A quick summary of Cheltenham

14/03/2015 | By | Reply More

Well it’s a relief that the first big week of the year is over, but also a bit of disappointment. Today was the misery I expected and the adjustment back to run of the mill action is underway. But big meetings don’t come around that often, so love them or hate them there are not that many. 

The meeting had a lot of volume, but don’t confuse volume with liquidity they are two different things. I need to do a video on that. Overall turnover before the off was up 9.10% to £102.5m. The biggest race did £8.3m and the smallest just £1.8m. It was interesting to see the Midlands Grand National do over £2m today.

The overall theme of the week seemed to be Betfair stuffed full of money, but neither yours nor mine would fill and the occasional the price would ping off into the distance. The thread on the forum was a good place to chat during the week. When the markets behave like this it can be frustrating. I wasted a lot of time trying to get some decent scalps away on Betfair but couldn’t, but it worked (as I mentioned in my video) really well on Betdaq, in fact it was a dream! It was the first time I’d really seen it working so well on Betdaq. Both the Betfair and Betdaq API’s held up really well and that gave me the confidence to really push things a bit. Betfair had a minor blip with the market navigation on Friday for about five minutes that didn’t affect actual trading, but other than that things were humming. The only limiting factor was the underlying market behaviour and I felt I never really went for it the same I have in previous years. But I did manage to be consistent at least, even if I 

I got off to a good start on Tuesday but carried too much enthusiasm into Wednesday and flunked that, but recovered well on Thursday and obliterated Friday. Overall I managed 20 races, not all at Cheltenham, over three figures. Curiously, only two of the feature races made it into the that list, but were generally bigger numbers. 

Overall Cheltenham was a big success and I ended up 28% on last year. So my desire to actually attend the races there will have to be put on ice until at least 2017! I used a mixture of strategies and traded both Betfair and Betdaq and the effort I put into preparing for the meeting paid off. I’ve captured a ton of data and videos from the meeting, so I’ll take some time to analyse that and move things forward again now and again in a years time.

Next up, Aintree.

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Category: Horse Racing

About the Author ()

I left a good job in the consumer technology industry to go a trade on Betfair for a living way back in June 2000. I've been here ever since pushing very boundaries of what's possible on betting exchanges and loved every minute of it.

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