Loadsamoney

28/08/2016 | By | Reply More

I made a post on social media this week about an article that appeared in the Financial Times. I didn’t realise at the time of posting, that in the background there was a mention of a sizeable position then went through the market at Royal Ascot.

I only realised this, when people started questioning it shortly after the post. Asking how it was possible put £125k through a market?

Ordinary or extraordinary?

This wasn’t an ordinary market, though, this was Royal Ascot and by any measure arrested Royal Ascot is not ordinary. You would naturally expect to have a chance of a big turnover race at a big meeting. However, it is perfectly possible to put large amounts through any market, it’s just a question of scale. During the big meetings, you can rack up some big stakes.

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But typically you tend to run with much smaller numbers apart from the feature races. On Saturday evening at Windsor I managed to put through £40,000 on the feature race , but much less on some of the other markets. But the key to all of this it is may be several trades, rather than just one. £40k could be 16 lots of £2.5k, and also not all of it could be traded profitably. You will be interested to know the Betfair site struggles with numbers over £100k 🙂

You tend to find that as you push the limits of what you can do, you often start a trade dump it, then start again. The try again, again and hopefully get what you are looking for or perhaps just never find it and end up putting a lot through but with little profit.

The key, for me at least, is trying to establish a sensible position in the market at reasonable risk. I’m trying to profit with the minimum downside possible. If I put a position in the market, I’ll put it if I don’t like it.

The most common result for me in a market is probably somewhere around £0-10! That just reflects that I try something, then exit because it didn’t work or the risk changed.

What’s the limit?

I never have any idea how much money I am putting into a market at any one point in time. I never look, never guess and never aim for a certain amount. All I’m trying to do is do the best trade possible and, typically, use the largest amount possible in any one trade. That is achieved by starting with a certain stake, then increasing it as I get more confident about the trade. If I am not confident then the stake never goes up and I may dump the position.

My focus is, and always will be the risk I’m taking on the actual trade. I don’t tie that to an amount of money. You can take more risk with £50 in the wrong market than £50k in the right market. That said I am always concerned about my exit so getting out is probably the most important thing to me. I need to safely exit, so the upper stake always reflects the underlying liquidity in the market. If there is loads of money in the market I feel safe using larger stakes. So that’s why I tend to put high volume through higher quality races.

I explained some of my thoughts in a video, which you can view here: –

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Category: Horse Racing, Trading strategies

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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