Getting started on the challenge

When I made the last post, I had thought I would start on the challenge straight away even though I had only €17.09 in the betting bank. Then I was trading away on the unders and of course I didn’t get greened up before the goals went in. I was working on the EUFA game between Zenit St Petersburg and Nurnberg. It was going just great. I was in and out of the market just loads of times and up to 75 minutes in the game I was greened up to a nice profit. Then the goals started……. and I ended up losing about €4.50 on the game. It was a shame really but the trading had been going so well. I made a small amount on the Elfsborg game and a reasonable amount on the Bolton game. The net result was me being down by €3.38 which if I was going by the €100 I was going to have as my starting point would have been 3 days worth of 1% approx being behind on the first day of the challenge.

Maybe it is better to wait until I have all the funds in the Betfair account so I can do a proper job of it.

Things are not so bad now as yesterday I brought the bank back to €15.79 despite having a loss on the St Pauli vs Kaiserslautern game. I went for one more go and as soon as the bet went in the market suspended and there was not much I could do to try and bring it back again. I just traded out for as small a loss as I could. The end of the day yesterday saw a profit though and now I am nearly back to my €17.09 that I had.

One of the reasons for the profit was I believe down to using some new software. I have been looking for something I can use native on my Mac. I don’t like have to start up a whole operating system just to use 1 or 2 programs in Windows via Parallels, but there was not much choice really. This software I used yesterday is BinarySoft and it is cross platform so those of you that use Windows can use it also. It is not just for the Mac. It has a super ladder interface and has a different approach to the trading. You do everything based on a percentage of the probability of it winning or losing. When I first looked at it I found it very strange and difficult to get my head around the concept. But after using it live I found it easy to use and pretty easy to understand.

The way it works is that you buy or sell a position on the market. The “binary price” is a value between 0 and 100 which is simply the percentage chance of the event occurring. As the event becomes more likely the binary price will move towards 100; as it becomes less likely the price moves towards 0. The bet will “expire” at a level of 100 if the event occurred; or at a level of 0 if it did not occur.

I like the under 2.5 goal market and what I did was to buy a position for €0.10 per point at the price of 48. When the market goes up by one point I have €o.10 of profit and if it goes down by a point I lose €o.10. It is that simple !! So the way it works is that as the odds change on Betfair getting shorter the number in BinarySoft get closer towards the 100. I found that a good way to do it in BinarySoft is to put in a sell order either manually or as a trigger on an unmatched buy order and as soon as it hits the price it greens up.

Each game varies by the amount that the market moves but there is always movement in the right direction when there are no goals being scored. I like to have things greened up by 5 or 10 minutes if I can. I will have to make a video of this in action so you can see how intuitive this process is.

I did have a loss on one game that I wanted to catch up on if I could. I was down about €4 on the other game and I used the function in BinarySoft to show me what price I need to get to make up for the loss and have a bit of profit on the game I was working on. I just entered the sell order in the ladder and let it run. the game was still at nil nil so I reckoned it would be good for it. Worked out fine anyway with me greening up to a profit of €4.34 whatever happened in the game. Not bad considering the amounts I was trading with – I had a back bet in of €5.05 at betfair odds or 1.98 and another of €0.07 at 1.81. I had two lays at 1.59 for €6.29 and the final lay of €11.96 at 1.67. I wish I could remember now the numbers from BinarySoft because it would make more sense.

What is nice about the BinarySoft way of trading is that I don’t have to adjust the size of the stake to be able to green up. It is just a simple buy low and sell high thing. I know I am waxing lyrical about this software and might seem like a sales pitch but I really was impressed. I have been trying loads of different trading softwares lately and this is the one that made me go WOW! I still have affection for BetIE, which is great for dutching of the horses especially with the LazIE added extra. BetTraderPro is good too and for Windows is the one that is good for trading if you don’t like trading binary prices. The tabbed interface of BetTraderPro is good and so are the green up facilities. I still am more impressed with BinarySoft though which also has a way of looking at more than one market.

The others that I have looked at recently have been BetExplorer which is OK but I find the choosing the markets  somewhat tedious. MarketTraderPro I found to be very interesting and priced well. It has a decent ladder interface which is easy to use, and the possibilities for the triggered betting is limited only by your imagination to come up with ideas to take money out of the market. I might consider using that more if I see better results from RacingPlace as I could roll my own triggers to do what is necessary to get the horses backed in time for the races for the day. Must not forget BetAngel which is a pro application with Pro pricing for the paid version. I have the free version and I like the green up on it.