Bet Angel Founder, Investor, Entrepreneur
If you are looking to trade on Betfair seriously, this is a peak time of the year; especially every four years. This is your chance to make hay while the sun shines and it’s shining particularly strongly at the moment. Overnight there were 43 main horse races in Australia and there are another 64 races…
It’s all Impossible
When I was young, I was constantly reminded how some things were just impossible and why I shouldn’t try. I had many dreams, but a difficult start in life meant they were very, very distant. I had no mentor, guide or pa…
Imagine you are a caveman meandering through a landscape, you hear a rustle in the bush. “What’s that…?”
Your brain kicks into action and provokes a flight or fight response. It could be lunch, or it could kill you! Your primitive brain makes a really simple judgement and decides that the payoff here for ‘kill you’ is pretty bad, -100% in fact. The pay off for food is there as well, but it can’t offset the negative. So you walk …
I’m just watching the Man City vs West Ham match and West Ham have taken a ‘shock’ lead according to most sources, but how often does the away team score first?
Goals
Football is a generally low scoring contest, but not only that you …
Greyhounds markets are another good example of little and often. The average Greyhound race only turns over £15k or so per race so it’s really not a very liquid market and even then, the money arrives really late. but are very large amounts of greyhound races.
I recently revisited the Greyhounds markets after a seven-year absence. Â If you want some background as to why have a read of this blog post: –
Since revisiting the markets I’ve now …
I think it’s safe to say we all had fun watching some of the opening premier league fixtures last weekend.
While it would be nice to think the whole season will be packed full of action of this kind, with remarkable comebacks and sterling fightbacks, Â it’s unlikely.
Trading opportunities
Obviously, a notable match was the champions, Chelsea, losing at home to Burnley who struggled to muster any decent away form last year. I and a number of people picked up …
Goodwood should have been renamed Greywood at the start of the festival, such was the miserable weather that accompanied what should have been a glorious week on the Sussex downs. But it was notable for one particular day.
The weather had a huge impact on the meeting last week and produced a below par performance from me and from the markets. I’d imagine most attendees on course last week, spent most of their time hiding from the incessant rain and …
You may have seen me post up results or information along the lines of ‘If you did this with £100 you would have managed to achieve this’.
I collect and analyse a lot of data and it’s all with the aim of identifying biases and the structural nature of a market. You would be surprised how many markets exhibit biases. Some have exhibited a structural bias for my entire trading career. I’ve casually dropped hints now and again and it’s …
I’ve been meaning to summarise Ascot. It’s always worth doing as you can refer back to it next year for comparison, so here goes: –
Turnover
Betfair ended up matching, at post time, around £70.5m which was up on last year by about 23%. Last year was down quite a bit so this returns the matched bet turnover to levels that would be deemed ‘normal’.
In the run up to Ascot, I reckoned it would trade around £65m so that’s …
I did a little piece on the General election recently for Betfair. Underlying it was some work I’d looked at recently on turnout for elections.
Apathy
When the election was called the markets shifted significantly anticipating a Conservative landslide. I immediately wondered if there would be a correlation between certainty and turnout. But first I had to work out what a ‘normal’ turnout would look like.
I looked back at elections since the second world and munched through some …