The best execution on a betting exchange
As most Betfair users will be familiar with, whenever you place a bet on any market on the Betfair exchange either directly on their website or via third party trading software. When that bet reaches the market if a better price than the one you requested (placed your bet at) is available Betfair will always try to match your bet at that price.
For example, if you place a back bet at odds of 3.50 but there is money available at 4.00 then that’s where they will begin matching your bet. This makes perfect sense, after all, why would you not want to be matched at the higher odds for a greater payout?
Likewise, when laying if you were to place a lay bet at say odds of 5.80 but odds of 5.10 are available, then Betfair will match your bet at 5.10. Again this makes perfect sense, why would you want to take on more liability when you don’t need to?
Depending on the Betfair trading strategy you are deploying at the time, there might be a good reason why you don’t want to automatically be matched at a better price, and instead, you will want to wait for your bet to be placed at a price outside the current odds and only want it matched IF the selection/runner trades or past that price.
Scenario
There are actually quite a few reasons why you might want to do use this strategy.
For example, if you are an in-running horse racing trader and want to back a horse you think has a good chance of winning but its currently priced around 4.5 in a competitive race that is yet to start – but you believe if it runs well during in the race and is in the mix near the end it will likely go onto win and therefore you want to back it – but only IF it’s odds reach 1.9 or less during the race.
Or you could be trading pre-off horse racing market and watching a few runners which are all trading within a tight trading range, but if/when one breaks out the top of it’s trading range you want to try and jump on quick and lay it to hopefully grab a swing trade or even just a few ticks of directional scalping etc.
In the image below if one or both the runners breakthrough their resistance (top of its trading range) I’m expecting it to continue drifting so want to lay it as soon as that happens, so I’ve just clicked in the two cells which I’ve highlighted on the lay sides, all I need yo do now is sit back and wait, (or look for other opportunities elsewhere), knowing if the first runner breaks out the top of its range and trades at 3.45 (or above) and/or the second runner breaks out of its range and reaches 4.8 or above a lay bet will be placed at the best price by the Bet Angel.
This way of placing a bet/trade has been possible for many years when using automation (triggered betting). But Bet Angel also gives manual traders the ability to do this type of bet/trade.
You would do this by using an innovative feature in Bet Angel called ‘Servants’. This is just one of a thousand+ tasks a servant can do for you.
You can give it a simple rule to place a back or lay bet at the price you want using the stake you want. Once the Servant is set up all you need do is point your mouse course at the price the bet is to be triggered at and push a key of your choice. With the exception of the key push it’s exactly the same as if placing a regular bet – the Servant will then monitor that selection/runner and fire the bet for you when/if that price is reached.
For in-running traders this means you can click and set your price then sit back, relax and enjoy the race, as sort of ‘Set and forget’ – with no need to then keep staring at the ladders waiting for the right time to place your bet/trade. You can of course change you mind at any time and choose a different price for the bet to be triggered at or stop the bet from being placed altogether.
Just like when placing a regular bet/trade on Bet Angel you can also make use of global settings with the servants rule to use options like offsetting, offset bet with greening and stop losses etc, but with Bet Angel you can do even more than that.
Adding Additional Conditions
As is the case with almost every feature of Bet Angel you can go much further than this.
For example, you might also want to ensure other criteria is met before the Servant is able to place the bet at your specified price. You could want to see if the favourites price has shortened by a specified number of ticks during the last few seconds/minutes, and/or the current book% meets your specified criteria. Or maybe you want to check the traded volume of the selection is increasing consistently enough over the last ‘X’ seconds (and its not just a spike from a single bet that’s caused the move).
If these or whatever condition/s you set are not all met then the bet won’t be placed for you even if the specified price is reached.
You’ll also have a speed advantage over other manual traders. Even the most alert trader will never be able to react faster than a Servant placing the bet – and that’s without looking all over the screen to see if other runners have moved, the book% is right, the recent volume is good etc etc
As you can see in the image below, the list of conditions allows you to test for almost any situation before the bet is placed for you. Ths signal and stored value options are particularly powerful as these allow you to test and check almost anything you can think of in the market, but there’s more about that in other blogs.
Creating the Servant
If you want a Servant to place bets outside the current price for you then and enable you to deploying strategies similar to those described above then you don’t even have to create it yourself because you can download and import a ready-made servant to do exactly this from the Bet Angel forum.
Once you’ve imported it into your Bet Angel you can use it as it is to quickly and easily place bets outside the current price or edit it to your own requirements including adding your own parameters and conditions etc to give you a simple but powerful tool in your arsenal to gain an advantage over other manual traders in todays markets.
