Hopefully not as i am really starting to have some joy but 50% of my winnings on commission?! Surely not! Thanks very much for your response, looked at a few loopholes also involving accounts. I am nowhere near 250k but hopefully one day i will be haha! Do other exchanges have such charges, i hate betdaq with a passion had my account closed after a disagreement with them but what about matchbook? Maybe PC is the reason the liquidity has improved so much on there in recent times? Have you ever used smarkets also??xitian wrote: ↑Mon May 15, 2017 1:12 pmPremium charge isn't that complicated once you spend a bit of time thinking about it and ignoring the really fine details. It's within your interests to understand it, because after all, this is your business - and people who don't understand their business' finances aren't in a great position.
Essentially, take your gross winnings for each market (before they take your base commission) and sum it up over a week. Then multiply that by 0.8 (because you'd give them 20%), and that's how much you'd take home. So if your commission paid over a week through the base rate works out as 10%, say, you end up paying the extra 10% in premium charge to make it up to 20% in total. But ultimately, it just works out as giving away 20% of your gross winnings each week (either in base or PC), as I mentioned already. The same goes for when you move into 40%, but that won't be for a while as you need to reach net £250k earned first. All this is summarised for you in a PC statement page each week.
20% isn't too bad, since it's basically the lower band of income tax, and given you don't pay tax in the first place, it sort of cancels out a benefit with a drawback for this career choice. (It would be a lot fairer if the PC free allowance were a yearly rather than lifetime thing, but hey-ho).
Paying PC shouldn't destroy an edge you have - you'll just earn less from that edge. You're only paying commission on winnings. PC has basically made it harder for people to do this for a living at the lower end. Whereas you could previously be making £30k, you'd now only be making £18-24k. However, if you're at £200k, then you'd now be on £120-160k, which is still a lot of money. So my advice is just have the drive to be better at what you're doing, and you'll be fine. It's definitely possible. In fact the sky's the limit in this business, so aim for that in the long term.
Thanks for the reply again, you're right about losing my focus and often i am quite prone to going off on tangents! I have a software for matchbook i am using to and having good success on football markets particularly on there. Always BF for horses. Are you far in your career trading?xitian wrote: ↑Mon May 15, 2017 2:30 pmI really wouldn't get too hung up about the PC right now. I know you're trying to make this work as a living and therefore doing your best to get as much out of it as possible, but at the stage you're at, you just want to work on being consistent and growing your edge/stake. As far as I am aware, Betfair is still currently the best place for that even taking PC into account. It's also not worth spending your time looking into "loopholes" since it will take away from your focus of being a good trader. You're much better off just improving yourself and earning 20% more, than faffing with evasion. Once you hit £250k and need to start thinking about the 40-60% band then you'll be much more experienced to deal with it then. That might be years down the line, so concentrate on getting there first.
I'm sure the other exchanges offer opportunities, however none of them at the moment have a great reputation for being a 'good guy', which is a shame. As far as I'm aware, only Betfair and Betdaq have trading software available.
Ah! Very interesting i have never really delved into this side of BA although i must admit it does interest me, what sort of automation do you use most often without obviously giving me your hard work lol!xitian wrote: ↑Mon May 15, 2017 3:10 pmI've been doing this for over 7 years now. Amazing how quickly it's gone. I'm purely specialised in automation though which works because I have a background in computer science. I initially started off manual trading, but decided there are far more benefits in automation.
Very clever cookie by the sounds of it! Unfortunately i am a spanner basher turned project engineer getting to terms with trading the sports i love so will never reach that level but i am succeeding at my level! Hopefully once mastered i can turn my hand to automation and experimenting!xitian wrote: ↑Mon May 15, 2017 3:20 pmBack in the day I started with dabbling in BA Excel automation, but soon moved into writing my own programs to access the Betfair API directly. This gives the ultimate flexibility, but also is more work. I mainly trade horses and football. Most of my time is spent researching, collecting data, backtesting, optimising and writing new strategies. Of course the benefit with automation is that I can be very flexible with my time.
Anyway, I don't want to send you off on another tangent. You should choose whatever area you think you'll be best at, then focus on that for quite some time before anything else.
