The BTC Horse Racing Thread
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@nick-allan I think actual time is the time it actually started. so on average anything up to 4 or 5 mins after the scheduled time. You EVER seen a race go off on the scheduled time?
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@adam So Official is anytime 10 mins before the scheduled time of the race and Actual is the actual scheduled time of the race as in 14:00 at Kempton? I know its a bit of as nightmare as races don’t seem to go off on time particularly sprints.
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@adam said in The BTC Horse Racing Thread:
I can change the preset strategy to use official start time if desired.
The reason there's the choice between the two is that lots of people trade right up until the race is about to go off and taking advantage of opportunities that come up during that frequent delay between the planned start time and the actual start time.
Lots of my own bots take some sort of action at x mins before the planned start as a failsafe, but continue looking for opportunities after that time.
So again, it's not that it's "impossible" to trade that way in real life. It just depends how you personally work.
Shouldn't be a problem. It's just a case of remembering to change it. Probably best if all the presets are set to official start time as the results will be different.
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I can change the preset strategy to use official start time if desired.
The reason there's the choice between the two is that lots of people trade right up until the race is about to go off and taking advantage of opportunities that come up during that frequent delay between the planned start time and the actual start time.
Lots of my own bots take some sort of action at x mins before the planned start as a failsafe, but continue looking for opportunities after that time.
So again, it's not that it's "impossible" to trade that way in real life. It just depends how you personally work.
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@jonathan-jones for what it's worth I had a small profit on the day yesterday with all preset strategies running unchanged.
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@jonathan-jones said in The BTC Horse Racing Thread:
Rubbish day yesterday.
Big differences in backtest to realilty. Backtest says 1.79 profit, reality was 14.6 point loss. One obvious and explianable miss of the back the fav. 2 horses swapped place after the official start but before the off resulting in me backing the loser but the backtester backing the winner. Sod all i can do about that one and i have had a fair few of those work the other way round.Pace Lays was the other. A bet taken on the limits in reality but missed in the backtest resulting in a massive 10 point difference. Put in a support request on that one because obviously it should of traded (wondering if its down to traded volume @ that price), just no idea why its missing from the backtest data (though last week i had a similar issue on the same strategy and an hour later it was showing on the backtest).
On back the fave why don’t you do what @Keith-Driscoll suggests? Back the bsp fave 5 or 10 seconds after the off? Odds will be slightly different but you will be guaranteed to be on the right horse 100% of the time?
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@jonathan-jones @Chris-Osborne
+1 for staking lays to liability.
It's been a solid strategy - no cause for concern here.
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@chris-osborne
No, not to liability. Its not a bad idea. When i get in i think i will re-download all the individual results (will have to now anyway since i change the pace lays) and download a version of the lays staked to liabilty. Will be an interesting comparison for the portfolio. -
@daniel-mills said in The BTC Horse Racing Thread:
@jonathan-jones I traded that one too. didn't think anything was unusual about it other than the fact it's a big one to lose!
Are you laying to liability i.e lose a maximum of 1pt or to stake where your losses could be significantly higher.
You won't win as much but more importantly you can reduce and control the losses and its a lot better for your mindset or it is for me anyway.
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@daniel-mills
Yep. it was.
I am trying to get my 'portfolio automation' set up correctly so am double checking everything every morning to make sure i have it all configured correctly. Found a few mistakes in my code and a few of these 'impossible' conditions in the preset strategies which i am correcting in my versions so they compare live to backtest more consistently. The Pace Lays line looks a lot more scraggly if you change the time to one you can actually use and profit is about 7% less but still looks a good strategy.In fact all the strategies still look good if you change the borked bits and crucially for the peace of mind they backtest more consistently to what you can trade. I think this is probably the last issue because the rest of the week has been really good.
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@jonathan-jones I traded that one too. didn't think anything was unusual about it other than the fact it's a big one to lose!
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Ah,
Scratch that. Everything matches now. Pace Lays is another of these impossible strategies where the rules are configured in such a way its a simply impossibility to trade them in real life.Its got 'Actual time', i missed that. Obviously unless you have a crystal ball its simply not possible to know when 1 min before the 'actual time' a race starts is. I had my strategy set to 1 min before event start time. Now i have changed the backtest strategy to match it all adds up.
@Adam Can you cancel that support ticket please? All is good.
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Hopefully Adam will be able to look at the messages they have from betfair and see if anything stands out. Obviously as it didnt trade in the strat its not on the list to have a look at the graph, Actually, thats an idea. I can hack something in the backtester to see the graph on that horse.
