Don't Fall In Love!

No, I havn't gone soppy. Don't fall in love with your trades. Last night I let a loss run and it wasn't until afterwards when I was kicking myself for it that I worked out why. I had "fell in love" with the price. It took me ages to get the lay side filled. The price kept moving and I nearly had it and then when I finally had the lay matched, the price moved up a tick and I was looking for another tick when it turned back. It bounced up and down a few times and I sat staring. Finally, the price went down to the price I had managed to lay. If I was sticking to plan, I would have scratched out, but I let it run and down it went. Stupid really and I knew it, but when I thought back at how long it had taken to get the lay filled, I was kind of reluctant to end the trade for nothing and 'hoping' for a price rise. Classic newbie behaviour and something I thought I was well over and normally would be. So, that's that. Back to the mind set of getting out quickly if it looks like the vicious flaky bitch, that is the price, turns on me!

Handling the ups and downs

I love the videos that Adam Todd, from Racing Traders, puts together! That said, I only just watched the October vid called, "Betfair Trading Using Advanced Coin Flipping and Guesswork Techniques". Essentially, Adam goes through a number of races and randomly guesses which way the price is going. He then either scratches out or takes a small loss if the price is heading in the wrong direction, but lets winning trades run, taking, for example, a 10 tick profit. The essential point of the video was that it is not so important how you determine the direction you think the market is going to move, but the important bit is limiting any losses and riding any profits. This is pretty much the same point given by financial trading gurus like George Soros. Its good to see this demonstrated and commentated on in Adam's usual amusing style.

In Summary

If reading through all the betting and trading blogs that are popping up is becoming a bind, there is a blog in town that does a lot of the grunt work for you. It is called Betting Blogs and it is basically a summary of what the latest posts are around the betting/trading blogosphere.

My eBook is ready for release, yay!

Well, I've finally finished the last set of changes to my eBook about building your own betting/trading software/bot. I plan to keep adding more examples and expanding it further, but for now, I'll release what I have. So far, I have added 9 new different examples, showing how to do the following.

1. Log on to your account using the Betfair free API
   
2. Getting a list of events
   
3. Getting a list of markets and runners
   
4. Displaying market prices in a "ladder" style.
   
5. Matched price and Bollinger band graphs
   
6. Volume graphs


7. Weight of money graphs
   
8. Placing a bet
   
9. Placing a below minimum stake bet, updating bets, cancelling bets.
   

At the top of this post, there is a screen shot.

Is this a blatant ad? Yeah, I suppose so, but I'm really excited that I've got this far. It's been hard to find time to work on this and seems to have taken me bloody ages.

Support?

Wife, girlfriend, partner-in-crime, other-half, spouse, husband, boyfriend, whatever you call them, they have a big impact on our lives. I was thinking about this the other day and wondered what your other halves thought about your trading activities? Are they supportive, encouraging, uninterested or downright anti-trading? For myself, my wife kind of treats it like it is my little hobby to be tolerated, like stamp collecting or something. It's okay, unless it looks like it will interfere with something "important"! A bit less than ideal from my point of view, but I just get on with it.

GetMarketPricesCompressed

I've had a few hits on the blog from people searching for information on the betfair API function "GetMarketPricesCompressed", so I have put a post about it in the forum at: http://thebreakthroughpartnership.com/simplemachinesforum/index.php?topic=3.0

Hope that helps.