The BTC Horse Racing Thread
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Hey guys, I am trying to use BFBM to automate a strategy that is based on BSP. It's fine for a strategy where I don't have any limits on the price, but I have a lay strategy where I want to implement a maximum odds.
The betfair interface allows you to do this by clicking 'Set SP odds limit' which then gives you a field to input the minimum odds for back bets or maximum odds for lay bets, but I cannot get this to work in BFFM!
I have gone through this thread in their forum but it is still not working:
https://www.bfbotmanager.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?t=3243
Any ideas?
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@Jonathan-Jones said in The BTC Horse Racing Thread:
@Martin
Think so. I have tried InPlay stop losses on horses and they just dont do what you want. You either set it as per the strategy and they just dont match or you set them for a miles worse price and every loss is bigger than it should be.The SL on this strat just looks like it smooths the PL out a bit. Think the difference in total PL is only about 40 quid.
When you remove the stop loss it doesn’t seem to have performed that well in the last 6 months, which would be a concern.
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@Jonathan-Jones I split the overall bank between the various strategies I am using to reduce risk of significant drawdown. Presumably if you set it to the shared bank/overall bank then you could have a pretty big reduction to the overall bank on a bad run, particularly if multiple strategies hit a rough patch?
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Question for those of you who use BFBM in regards to the split banks (or anyone who uses any similar functionality really).
Do you use it with multiple strategies so each strategy just manages a fraction of the overal bank or do you just use the whole bank shared so all the strategies share the profits/losses?
I am guessing the first is the safer option but it looks like there is an absolutely massive difference in the rate of account growth (shared bank being a lot more profitable).
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@Dan-MacKinnon yeah assume it would work fine on prerace as moves are smaller
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@Martin I tried a similar strategy a while back when the horse racing software was first released. It used a pre-off SL and even when I moved the trigger further apart, as Jonathan said, it always seemed to match on "winning" trades and didn't when I wanted it to! I gave up with SL and think it's more of an insurance unless you're manually trading
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@Martin
Think so. I have tried InPlay stop losses on horses and they just dont do what you want. You either set it as per the strategy and they just dont match or you set them for a miles worse price and every loss is bigger than it should be.The SL on this strat just looks like it smooths the PL out a bit. Think the difference in total PL is only about 40 quid.
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All the time. I tried this one live when it first hit the forums. in terms of looking at the backtest and live results you cant compare them. No idea how this would perform live long term. Only thing for certain is it wont be anything like the backtest. I tried an inplay SL again recently in one of my strategies. Only ran it for a couple of days because its simply not worth it. People need to remember a stop loss isnt a standing order. Its placed when the conditions for it are met so its subject to the inplay delay and because of the way prices move there are some universal truths about stop losses activated inplay.
- A stop losss you might not want matched because price then reverses again and goes in your favour will ALWAYS be matched.
- A stop loss you really need matched because price is storming against you will NEVER be matched.
You can with a stop loss trigger at a value but set the price miles out (worse price) then its probably going to get matched but you cant model that in the backtest software. Changing the stoploss value in the backtest doesnt model this.
This particular strategy looks pretty good without the stoploss though. Its just a bit more of a jiggly line.
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@Martin said in The BTC Horse Racing Thread:
@John-Folan interesting what you were saying about stop losses sometimes being blown through, how far would that happen?
Depends on the race liquidity plus how quick the horse fades etc. It does happen a lot.
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@Jonathan-Jones yes
https://www.timeform.com/horse-racing/result/doncaster/2023-07-22/1945/14/4
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@Karl-Pick
Thanks,
Thought that might be the case. Its on my version of pace backs and i got one of them. Accounting for the dead heat everything matches for the weekend.
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@Jonathan-Jones said in The BTC Horse Racing Thread:
quick question.
Was the 19:45 at Doncaster on Saturday a dead heat?
Been away all weekend, looking at my PL this morning i have about half what the odds suggest i should of got.If it was the Gweedore race then YES, its popped up the last few times on my PACE backs, but not this week....SODS LAW!!
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quick question.
Was the 19:45 at Doncaster on Saturday a dead heat?
Been away all weekend, looking at my PL this morning i have about half what the odds suggest i should of got. -
@Adam The only thing I can see is their swagger docs, no forum as far as I know. I will let you know if they reach out to me again.
I do remember them having a stupidly low rate limit, I did enquire on how I could get it raised but they weren't too helpful. I thought if they seriously wanted to compete then they would sort that out, probably why the API didn't take off.
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@Toyin-Butler said in The BTC Horse Racing Thread:
@Martin I use Matchbook (API) but for small amounts right now. Its liquidity obvs not as good as Betfair but it seems ok. Next month I'm increasing size there so will be interesting to see how that goes. By the way, Smarkets told me they will be offering their API again in the future but would not give me a rough estimate as to when.
Smarkets always seems to have struggled to offer a decent API solution. I was testing their first attempt back in 2011 which was based on protocol buffers. It wasn't particularly usable. They then gave me access to their "HTTP API" in 2020, but betting was rate-limited to 1 bet per second (including adjustments to existing bets) which again is useless if you're trying to trade multiple markets programatically.
Do they still have a developer forum? I'll start keeping an eye on it again if they're planning to re-release it!
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@Toyin-Butler never handy if they aren't accepting bets is it!
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@Martin Not sure, but they had been on my case last year asking me how the integration was going. At that time I had paused work on the project, but when I went to use their service I discovered it wasn't accepting bets. I still get all the other services like account info and prices though.