When trading on Betfair on horse racing markets, Peter Webb says “profitable opportunities occur all of the time you just need to able to do something about them. You need to have the ability be able to jump in just before everybody else realises what is going on.”
How pictures can help you trade more effectively in the long run
This a picture of the favourite during a horse race, the favourite is going to post, he’s perfectly calm, the jockey has complete control. So upon seeing this picture I initiated a trade.
There are so many inputs into what the price really should be that very often it’s difficult to work out exactly what that price should be. One of the factors that you have to take account of is the horse’s demeanour. Before the racing, you can measure if the horse is going to run well if it has a strong form line but when they go to saddle up the horse and it doesn’t like it, it’s getting a bit tetchy and then there’s a problem going to post.
Therefore if you were going to put your money down on a horse that exhibited that type of behaviour you wouldn’t if you were a professional punter. A professional punter will be looking at all of those characteristics.
In this image, you will see the favourite is in front. Can you notice the difference between the two of them?
If you look at the favourite (in front), you can see that its coat is very reflective and shiny – look at the horse behind and its coat is very matt and non-reflective. The favourite is sweating, this is not normal and when a horse starts to sweat up it’s usually because it’s anxious. When you’re looking at much shorter races you want the horse to have all of its energy ready to run that particular race, you don’t really want it using an expending energy on the way to the start of the race itself.
So although it seems like a funny thing to be looking it can give you a clue in the market as to what is happening or what is going to happen next within the market. The favourite is unlikely to be backed any longer and you may actually find people come in actively lay the horse when it exhibits this sort of characteristic.
When I see something like that then I’ll lay the horse within my sports trading software with the expectation that the backing will dry up and the price may start heading out in the other direction.
If we look at the graph from the betting exchange on that particular race you can see immediately that when pictures became available everybody started laying it (or not backing it) within the sports trading software.
Derby market was pretty interesting this year. There was a very big market, the biggest market sport trading on betfair that I’ve seen for about ten years on the Derby, most of that was due to the interest in the favourite and the fact that it was that a shorter price. That tends to generate volume anyway.
EXAMPLE
The opportunity I’d like to highlight to you in this horse racing market was on Hazapour. Everything was going normally on Hazapour and then all of a sudden boom the price goes flying out. Now if you would have looked at Hazapour on the way to post here you would have noticed absolutely nothing. Of course, upon seeing the price on the betting exchange start to go rocketing out, I immediately turn my attention to the pictures again to have a look and see if I could find where Hazapour was. He was absolutely fine! There were no issues, no reason to think that the price would go out. So now it looks like a total anomaly. When you see this in the horse racing market, what you should do is, as the price starts flying out – try and catch it, right at the top. Put a couple of orders in at a speculative price near the top of that or when you see the price starting to head back in the other direction and then you trade out a much lower price.
TOP TIP:
Within Bet Angel, if you use the automation features (including advanced automation) or a servant you can actually get Bet Angel to monitor how much a price is moving and if it moves quite violently within a short period of time Bet Angel can actually alert you to the fact that that has happened. It can do that by popping up a message on your screen or you can actually get it to fire off a sound alert. I use the sound alert, it’s telling me things that are happening within the market that I’m not necessarily looking at.
If you’re in the market and something that you were trying to back is it at a low price it’s 15 – 17 and then you see it available at 30, what are you going to do? You’re going to back it, at the best available price you can. Arber’s kick in and bookmakers and people hedging it and people who can see the anomaly and then of course that brings the price all the way back down to where it was, from its extreme Heights.
This particular opportunity occurred in the Derby, completely unexpected, totally out of the blue and it does happen quite frequently. When the price spikes out unexpected like that and you can see no cause and that’s probably an opportunity to do a back to lay trade within that market.