The BTC Horse Racing Thread
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@andy-donnelly what is the condition?
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Got stung a bit today by continuing to lay to stake for the higher odds strategies. Going to continue to lay to stake until my road test is complete but will definitely be considering laying to liability once I'm up and running properly!
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@andy-donnelly
I would say widening should be better but with recent experiments in optimisation timeframes forward testing is king whatever. -
After a bit of advice.
I’ve been following my own customisation of the lay the beaten fav strategy for the last 6 months, which has been profitable. However I’ve just noticed that one of the conditions I was applying was actually causing the strategy to earn less than it should. So removing that seems the logical decision.
Question should I remove this condition straight away?
Or should I run both variants side by side and not switch to the version with the condition removed until testing for a period of time?
My gut feel is that as it’s widening a criteria rather than narrowing, that the back test results is probably sufficient to move in this case, but interested in anyone’s thoughts before I change.
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Hello all. I was wondering if anyone has ever looked at laying a specific jockey?
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@nick-allan "Official" is the planned start time, "Actual" is the exact time the race actually started. Often races are delayed, especially the Irish ones with ridiculous numbers of runners.
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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.
