Life in Bots-ville

Wow! I've not posted for a while. I've also not done much trading, in fact, the last trades I did were in February for the grand gain of about £6! I havn't been completely quiet though, I've been playing around with some laying systems, for a bit of a change. I'll write up the results in a forthcoming post. I know, I'm normally all about the trading, but as I've not felt like trading, why not explore other options?

Anyway, the main thrust of this post is about the world of Betfair bots, or rather, what recent events have happened to affect them. First up are the new changes that Betfair are making if you want to use data from their site or API. They've decided to apply extra data charges if you make more than 20 calls a second to their API or web site. Now, that doesn't sound too bad, but if you are trying to access multiple markets at once then it can happen.

I usually use the free API and only track one market at a time, so I'm okay, but its something to bear in mind when you're planning what you want to do at the start.

And finally... We see the death of a site/forum that has been a centre piece to bot builders for quite a while now. That site is http://www.fred77.co.uk/. It's gone! If you want a new forum, then I've set one up. Whether it'll take off, will depend if people use it. If it doesn't get used I might take it down again, but if you want a look, its at: http://thebreakthroughpartnership.com/simplemachinesforum/index.php

And finally, finally, if you are interested in building your own Betfair bot, please have a look at my eBook on the subject (hey, nothing like a self plug!). Go to: http://www.thebreakthroughpartnership.com/tradingbot/tradingbot.html

Example Graphing from Betfair data

As part of the rewrite of my eBook about building Betfair bots and using the free Betfair API, I have been creating some simple examples. One of those is a graphing example. I thought I'd post it up as a download in case anyone wants to play with it. It is somewhat raw and buggy but it was only written as an example to show how to use parts of the API. If you want to have a look, please go to: DOWNLOAD HERE and click on the "install" button. It is a windows application and when run will ask for username and password. These are your Betfair user ID and password and are used to connect to Betfair using the free API. Once you have logged on, you are shown the main window. On the left is a tree view you use to select a market and an event. Open the treeview until you find the event you want. When you have chosen through to the lowest level, a drop down list will appear at the top of the right hand pane. Use this to select a runner. As soon as a runner is picked, the simple ladder and graph will update price info every second. At the bottom of the window are some check boxes. These let you turn on or off the various graph lines. The available ones are back1-3 and lay1-3 which relate to the unmatched back and lay prices, next to that are back band and lay band. These are bollinger bands, currently set to use a 20 second moving average of matched prices. Finally there is a checkbox for matched price and moving average matched price. Next to the moving average is a box that you can enter the number of seconds the moving average is over. I hope that all made sense.

Just to repeat, this little application is not a finished, solid application, so don't be surprised if it does something funny every so often or crashes, etc.

If you want to make the graph fill more of the window, click the "hide ladder" check box. You can zoom in onto an area of the graph by holding the left button and dragging the mouse over it.

Have fun.

Some Bot Work

A bit of a bad day on the trading front. I made a mistake whilst in-play and put on a back I didn't intend and lost. Very careless.

I also got started on my graphing application. I used the Betfair API sample code that you can get from the Betfair web site as a starting point and am changing it to be compatible with the GetMarketPricesCompressed function as this can be called 60 times a minute from the Free API. I have also found an open source graphing component that does all that I require. All I now need is time to get it written. I might post it up when it is done, if anyone is interested.