Standing still

No post for a while as I have been tweaking and testing new things. I have started collecting horse racing data from 8am till the very end of the race and this threw up a lot of ideas to investigate.

My data threw up an in-play system which looked like it could give me £300 in one month with no losing days. After 2 days I lost over £50 and I will not be going near in-play horse racing anymore

My 10 minute pre race bot is just about breaking even because I won't leave it alone. Every time I look at the data I can't help making tweaks. Currently I don't trade maiden stakes, beginners chases, Wolves and Southwell. I also have an idea about how the early market influences the 10 minute pre race market which I will test tomorrow

I have noticed the best days are Saturday and Sunday, followed by Monday and Friday. Tuesday to Thursday lose or break even and I am not sure why. I will continue to trade level stakes until I know why this is

I have just had some money come in so will be implementing a massey system in April too.

My goal in April will be to let the bot run untouched. I have learnt and tweaked a lot I just need to let it run now

Diversification

P&L since last update £7.74

Trading Races
7-Mar £7.14
8-Mar £4.44
9-Mar £1.66
10-Mar -£16.50

Casino bonus £15
Laying -£4

I am trialling a laying system to small stakes and this has totally captivated me. I haven't worked on my Bot at all over the last 4 days and need to get this out of my system soon.

I made the £15 playing blackjack on coral using their monthly reload bonus

As my activities start to increase I need to build a better tracking spreadsheet

After much thought and although it doesn't make sense, I have decided to implement my daily stop loss again. It will be 6x trade stake (amount risked per trade) and target will be 10x trade stake. Once I hit 4x trade stake loss I will reduce stakes by 50%. If I hit another 4 x trade stake loss at new stake then I will reduce further to 10%. Will do the same with targets as well i.e if I hit 7x will also reduce stakes by 50%. If I hit another 7x will reduce to 10%. Right now will do this manually but automating this is one of the many upgrades planned for my Bot

This has been prompted by today's loss of -£16.50. I have been on £1 loss per bet for the last two weeks which makes today's daily loss of £16.50 truly shocking. If I was on £5 stakes that would have been over £85. So even though in the long term this doesn't make sense, with a limited bank it is the only way to go.

I just need to drag myself from betting forums and building a laying system to upgrade my bot and move on to bigger stakes

Reprogramming and Backtesting day

P&L since last update -£91.87

4-Mar -£1.08
5-Mar -£109.72 (Bot failure -£113.46)
6-Mar £18.93

Grim reading above however there a lot of things I am positive about. My new bot settings mean losing days are controlled.

This weekend I was meant to completely reprogram my bot but stayed up late trying to come up with a system for laying horses. I feel a better understanding of form etc will help my trading and trading will help punting. At least I hope the impact is positive and not the other way round. I even bought a horse racing game to help this process. Once the laying analysis is completed I will get about 1 year of results from the RP site to back test.

All this meant I woke up late and just managed to set up the bot and then went to sleep. Went out with Mrs Vital to a dinner dance in the evening so didn't do much programming.

I am not 100% sure my bot won't still make mistakes so unless I am watching will be using £1 stakes. I never seem to lose on Saturdays so I may use £5 or even £10 stakes on saturdays

Today I hope to back test the impact of the early morning price movements on the last 10 minutes in the horse racing market and also reprogram the bot to be able to track prices from early morning but still only trade in the last 10 minutes.

This means instead of one workbook open with one sheet trading I will have between 2 and 5 workbooks open with up to 8 sheets trading. I will do all this using Gruss's betting assistant and excel as usual. I know my home Laptop can handle this but it remains to be seen if my 512mb ram VPS can. If not I will eventually have to upgrade the VPS but in the meantime will run bot from home Laptop. Problem with this is my Internet crashes about once or twice a week which is why I got the VPS in the first place

£100 plus cost of indecision

After a couple of stop loss issues with Gruss, I set up my bot to fire a stop loss after 5 seconds if Gruss's stop did not fire or did not get matched. This has caused me problems twice before today. First time I layed a horse and won 6 second time backed and lost 4. This was meant to be one of myfixes this weekend but it has come too late

My options were let Gruss's stop loss fire and hope to get matched in running or use just my stop loss

I was leaning towards mine but hadn't implemented. The thing is this is a really simple fix just take two digits of the gruss trigger. Daammn. A horse bot backed today, Chaninbar led to this loss. Both Gruss and my stop loss fired meaning I had a net lay and the horse duly romped home.

My bot runs a cycle every second. First it checks to see if Gruss's stop has been fired, if not a second later it cancels and then 4 seconds later it fires a stop based on my actual exposure. Somewhere within this 5 seconds something is not quite happening right so I am going to simple turn of Gruss's stop loss. Eventually I will turn off the tick offset too. The only other option is to let the stop loss and tick offset go in play but this is a little too risky

I still hope to be ahead this month and I am just happy still using relatively low stakes. There is no way I can do this without a bot as I trade all runners below 8.5, 10 minutes to the start and this weekend I am upgrading my bot to monitor and trade from 8 am in the morning all races and possibly all runners. Even if I had the free time I could not sit in front of the pc all day

So the good news is I think I can rectify the problem easily. The bad news is an additional £100 in bot errors bringing the total to nearly £1,000

P&L since last update -£26.86

I haven't posted for a while because of work and also I have been doing a lot of analysis to improve my system. Things haven't been going well on the P&L front but what has been good is I have allowed the bot to run uninterrupted.

For my current system I have been trying to improve profits by doing one or all of the following

a)Finding an indicator to enable me let trades run greater than my standard target of 7 ticks
b)Taking whatever profit is available if less than 7 ticks and if my indicator suggests the trend is weakening
c)Apply a filter to help me not enter certain losing trades - can't avoid all but the trades that do not go my way for even one tick and usually get stopped out almost immediately usually in less than a minute

The search continues but I have a few things to backtest first. I usually start by putting the indicators on a chart and just manually checking about 30 charts. If it looks good then I run a back test. I currently have quite a few in the pipeline as well as some I have discarded

I just now need to make the time to run the backtests and also to continue matched betting

Summary not happy not making money but really pleased about my discipline in letting the bot run.What has helped me is reading blogs where some people have long losing runs but stick with their systems until things turn round.

I am also pleased that I am still hopeful researching and analysing

Until next time good luck to us all

The Skinny