Category: Horse Racing
One Bank Holiday you may want to trade
Bank holidays can be a bit of mare. Four billions horses, racing over a thousand meetings.
OK, A slight exaggeration there, but you get the picture. Too much racing, too many courses, not enough quality and everything falling over itself.
But today that actually isn’t the case for once. We have 392 runners and they are spread of 42 races, but remarkably the card is lined up perfectly. That means, even allowing for later starts, it’s unlikely that any races …
York Dante Metting
After a successful Chester meeting we roll onto York for the Dante meeting this week.
The York card looks OK but the other stuff on the card today looks a little ‘testing’. For a direct comparison look at the prize money. Bath has a grand total of £19.5k, York £185k. I’ll be cautious and use small stakes at Kempton as a result,
As we move through the early part of the flat turf season, the early part of the week …
Chester May Festival
Chester May festival starts today and it’s a welcome addition to the card, but based upon previous years it’s nothing amazing from a trading viewpoint.
Obviously we all love some extra liquidity that the quality racing will bring, but it’s never been a meeting that I’ve got really good amounts from. By that I mean I’m not banging in three figure results a race. Just the odd one or two a day. The thing to note about Chester is its …
May Bank holiday racing
So that’s the Guineas parked for another year. I did OK, but didn’t get as much as I would have liked from the feature races, I just can’t get my orders filled quickly enough. But it was a satisfactory result. Over the two days I produced remarkably similar results. So 10/10 for consistency but maybe a bit less for the overall results.
Another public holidays means a whole bundle of racing on the card, often too much. If you have …
Trading the Newmarket Guineas meeting
The weather is looking mixed this weekend for the first real big trading market of the flat season, the Guineas. I’ve always enjoyed the Guineas meeting and have had some fun and game over the years on it.
Last year on the 2000 Guineas I bagged a decent total from the race. The market reached over £4m in turnover but tomorrow I think it will be down a bit. This is mainly due to the market dynamics and the fact …
Trading early season flat racing
With Aintree out of the way we are now in the transition to the full flat racing season and evening racing.
The seasonal transition from one code to another can present problems if you bet and trade with the same style throughout the year, so it’s worth exploring what is different about this time of year.
The first thing to note is that the late season jumps racing has been suffering more than normal this year. A dry April and …
Punchestown Festival
The Punchestown Festival this week is a good opportunity to get tucked into some good quality Irish racing.
The jumps finale offers a decent prize fund and total prize money today is £283,000, versus one tenth of that on the UK meetings.
Irish racing is much weaker than UK racing typically, doing about half of what you expect on a UK race, but the good quality stuff can produce decent volume. So it always worth a look. The Punchestown festival …
Best of a bad job
Well that was an interesting day. I knew it was going to be a case of doing the best I could in tricky circumstances. Despite being tired it all worked out roughly in the end. But it didn’t feel like a successful day!
First up, the run-away leader in the US Masters made this a particularly tricky Masters this year around. I wanted a record result, I desperately wanted to break a four figure sum but it looks like that …
How to win every year on the Grand National
So the Grand National is upon us and that monumental task faces us again, picking a winner from 40 runners. Worse than that, all our friends will want a tip as well.
Picking the winner from this incomprehensible field is a bit of a nightmare. There are some common trends that are touted each year. Horses that haven’t won over three miles are generally not considered, as are horses with no experience of large fields. Positives are age, experience, proven …
The flat is back
While playing Football World Cup in the desert may not be a great ideal, running the world’s richest race is!
This weekend we have two key events in the racing calendar , the highest profile being the Dubai World Cup in Meydan. Here is another sports event I will make the effort to attend some day. For the moment, I’m still sat behind my monitor taking an active interest in it from the other side. The racecourse was designed to …
Could the General election change racing forever?
A fair few years ago I started visiting the houses of parliament.
I wasn’t looking to be an MP I just wanted to follow the passage of the new Gambling Bill through parliament and the committee stage. I learnt a lot about politics, lobbying, MP’s, party whips and the legislative process. The biggest thing I learnt was it was largely a pointless exercise. All the discussion, cross checking and diligence went out the window when the bill was guillotined thanks …
Cheltenham festival – On the other side of the fence
Sometimes, enjoying the sport you normally trade can be just as must fun! Dave gives us an insight to his experience of a day at Cheltenham…..
As many of you know, my health has been an issue for many years now. I wake up every morning and within 30 seconds I know if it is going to be a struggle or if I can be okay. I rarely get a good, or what many call a normal day, so I …
A quick summary of Cheltenham
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 …
Cheltenham update
A quick update on how the week is going so far. Today, Thursday, is trading well so far.
Willie floor the bookies?
Oh, Cheltenham is here, The weather is great it’s all looking good for a great week.
The first day of the Cheltenham Festival is upon us and the excitement is building to bursting point; well it is for me!
Tuesday has become something of a bookie bashing mission for a certain Willie Mullins, the extremely shrewd and talented trainer from Ireland. The old adage “if the favourite wins the bookmaker loses” has never been more appropriate than on the opening …
Trading Cheltenham
This year I’ve decided to upload a video to narrate some of the stats and detail behind how Cheltenham trades. It seems much easier to express and emphasise points and show a number of things on a video that you can’t do in text. So I’ve created the longest video yet and uploaded it for you!
