.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

In the Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

Hello,

a quite week so far on the trading front for me. Did not yet traded a single event this week. Did a lot of work on the betting bots. Muxor and me converted all the historical data from LaylaCheval and HorstBecker from the excel sheets into our MySQL database.

Let’s have a look at some key facts:

HorstBecker

Number of racing days: 97
Total P&L in points: +88.56 pt
Max Daily Loss: –38.34 pt
Max Daily Profit: +51.85 pt

 
The data are calculated with a 1 point level stake per selection.

We started putting money on the selections nearly the highest level of the profit. The good thing is that it is still in profit, but we need to apply some filters. Actually I have not yet done all the analysis work, but so far it is quite interesting that there are some courses which are not profitable, for example Southwell produced a loss of -72.05 points, Lingfield produced a loss of -51.07 points , but Kempton produced a profit of +51.92 points and Carlisle produced a profit of +36.41 points.

Once the analysis of all the data is done and all filters are defined I will give it another try with putting money on it.

LaylaCheval

Number of racing days: 118
Total P&L: +206.56 pt
Max Daily Loss: –47.05 pt
Max Daily Profit: +65.72 pt

 
The data are calculated with a 1 point level stake per selection.

The same here again. We started putting money on the selections at the peak of the graph. All over it is in profit, but the down trend right after we entered was too heavy. Here is an overview of some of the courses P&L for LaylaCheval:

Southwell: -40.88 pt
Lingfield: -15.79 pt
Kempton: +34.72 pt
Carlisle: +21.41 pt

It is quite obvious that there are some courses which are negative for both bots and some are profitable for both bots.

Conclusion

So what’s the conclusion of all the numbers?
First, there is something going in the right direction with both bots. The results are promising, but not yet the way I like it.
Second, I need to identify some reliable filters to maximize the profit and to protect the bank roll from a bad run.

That’s it for now.

All the best, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Lay Selections

Hello,

Today’s selections:

No selection.

NB. All selections are lay selections. Only lay the given selections, if the odds are less or equal 5.0. If the price is greater than 5.0 it is not a bet. I recommend to take the early odds and a maximum liability of 5% of your bank roll on each given selection.

Cheers, Loocie

Analysis of January 2010

Hello,

this month was not the best one for me. “Disappointing” describes it the best.

American Football: -€34.72
Hmm…What to say about it? My strategy did not work the way I expected it. Maybe I am looking for too big odds movements. Need to do some more research.

Basketball: €1.88
Did not traded really Basketball. This figure just came from developing the bet matching for a bot.

Horse Racing: –€17.70
I started well with three profitable selections in a row at decent odds. Then two losers turned the month into a negative one. This can happen, so I am not too worried about. There will be better months for sure.

Soccer: -€1.39
I had two bets this weekend: B Munich v Mainz on Over/Under 2.5 goals market and Stuttgart v Dortmund : Match Odds market. The later one lost, so I made a small loss.

Tennis: –€14.52
The first month of a tennis season is always a tough one. There is really much uncertainty about the players form in the first few matches.
One of my main goals during 2010 is to become more professional in the way I am trading. I kept record of my trades and if you have a look at the numbers, it is not that bad, except the strike rate:

Total Trades 35
Win Trades 15
Loss Trades 19
Scratched 1
Strike Rate 44.52%
Average Win +10.24
Average Loss: –8.85

Generally I have a strike rate of 55-60% of profitable trades. This month I was not patient enough. I entered too many matches. Here is a graph of the progress of the P&L figure:
 

There is much space for improvement.

January Total P&L:  -€66.45
A disappointing month and a disappointing start into the trading year 2010, but this is just a bigger motivation for me for the next months. I know I can do better and I am sure I will.

What about the betting bots?
They are currently running in simulation mode and it seems the horrible weeks are behind us. I need to apply rules to protect the bank roll from those bad runs with daily maximum allowed losses. This might reduce the possible profit, but it also helps to stay in the game.

This week Betfair’s API service was totally crap. Today the API service was down again for sixth time this week alone.

LaylaCheval could have produced a profit of 50 points this month with the new filters and rules. I will work out the past results with the new filter and if this works I will give it another try.

HorstBecker is not yet performing as expected. I have not yet done all the research and analysing of the results with new filters and rules. So still a lot of work in front.

That’s it so far.

Cheers, Loocie