I Have a Sound Strategy, but How to Scale Up? Advice Please?

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Crazyskier
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Hi gang.

For some time I've been repeatedly told / advised by several folk on here and elsewhere to scale up my strategy as I consistently make gains race after race, albeit small ones and I've been withdrawing £50 every time I get to £300.

Today I have traded 34 horse races and 13 greyhound races and made a nett profit on every one of the 47 events. Given the fact I've been doing this almost daily for over a year, through automation and manual trading when time allows; I therefore believe my knowledge of signals and when / how to make trades is now generally sound and pays out long term (for over a year) So I'd like to take it to the next stage...

This is where you professionals that do this for meaningful money might help me, if you'd be so kind.

1) I generally work to £2 per trade liability / £250 trading bank - as I now have a £1k bank (some more races have a profit on tonight and are yet to be included in the P&L screenshot below), should I just increase my liability per trade to £3, £4 or £5?

2) On L2B trades, should I stop limiting the £2 as liability?

3) Should I target a set amount per race as I've just been refining my 'green is good' policy of late, ie taking ANY win, even if a few pennies as it's not a loss - and I am very risk-averse.

I really would like the staking advice not to interfere with the strategy and at my small stakes there are elements that go 'under the radar' in terms of being below £2 and therefore invisible on the BA / BF screen... If I increase stakes too much, they will all become visible to other users...

All advice welcomed and thanks in advance.

Regards to all, especially Peters Le and Webb and Jolly Green, LeTiss and the incomparable Dallas; all of whom (and others) are responsible for the inspiration that put me on this path last summer.

CS

CS
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Bluesky
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I'm not qualified to advise you regarding you questions CS, but I would like to congratulate you on your excellent and consistent results, and also on your discipline to stick to small stakes for a year. I think you are now confident you have a winning system and it will be interesting to hear what advise the pros on here give you.

I don't know enough about the markets to say if it will make a difference if other people or bots can see your money in the market. If you don't get any help on this aspect I would probably increase my stakes gradually, and if returns start to suffer go back to the pervious profitable ones, but try and work out why the increase in stakes damaged your returns.

I have read several posts from people who say that one can learn a great deal if one changes something and it doesn't help the strategy, as it gives one a deeper understanding of how the markets work.

If you try and think back to where you were a year ago with all this, I bet you have a much deeper understanding of the markets now than you did then.
PeterLe
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CS
Awesome to see your doing well at this, I know you worked hard at refining and distilling your strategy.
I would say don't be too hasty to increase your stakes dramatically, as we enter autumn the aw courses and markets react differently.
A few years ago I had a fully automated greyhound system and the stakes was derived from the total balance of the account.
From early march to around November the stake increased by a factor of around seven, the balance of the account went from 200 to circa 6500
I was carefully monitoring and plotting results.
Then the p&l started to drop around late November.
Now I don't know a lot about greyhound racing or if anything significant happens around this time, pulled the plug with the intention of restarting it in the spring, going back to the original small stakes. I was working on other stuff so this was just an experiment.
I carried out the various checks, standard deviation etc etc, but I couldn't rule out that maybe I'd just been lucky and entered at the right time and that things were reverting etc
Anyway, I'd say slow and steady wins the race
Keep going and keep good notes
Regards
Peter
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gazuty
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workpeter
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You've mentioned prior that you focus in early markets, and you also trade greyhounds. Both of which have limited liquidity. I assume you have limited growth scaling up your trades, so have you considered scaling horizontally? I.E. look for more markets across different exchanges etc?
Profit by a thousand cuts.
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Crazyskier
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Hi all and thanks for the considerate comments above. I'm going to try just increasing the liability per trade to £3 but still keeping the lay to liability option. When I tried not doing this, I was using £20+ to lay horses around 10s and that made my heart beat a little fast for my liking... :o
workpeter wrote:You've mentioned prior that you focus in early markets, and you also trade greyhounds. Both of which have limited liquidity. I assume you have limited growth scaling up your trades, so have you considered scaling horizontally? I.E. look for more markets across different exchanges etc?
Profit by a thousand cuts.
Now this is interesting. I've never tried Betdaq and is there another one called Smarkets? Can anyone recommend these? I know there is a (free?) BA product for Betdaq, but what about any other exchanges... This has got me thinking of how to best export what I'm doing on BF across to others.

Thanks

CS
Bluesky
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Crazyskier wrote: Now this is interesting. I've never tried Betdaq and is there another one called Smarkets?
CS
I use Smarkets a lot but this is for match betting, I like their 2% commissions. There is a thread about them on this site. I am not sure if you can use them with trading software though, not read that you can. There can be problems with them especially when things get very busy for example on a Saturday afternoon.

