Little and often – On Greyhounds
Greyhounds markets are another good example of little and often. The average Greyhound race only turns over £15k or so per race so it’s really not a very liquid market. Even then, the money arrives really late. but there are very large amounts of greyhound races.
I recently revisited the Greyhounds markets after a seven-year absence. If you want some background as to why, have a read of this blog post: –
Since revisiting the markets I’ve now traded nearly 13,000 of them. Initially, I traded them manually to piece together what were going to be my key trading components. Since then I’ve gradually refined and automated the activity further and further and I’m happy to just leave it to its own devices now. I expect to periodically revisit it to further refine it, but I’ve hit the limit of what I can do short term.
The key to these markets, apart from what I have listed in the previous blog post, is the volume of them. You don’t need to do much in the market to generate a useful profit on the day, week and month. You just have to be slightly positive to make a difference. If you can find a half decent strategy and match that with a semi decent strike rate you will most likely be up on the deal at the end of the day having marched through 100 or so races.
I’d pretty much-dismissed Greyhounds as viable a few years ago because of the low return. But thanks to automation, streaming and Betfair dropping data usage charges, I’m glad I spent the effort this summer to revisit them.
Not only is it making a useful contribution, I’ve learnt something new again. I reckon the things I’ve picked up on this summer could probably be transplanted to other lower liquidity markets. The honest truth is, that I had probably forgotten what illiquid markets looked like and how to trade them.
Onwards and upwards!
Category: Trading strategies
Hi, Is your greyhound automation run through bet angel via excel or do you use the automation function within Bet Angel or another coding method altogether ?
It’s all done through the automation area.
If you had to guess , how many hours of your time would you say that you have had to invest to get your greyhound bot to where it is today ?
I originally did it ages ago but abandoned it because of the data charges and low returns. But when I returned to it earlier this year I almost hit the nail on the head first time thanks to that prior experience but I’ve tweaked and tweaked since then so I’m version 27 now. It’s difficult to tell just how much time I’ve spent on it, but including the first attempt. I’ve probably fiddled on and off for about 18 months.