Tuesday 31 May 2011

Phootie Alpha Live

Thought I might as well post a little update.

So my first football bot Phootie went live on the 7th May. After a few successful days testing on the 2.5 goals market,  I added the 3.5 market to the equation, and after a few more days the 1.5 & match odds markets were also included. The bot itself is relatively simple and basically seeks out value and bets accordingly in-play.

I actually felt a bit gutted as it went live just in time for all the major European football competitions to come to a close. My prior analysis indicated that Phootie's tactic would be suitable for these higher liquid competitions. Plus I always feel that the end of a season is not the best time for football betting in general, as you can't help but feel that many teams & players are not quite as keen as they would otherwise be. This makes it a bit trickier to determine true value (particularly for my simpleton bot!)

I decided to continue testing during the off season anyway, mainly to gather data as I have no data for this time of the year. It would if for nothing else give me a good indication of whether to pursue with this tactic at this time of the season in the future. Surely enough, I'm noticing a clear difference in results even with this minimal data.

I've included a graph below of just under 2000 markets Phootie decided to participate in. This is not a particularly adequate sample size, but I thought I would include it here to demonstrate the clear distinction I'm noticing. Also remember this is split unevenly between 4 differnt market types and is mostly for football during the off season, as this was when all 4 were mostly firing. It would have been better if I had started all 4 markets at the same time but I needed to test the waters for a few days as I was not sure at that time if my bot was actually going to work. The green line shows approximately when the major football competitions ended and the red my starting bank.


So even form the above data the off season is looking like a clear loser for Phootie, however I will continue with it anyway for the reasons already mentioned. My staking here is tiny and the profit or loss made is not really the main purpose. What is promising is even for that small window when the major football competitions were still running, profits were being made & the bot seemed to handle a couple of busy weekends flawlessly. I don't think I will be convinced to really go for it with Phootie though until I have a full season under my botting belt.

As mentioned previously on the blog, I do like to branch out and will continue to do so. I am now working on a horse racing bot however due to the increased sophistication required for that project, it will take some more time to get that one up and running. My programming skills are improving but the learning curve has somewhat steepened as this bot will be doing much more than Phootie. Tennis, Dogs and perhaps even Basketball also look likely to follow. I also think some different football tactics might be worth pursuing. Happy to report roboguilt has subsided and I'm looking forward to getting stuck into these projects over the next few months.

4 comments:

James Higgins said...

Thanks for you support, I will add a link to your blog.

I've not had chance to read up about your bot but I do have some Ideas that could be integrated into it, mainly entry and exit points at specific times when the markets are moving the fastest, If you would like some help developing it then I'm not a coder but I would be happy to help with entry and exits odds, I met the author of mastering betfair Pete Nordsted who showed me how to analyse the markets and I now have a spreadsheet I use in my own trading and its bizzare just how spot on the odds are.

JS said...

Hi James, thanks for the exchange. Sure I'm always up for discussing ideas. My email is ambergambler007@yahoo.co.uk. Drop me a line when you can.

James Higgins said...

Hi JS how is the bot coming along? I purchased Market Feeder and have been playing around with some ideas, I dont have anything which produces a profit at the min but if you want to combine skills and thoughts then give me a shout.

That spread sheet i sent over looks to be quite a mammoth task to produce triggers for so i have not made any attempt at automating that.

JS said...

Hi mate,

Sorry about the delay in getting back to you, I've been away for a while.

MFPro are actually annoying me a tad as version 7 should of been ready by now but keeps getting pushed back. Some functionality on that major update will allow me to fully automate my main bot, but as it stands it's a semi-auto bot and I just don't have the time to run the manual functions daily. So now I have to wait and watch the footy season start and with it all the opportunities I've been waiting all summer for until they release that update. Apart from that though I'm finding the product very versatile and solid overall, just need that damn update!

About that spreadsheet, not sure if you got my email. I basically said that I was not a fan of that tactic. The risk is not worth the reward for me. I think it's a common first tactic used by rookie traders until they get burnt. I reckon there will be a few that can profit from it longterm but I'm guessing their resources would be superior to what we have available.

Ah well I just need to be patient with MFPro I guess - rather frustrating time though for me!!

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