I have read some stuff and seen some pro videos regarding Betdaq. I think the Saturday horse racing markets can be fairly busy, but the mid week racing can suffer from low liquidity. I would imagine if your using fairly small stakes though this might not be a problem, although lack of liquidity often leads to increased volatility according to people who know what they are talking about.

It would be good if Betdaq could provide some real competition to BF but I think many horse racing traders are scared off by the lack of money being traded there mid week.
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Crazyskier
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Bluesky wrote:
Crazyskier wrote: Now this is interesting. I've never tried Betdaq and is there another one called Smarkets?
CS
I use Smarkets a lot but this is for match betting, I like their 2% commissions. There is a thread about them on this site. I am not sure if you can use them with trading software though, not read that you can. There can be problems with them especially when things get very busy for example on a Saturday afternoon.

I have read some stuff and seen some pro videos regarding Betdaq. I think the Saturday horse racing markets can be fairly busy, but the mid week racing can suffer from low liquidity. I would imagine if your using fairly small stakes though this might not be a problem, although lack of liquidity often leads to increased volatility according to people who know what they are talking about.

It would be good if Betdaq could provide some real competition to BF but I think many horse racing traders are scared off by the lack of money being traded there mid week.
I'm tempted to just keep scaling up on BF tbh. I'm not greedy and the phrase 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' comes to mind. I increased the £2 liability to £3 and the average £6 daily gain has increased to over a tenner for today, so hopefully this is a sign of things to come... if I get a consistent increase like this for a week, I may try £4 liability per trade...
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Bluesky
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Excellent set of results CS, your plan if you maintain this kind of return for a week to then increase to £4 seems very sensible to me. I hope it works well for you, you have obviously put a lot of time and energy into your system, so its good you are starting to see some reward for all that hard work.
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Crazyskier
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Bluesky wrote:Excellent set of results CS, your plan if you maintain this kind of return for a week to then increase to £4 seems very sensible to me. I hope it works well for you, you have obviously put a lot of time and energy into your system, so its good you are starting to see some reward for all that hard work.
Cheers bud. So far so good, and the increase to £4 liability seems to have given some larger wins and losses, though still 98%+ win rate per event, thankfully. I just hope it continues...

CS
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Bluesky
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Another excellent set of results, if you were to average £30 a day that all adds up over a month. I know the big hitters on the forum make far more than this on just one race, but making almost £1K per month is a very decent return.

Be careful not to accelerate things too quickly, I know you have been very disciplined so far, but it can be quite easy to get a little carried away with things once you see some decent money stating to come in. Its up to you but in your place I would probably keep it at the £4 liability level for a week or two just to see how things progress. Then if everything is going well, step it up once again.
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Crazyskier
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Bluesky wrote: Its up to you but in your place I would probably keep it at the £4 liability level for a week or two just to see how things progress. Then if everything is going well, step it up once again.
I concur, Sir. I've been very good and kept the liability to £4 all week on both the horses and doggies and it only seems to have helped in terms of profits (see today's typical 100% results below). I'm still allergic to red numbers!

I was concerned about bots 'seeing' my bets when they go above £2 as they show on the screen and I do have sometimes to wait longer for matches, rather than snatching at prices and eroding my tiny margins. Thanks for the feedback and encouragement.

Regards to all, going to get my £2 bets on for the Breeder's now and settle in for a night in front of the newly-discovered ATR channel free with Sky! Who knew! lol :D

CS
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Crazyskier
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So for anyone interested, It's now over a week later and I've been scaling to £5 liability (rather than my original £2) and the results are precisely as I'd hoped. There has been no negative impact whatsoever on the percentage of successful trades, despite increasing liability and placing bets into the market above £2 which are visible on the screen.

You can really notice the averages rising versus just 2 weeks ago when I was using £2 - £4 liabilities. Many races are approaching £2 nett return now, which was a rarity before.

I'm just hoping every week progresses as this last one has as I'm up to an average of over £12 per day from 100% automation and feeling that the risk is paying off and perhaps I should try £6 liability and beyond if it keeps scaling this well :D
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Bluesky
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Excellent results CS I think your doing the right thing with the gradual increase in liability and I hope your profits continue to increase. I am sure lots of people are interested but of all the people that will read a post on a forum only a tiny percentage, actually probably a fraction of one percent will reply.
LinusP
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Joined: Mon Jul 02, 2012 10:45 pm

+1, much rather see a p&l full of profit then a volatile one.

You looked at expanding into other markets rather than increasing liability/stake?
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