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@jonathan-jones that's strange, didn't trigger on my bot
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16:25 @ Haydock
Trade was taken on Makinyourmindup at 16:24 at odds of 11. So, bang on the max. I am using Fairbot with the streaming API and the trigger is:
LTP > = 3
LTP < =11Just noticed a forum bug. It doesnt like greaterthan or equal to without putting a space in for some reason.
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@jonathan-jones which was the Pace Lays horse? I can check and see if BFBM fired on it
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Rubbish day yesterday.
Big differences in backtest to realilty. Backtest says 1.79 profit, reality was 14.6 point loss. One obvious and explianable miss of the back the fav. 2 horses swapped place after the official start but before the off resulting in me backing the loser but the backtester backing the winner. Sod all i can do about that one and i have had a fair few of those work the other way round.Pace Lays was the other. A bet taken on the limits in reality but missed in the backtest resulting in a massive 10 point difference. Put in a support request on that one because obviously it should of traded (wondering if its down to traded volume @ that price), just no idea why its missing from the backtest data (though last week i had a similar issue on the same strategy and an hour later it was showing on the backtest).
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@nick-allan
At a guess i would say its probably how your automation is set up then. I use Fairbot so cant comment on BetAngel at all. Fairbot automation is very simple. Its easy to craft rules that match the strategies and i have pretty much no missed entries now its set up to use the streaming API. Only thing with it is that it works on a strategy file per race and you can only have one. So, if you want to run multiple strategies on multiple horses in the same race it would be a lot of work to configure those every day (unless you can code and hack a workaround). -
@jonathan-jones Sorry I should have clarified that the short odds lay isn't a favourite strategy you're absolutely right the only filter that I have on that is to take out class one and two horses which when I looked at backtesting were the ones that were winning and therefore unsuccessful trades. But everything else is included and my BOT looks at the number of runners an only executes when there's more than four or less than 15, so the number of runners criteria is covered. Again I don't know if runners are categorised at BSP because obviously you could have 15 runners when the bot fires (5 secs be the race scheduled start) and then two runners might refuse and the software may recall that as 13 runners and therefore a valid trade, if you see what I mean.
Yeah I've realised that having the favourite condition in the lay the beaten fav strat in the software wasn't working because of course favourites can change dramatically in the final five minutes before a race, so I took that out of the filter and my bot basically won't fire if the selection is first or second favourites as per the rules. What I am seeing is selections in the results where the BSP odds are way higher then maximum odds of 15, but of course some horse races go off 10 minutes late and of course in that time a horse can massively drift so its not not a great metric. Id prefer a price at schedule start but again people have raised this before.
The back to favourite is probably the closest in reconciliation from live trades and software results and yeah I agree that once the software makes that change I think that's going to be a lot better. in fact this might be the one and only strategy I take forward and forget the other two if the inconsistencies continue.
I think the hardest thing with betangel is how you actually checked it with the inconsistencies it has a log feature bar obviously if the bot hasn't fired it doesn't log anything anyway so you're none the wiser. I believe that the BFBM is better at discovering bugs but I always had the issue of running multiple strategies across the race being too problematic. I don't know if that's been ironed out now and I can see that there is a BFBM button on the software so this might be a better product to run on the horse racing software but I've still got six months of a subscription left to go on it.
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@nick-allan
If you are using the classic (preset) versions of these then there are things you need to change. Youn may already of done these but just in case you havent thought about it i will repeat them here:Short odds lays has number of runners condition. The Short odds lays itself DOESNT specify the favourite though i have often seen it implied in selections that it does. This often causes differences as horses drop out. Your best bet with this one is to create a 'filter only' version with that removed to provide your daily selections and handle the number of runners in your automation.
Lay the beaten fav also has the favourite condition and looks for selections from 11 mins (think its 11) out. Thats never going to give consistent matches between backtest and live. Bin the condition. To be honest its performed fine without it.
Back the favourite you are stuck but as its only looking for selections in the last 10 seconds i cant see it being too bad. I notice the odd one but nothing that makes me worry. Plus with the new release imminent giving odds on the 2nd, 3rd favourite etc i think this is one that will end up getting improved and made more consistent.
Back C&D winner. Bin the favourite and bin the number of selections condition. This particular strategy is impossible to execute according to its current rules. I am pretty guilty of coming up with ones like that that lose me money before i realize exactly what i have done. Without those conditions its still very, very profitable but re-evaluating the courses after making the change should smooth out the now bumpy equity curve to something more acceptable.
Beyond that double check your automation. I thought mine was perfect and still found a bug this week.