For those of you that want the text I’ve prepared a long document for you here. It should be of interest one way or …
Cheltenham Beckons….
OK, we are almost there now. We are just a stones throw from Cheltenham and I’m deep into research how previous years traded, all the stats, videos, charts and anything that can refresh my mind on previous years.
I’ve produced this video for you to give you my initial thoughts ahead of the Festival. Another video will follow with more detailed analysis.
Automated trading on Betfair – Profiting from a steamer
When a horse starts getting backed, people will often pile into the gamble and the price will steam in. You can benefit from this, using Bet Angel’s automation tools…
One of the best trades to pick up on in a horse racing market is a jolly good ‘steamer’. That is horse racing parlance for a horse who keeps on getting backed and backed, the opposite to a ‘drifter’. There can be any number of reasons for this to happen …
The new kid on the block
It’s not often you get a new kid on the block but this week we have.
Well sort of new. In April 2008 a new racecourse opened, the first completely new racecourse sine Taunton in 1927! It didn’t last long however and the following January it went into administration. It is now being re-incarnated as Chelmsford City and it’s first races are today.
Having another all weather course will probably help the industry, especially as this is in the south, …
The day somebody with £1k caused a £600m error
Three years ago today we were treated to a day of spectacular proportions. It seems to have slipped into the history books a bit so I thought I would reprise it for your enjoyment and delight.
On this this day at the Christmas hurdle at Leopardstown something went very, very wrong. Voler La Vedette ran home to take that race, but for most of the race £21m was available to back at good odds. Nobody it seemed was able to …
Boxing day
So we are at Christmas and the sports schedule in the UK thinned out into the run up to Christmas day. Everything, apart from your wallet probably, took a break. Now it’s back with a bang on Boxing day.
Last year, even with two meetings abandoned there were still a total of 11 race meetings in the UK and Ireland and a total of 720 runners over 72 races! This year we face a total of 79 races, 24 of …
Hennessy Gold Cup – One of my favourite races
I have fond memories of the Hennessy Gold Cup. I’ve traditionally done well at this race and its the race I traded live at the IX Investor show for Betfair in 2006.
Seeing a betting company at an financial investment show was a shock for many people and lots couldn’t understand why we were there, so we had real trouble getting people to come near the stand.
This was when I rolled up my sleeves and traded live for everybody. …
Cheltenham Open meeting
At last, some quality comes back into the jumps season!
With the Cheltenham open this weekend we can look forward to the fact that the festival is only four months away! Hey, you need something to look forward to during the, often bleak, winter season.
The Open is a useful meeting and volumes will be higher than normal so it’s an opportunity to get tucked into some decent markets. This isn’t like the Festival though so you shouldn’t get wildly …
Melbourne Cup meeting – Day three
I was going to post up a breakdown of the big day, but the unfortunate circumstances surrounding the post race period put paid to that. Couldn’t bring myself to post enthusiastically about proceedings given that. In case you don’t know what happened the BBC has detailed the unfortunate set of circumstances.
From a trading perspective things went pretty well. I don’t expect to set records on every major race meeting now, due to the time I’ve been in the …
Melbourne Cup Meeting
Me and the Melbourne cup go back a few years now. Many moons ago I got interested in the ‘race that stops a nation’ and learned that it really did stop the nation, they have a national holiday today.
So, intrigued, I got up at 4am one dark winter Tuesday to see what all the fuss was about. Nothing really happened apart from a lack of sleep and I returned to bed disappointed. Back then I had converted have the …
Laying in the sand – Part two – Santa Anita
So, following on from my trip to Ireland to see Laytown races, I’m now in California and literally laying in the sand.
There are a range of reasons for that, but Santa Anita was another item off the bucket list. I’ve put a load of photos on our Facebook page if you want to see Santa Anita without the crowds.
I always enjoy California. Plenty to do for everybody, the weather is always fantastic and LA bay has miles of …
Fingers at the ready
After some below par racing recently, we explode into a smorgasbord of quality today. Though in typical racing fashion we have five cards on this afternoon!
Top of the list is Newmarket where prize money totals £668k over 7 races. The return of Cheltenham sees a more modest £67k for their seven races. But the presence of both should make for a decent afternoon of action.
Haydock and Redcar chip in with some lower grade action but some of that …
Traders of the Prix De L’Arc
Once a year I will taste some French racing like a connoisseur tastes French wine, with a sense of appreciation but with the gusto of a true enthusiast.
I don’t tend to trade on Sunday’s, or on French racing; but the richest race in Europe always draws my attention as it and the companion races are nearly always an opportunity. Most of the surrounding card in the UK is not the greatest quality, so I’ll tend to do some other …
Salisbury
Whenever I see Salisbury on the card it reminds me of a document that Betfair published many moons ago.
I saw Salisbury on the card today and the same bell rang in my head, but also a bit of alarm at the two and three runner races on the card! How poor is that? But back to the main topic.
Back in 2004 Betfair issued a document that actually clearly laid out what a market looked like. In the document …
Part timer
I’m back onto Betfair markets properly today. I’m currently taking the opportunity to enjoy the late summer sun. I had my first round of golf for a few years this morning! Having worked hard during the busier periods of the year, I can skip the quieter days at the moment without remotely denting my yearly performance much. Though I did take a look at the champions league last night.
I also nipped in on Sunday to have a pop at …
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