Seriously weird in-running price volatility

[mak]

I see...
As far as i know you have there plenty of sun these days...On the contrary here we become London

mainly raining the last couple of weeks

thanks

[doris_day]

Yesterday (2nd May) was rubbish for me and I suspect it was because we'd just had two days of the Guineas meeting. I often find that after a big meeting the liquidity is poor. Its as though there are some out there who have a subconscious limit to the number of bets they can make within a fixed period and a big meeting takes precedence.

[doris_day]

Yesterday (2nd May) was rubbish for me and I suspect it was because we'd just had two days of the Guineas meeting. I often find that after a big meeting the liquidity is poor. Its as though there are some out there who have a subconscious limit to the number of bets they can make within a fixed period and a big meeting takes precedence.

[doris_day]

Yesterday (2nd May) was rubbish for me and I suspect it was because we'd just had two days of the Guineas meeting. I often find that after a big meeting the liquidity is poor. Its as though there are some out there who have a subconscious limit to the number of bets they can make within a fixed period and a big meeting takes precedence.

[doris_day]

Sorry about the multi posts but the interface said they hadnt been posted. Ce la vie

[ddaann]

I guess it is my turn now to whinge I'm doing extremely bad since about 10 days ago , my setup is the same as always but I'm just not getting matched.

[mak]

2 May rubbish for me also...

[mak]

* 2 week of may...

[doris_day]

I've been taking a close interest in the in-play horse racing markets over the past few weeks, particularly because my in-play algos have fallen over. Rather than collecting data I've been videoing an interface that can refresh very quickly and it seems to me that the volatility is being caused by what I suspected - low liquidity. Prices towards the end of a race have recently become hugely volatile, in fact inexplicably so and the reason seems to be that there is so little money around that any bet of size can completely change the market. So this is why you'll see swings from 1.5 to 20.0 and back to 2.0 and so on. Its partly cross matching but mainly the tiny amounts that are now available.
I'll go onto Swarm in a few days and download some recent data and compare it to markets I have data on a few months and a few years ago so I can quantify the differences.
But it seems that towards the latter end of the race, virtually all markets have reached a tipping point where any rules you had built into your algos now simply have broken down and don't work.
That's my take on it anyway and I'm assuming that my data collection will be able to provide the hard facts.
I think this poor liqudity is a combination of things:

1 The recesssion
2 The fact that Betfair have driven many away with high costs and poor platform stability
3 The growing perception that there are in-play users with advantageous feeds out there. Digital TV hasn't helped as the delay is enormous compared to analogue.
4 Betdaq have become a growing force
5 The 'honeymoon' newness period of Betfair is now well and truly over

All these factors (and more no doubt) have conspired to bring us to this tipping point.

Where will it end ? Time for those of us who used these markets as an income to think again and create new algos till liquidity returns (if ever). I've already done that but its getting tougher by the day !!

[ddaann]

True words, it is getting tougher and tougher in play. I was doing great in running with my algos (only involved first half of a race) for the past few years, ocassionaly tweaking formulas depending on time of the year, but it seems since BF introduced cross matching in play, things are going downhill fast for me.
December saw big freeze and only hadfull of races, yet I was doing great, probably because all liquidity concentrated in those races. Since January it was constant struggle, just not getting matched at odds I was offering. When flat racing started things picked up and was doing quite good in April. However, since begining of May it has been abmysal, probably looking at my first losing month since started with this BF malarkey. I made a sheet to monitor how much is matched every second, I don't have any previous data to compare with. Obviously it depends on length of a race, 5 furlongs race will have much more matched in begining of race than 1m4f race. Beginig of longer race looks like £50-£200 per second matched (this is actual matched amount, BF number divided by 2), going much higher toward the end of the race, £1k-£3k per second last 20-30 seconds. Evening races can have 2-3 times less or the same amount matched, I guess it depends on quality of a race.
However, since my stakes are relatively small (less than £20) it seems reasons for my woes are mixture or few factors.
Apart from amount matched it is important how much are layers/market makers offering, if they don't put enough money odds are in crazy swings.
There are more factors involved in "in running" , quality of race, how many "sharks" are operating on course , delay of TV pictures.
My best day is always Saturday, whole day not just Channel 4 races. It seems this is when all recreational players are on BF, after all, like in poker, you need those guys to make money.
As for betdaq, judging from what I read on other forums, they are mainly powered by their in house market makers, closely connected to bookies. I guess they are OK for straight punters as they offer lower commision + no premium charge. If you were to offer odds in play on betdaq, I doubt you will get matched except when odds become value for takers. Betfair is at least evil we know.

[Captain Sensible]

Personally I'd put a lot of the apparent decrease in liquidity down to the x matching, need to see figures to see if the actual liquidity has decreased but I'd imagine it probably has. The x match is a bit of a double edged sword due to the way it works.

In play horse racing markets are always likely to be inefficient which was one of the reasons the market was always going overbroke/overround on a regular basis making our lives as botters alot easier due to the fact lots of prices were out of line.

X matching has basically removed those at source so it has the knock on effect that those prices now never actually appear on screen. As the majority of punters prefer to take prices they consider generous rather than figure out what odds to offer it means there's rarely anything for them to go for especially at the business end of a race. Pre x matching plenty of decent prices appear and even though people going for them might not actually get them their bet would still show on screen and others may go for those and so on.

[doris_day]

I think you're probably quite right. However, that doesn't fully explain the sudden decrease that we've all observed over the past couple of weeks and well into the cross matching scenario.
Perhaps the cross matching engine Betfair is employing has been changed. But whatever the reason, things have certainly changed since (or close to) the Guineas meeting. My own take is a fall in liquidity. That could have been exacerbated by CM as that fires off a spiral effect.
As you say, its a double edged sword and maybe the final effect won't be as positive for Betfair as they had hoped.

[Captain Sensible]

Must admit I haven't seen any major drop in the last few weeks but then again it's not's something I'm actually looking at. Probably an amalgamation of various things plus alot of the bots that used to operate in these markets have now been made redundant with cross matching so they've probably all but switched off by now and most markets on betfair are heavily botted.

Do you log the amounts matched or just noticed a drop off in matched bets/profits?

[doris_day]

Do you log the amounts matched or just noticed a drop off in matched bets/profits?

Both, though I haven't been doing as much logging as I used to. That's why I'll take a look at the Fracsoft data and compare it to previous data I have. Its not just a simple matter of totals though because its also a matter of at what point during the race the bets were matched.

[Captain Sensible]

I think the drop in liquidity has been long overdue at the business end of the race for a while now. The TV feeds are just so far behind you need to be something special to be winning against the track & 'live' feed players. Even the internet feeds from VC are quicker than watching ATR's TV feed. Was watching a few races this week where the odds were totally out of line with what was happening, 3 seconds later you could see why.