We've made some improvements to our Betfair price grabber that provides the prices for the backtesting.
Previously, we took a price snapshot once per second and wrote that to the DB for later retrieval in your strategies. 1-second intervals are obviously pretty granular (already resulting in about 10 million price snapshots per month of data 🤣 ) and provide a good indicator of price trends and entry / exit points.
However when a race goes in-play, the prices obviously become very volatile and we've seen that the price can easily dip below or surge above the "snapshotted" price between snapshots, often for significant enough traded amounts that you would want to be aware of it in backtesting (where you're basically always interested in whether the price touched a particular level).
To solve this problem without literally writing every tick to the database and needing a data-centre to rival OpenAI's, we're now analysing the ticks that make up each snapshot in memory and then storing the highest and lowest values as the snapshots.
The upshot of this is a more reliable indication of whether your entry or exit price was hit and therefore a closer correlation between your simulated backtesting results and your real life trading.
This will most benefit people who are exiting their trades in-running, or those doing lay the field type strategies.
@Lee-Greener No worries, we'll disable the non-scope version of that strategy rule in a future update (like we do with "horse position") as it's literally impossible to use to backtest an upcoming race!
@Sam-roberts made a megathread a while back if you want to run the numbers on these: https://forum.betfairtradingcommunity.com/topic/3531/horse-racing-strategies-megathread/2
These are now posted daily here: https://lightspeedstats.com/horse-racing-highlights/
@Mark-Hewett always going to be a bit of deviation due to the nature of odds moving so quickly, what time do you enter?
@Martin said in Question about horse section!:
@Patrik-Mellqvist the horse racing has backtesting yes if that's what you are asking
Thanks.
Exactly.
Can I test for one month to validate and explore?
Can I use a month subscription?
If I get what I am looking for after the testing period.
Then can I get the same 3-year deal as with a soccer subscription?
Cheers Patrik
Hi Adam. I was trying to create a back strategy looking for horses that ran below their handicap last time/handicap has been lowered focusing on higher quality handicap races with decent prize money (theory being you know the horses will be trying). My thinking is that a lot of money in these higher quality races will be placed on the favourite/tipped horses by pundits leaving some of the "outsiders" to provide value. Obviously this approach won't be for everyone as there will be long losing runs but wondered if you had any comments on my first stab? Is there any way of testing how it would have performed if the selections had been backed each way? Thanks!
Sorry for clickbaity title, it's accurate though!
I know a lot of people have their strategies set up in the software to bet within the last 10 minutes before the race. Are you aware of just how much the prices move around during that time? Especially these days with Betfair liquidity massively down on what it was even 5 years ago.
What I find now is that even on a solid handicap race, the prices will range much more, somewhere around 2 or 3 ticks either side of the average traded price. So you could do 6 ticks better on the same selection simply by better timing your entry bet! What difference would that make to your results?
I'm planning on introducing some "value maximisation" settings into the Betting Rules in the software. Ideas so far:
Entering a trade at the top or bottom of the selection's recent traded range Predicting the stopping or reversal of a trend (kind of the same as 1 tbh, probably based on MACD or price envelopes) Restricting bets based on the back/lay ratio (gap between the top back and lay prices) "Big bet" detection (Outsized bets coming into the market cause big moves) Betting based on proximity to natural or dynamic support and resistance points (natural resistance points basically being the tick crossover points on the ladder, e.g. 3.0, where the increment changes from 0.02 to 0.05) Liquidity related measures like fill rate, amount of money available at a price Backtesting profit figures with thresholds built in, for example telling you what your profit would have been if you'd taken 1 tick better or worse pricesSome of these are going to be quite intensive to calculate on the fly so this probably isn't a quick thing, and I have no idea if you could replicate them in BFBM (I think BetAngel's automations could handle them), but I'll leave that to them!
Those of you who do manual trading and think about this stuff, and also use the software, do you have any other suggestions or requests?
@Martin dobs strategy from my youtube video is here to download: Dobs (Sept 2024): rules_export.json
@Michael-Chalk I think this is a good idea. I'll have a think about how to implement it!
@Kevin-Pepper that's a really great way to look at it!
what columns do you want?
@Martin said in John’s Horse Trading Resources:
@John-Folan what you getting done in Turkey?
Teeth, hair transplant, tummy tuck and a face lift 😂
@Adam said in Question About BSP Place Markets:
@Michael-Chalk We get the place prices in a file from Betfair and the event name is still listed as "To Be Placed". BF don't seem to offer this market as a single entity any more on the website.
I think the price is taken from the TBP market with the same number of places as the Each Way market.
Nice and simple 🙄
Betfair don't make life easy for you do they!
@Wayne-Thomas OK thank you Wayne, I will follow with interst ,I noticed 4 possible bets yesterday and 4 winners.
