We are treated to plenty of good horse racing this weekend and the highlight will be the Newmarket Cambridgeshire meeting. I’ve picked off a few good Betfair trading results by from the Cambridgeshire in the past and hope to this weekend.
But I remember this race for several reasons. Big wins, a big loss and a public appearance.
The race
The Cambridgeshire is a very competitive large field handicap. It’s an impenetrable betting market, with a ton of horses competing head to head at the Newmarket Rowley mile each year. It’s a focal point at this time of year and followed by the Cesarewitch.
As with all big, competitive, quality races; the fill rate will be at the top of my mind. I’m not expecting a market-moving gamble to explode out of nowhere, but you never know nowadays! But typically the price movement will be fairly limited. From a betting perspective, it’s a high-risk race, where a winner is difficult to pick. A simply lay bet would produce a decent chance of a result as it’s tough to know who will win, but you would have to do so at high risk as prices will be big. Dutching by placing multiple bets it’s useful in this sort of market.
The structure of the race should be familiar though and if you have seen these sorts of markets before you should know if you love or hate them and roughly how you would trade it. I tend to enjoy these big races as they give me the chance to really get stuck in with some decent stakes. The problem you face of course is that there can often be large amounts of money in the system and that means you may have to wait for ages for your order to fill and that will increase the risk on your trade. But as always my prefered method will be to trade pre race on a betting exchange using trading software and that will almost certainly get me a profit.
Races like this usually produce decent results, but I will remember this race forever for a disaster I had in 2011.
Betfair outage outrage
Back in 2011, as we approached the key race of the day people started posting in the forum about performance issues with Betfair, we have a specific thread for this.
Having done well on this race in the past, I was keen to press on but should have heeded the warnings as Betfair ground to an almost complete halt during the run-up to the race and stopped completely in-play. I was left hopelessly exposed. Needless to say, the right horse didn’t win and I took a bit of a thumping. It was one of my biggest losses ever, I can’t remember exactly how much it was but it was a whopper. However, when you are a full-time trader you need to prepare for anything and while it wasn’t pleasant I dealt with it and even despite this I finished up on the week!
I went back to see if I had a screen-shot of the loss, but it looks like I didn’t archive it! Nothing like a bit of denial to overcome a thumping loss is there?
The World money show – London
However, I did find some pictures and images from the same race from other years. It turns out that during this meeting in 2006 I attended the World Money show, a financial markets exhibition to talk about trading sports on Betting exchanges. I had half-forgotten about this. I remember doing it but had no idea it was during this meeting.
It was a joy to talk positively about my experience in sports markets, it is just such a shame that this sort of thing rarely happens now.
On reflection, it appeared to be a heavy schedule of football and a big field/betting race that kicked off the crash. So I always keep an eye on these things now and will be well prepared. Hopefully, I can replicate some positive results from years prior, but this is one time I am not hoping for a repeat of a previous year, necessarily what happened in 2011!
Cambridgeshire Calamity – My worst ever loss!
We are treated to plenty of good horse racing this weekend and the highlight will be the Newmarket Cambridgeshire meeting. I’ve picked off a few good Betfair trading results by from the Cambridgeshire in the past and hope to this weekend.
But I remember this race for several reasons. Big wins, a big loss and a public appearance.
The race
The Cambridgeshire is a very competitive large field handicap. It’s an impenetrable betting market, with a ton of horses competing head to head at the Newmarket Rowley mile each year. It’s a focal point at this time of year and followed by the Cesarewitch.
As with all big, competitive, quality races; the fill rate will be at the top of my mind. I’m not expecting a market-moving gamble to explode out of nowhere, but you never know nowadays! But typically the price movement will be fairly limited. From a betting perspective, it’s a high-risk race, where a winner is difficult to pick. A simply lay bet would produce a decent chance of a result as it’s tough to know who will win, but you would have to do so at high risk as prices will be big. Dutching by placing multiple bets it’s useful in this sort of market.
The structure of the race should be familiar though and if you have seen these sorts of markets before you should know if you love or hate them and roughly how you would trade it. I tend to enjoy these big races as they give me the chance to really get stuck in with some decent stakes. The problem you face of course is that there can often be large amounts of money in the system and that means you may have to wait for ages for your order to fill and that will increase the risk on your trade. But as always my prefered method will be to trade pre race on a betting exchange using trading software and that will almost certainly get me a profit.
Races like this usually produce decent results, but I will remember this race forever for a disaster I had in 2011.
Betfair outage outrage
Back in 2011, as we approached the key race of the day people started posting in the forum about performance issues with Betfair, we have a specific thread for this.
Having done well on this race in the past, I was keen to press on but should have heeded the warnings as Betfair ground to an almost complete halt during the run-up to the race and stopped completely in-play. I was left hopelessly exposed. Needless to say, the right horse didn’t win and I took a bit of a thumping. It was one of my biggest losses ever, I can’t remember exactly how much it was but it was a whopper. However, when you are a full-time trader you need to prepare for anything and while it wasn’t pleasant I dealt with it and even despite this I finished up on the week!
I went back to see if I had a screen-shot of the loss, but it looks like I didn’t archive it! Nothing like a bit of denial to overcome a thumping loss is there?
The World money show – London
However, I did find some pictures and images from the same race from other years. It turns out that during this meeting in 2006 I attended the World Money show, a financial markets exhibition to talk about trading sports on Betting exchanges. I had half-forgotten about this. I remember doing it but had no idea it was during this meeting.
It was a joy to talk positively about my experience in sports markets, it is just such a shame that this sort of thing rarely happens now.
On reflection, it appeared to be a heavy schedule of football and a big field/betting race that kicked off the crash. So I always keep an eye on these things now and will be well prepared. Hopefully, I can replicate some positive results from years prior, but this is one time I am not hoping for a repeat of a previous year, necessarily what happened in 2011!