Friday 17 August 2007

Using the information

When using trading software, you get a lot of potential information coming at you pretty quickly. One reason I think charts are good, is that they let you see some of that info in a picture form, that you can take in quickly. When I started to trade on horse racing, I never used to take into account anything other than the price and volume of the horse I was working with (usually the favourite). Recently I have become more interested in the relative prices between the favourite and the 2nd and 3rd favourites (if there are any) and the rest of the field. Is this something that most of you guys do? I must admit, I'm not doing any deep analysis, just yet, but I think that there may be some indicators to take account of. May be not indicators of short term price change but may be of longer term (I'm still talking last 10 minutes before the off, so by longer term I mean a few minutes rather than a few seconds) changes, e.g. price direction reversal. Just a few thoughts. Be interested to hear if any of you guys use this sort of information much.

Something else that has been on my mind is a comment that Stan left on the blog recently. He spoke about how trading/scalping on the exchanges is getting tougher and that the markets have been behaving strangely. Anyone else got any thoughts around this?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi richard--below is a comment from a trusted professional trader from another website i read alot. i have witnessed the same problems and unfortunately it is becoming a common occurance. it is making scalping so much more difficult [it has never been easy mind !!] ----------------------------------.The horseracing markets used to be more reliable on the Weight of Money Principle.In other words,if there's a lot more money on the BACK side then the horse would drift and vice versa.Unfortunately the Weight of Money no longer holds as much sway in these markets as the price jacknifes at various times in the pre-race markets.I have found it increasingly difficult over the last few weeks/months to predict which way the market is going.My stock-in-trade is to cut out of a trade if the market swings the wrong way.What happens now though is crazy.Yesterday I backed a horse at 4.2 expecting to be able to trade out around 4.0 or,at worst,4.1.The price then jacknifed straight up to 5.0 where I simply had to cut out to save stake.Imagine my horror when the horse then troughed virtually straight down to 3.65! It really has got beyond a joke now so I am looking for different angles all the time and diverting a lot more of my time to other sports that I wouldn't have ordinarily considered.---------hope this explains the problem. cheers stan.

Richard said...

The problem with trading, as I see it, no matter if it is bet exchange trading, forex trading, futures, etc, as soon as a technique, system or method is shown to be successful and becomes popular it will stop working. Most notably because it will be predictable and therefore other traders can manipulate it to make big gains. I think WOM is an example of that and has become a victim of its own success.

Mark Iverson said...

Hi Richard,

When I hear people say that trading on the exchanges is getting tougher I often think it's just that the market that has changed and they've lost their edge.

Alot of people aren't flexible and can't reinvent themselves when this happens. In my opinion, to be successful in this game you always have to be looking over your shoulder and never believe that what works for you today will work tomorrow.

All the best!

Mark

Anonymous said...

Mark--- our observation was specific to scalping the horse racing markets before the off. this has become more difficult and people or bots have evolved and i think now manipulate the market to there own ends. before you could notice the spoof bets because they would come and go and you could use this to your own advantage , but now the jack-knifing of prices happen without warning, sometimes leaving on the wrong end of some big losses. i think in the last few lines of my posting you can read that the pro- trader is adapting and looking for different angles etc !!!! cheer stan.

Mark Iverson said...

Hi sSan,

I understand your point. I tend to stay away from the Horse Racing markets because of this.

Cheers

Mark