I am happy to report things have finally been falling into place the last couple of weeks. The long wait for the football season was followed by a few weeks of continuous testing and updating of triggers. Initially I wasn't happy with some of the actual functionality of my bots compared to how I wanted them to be performing, so I had to go back to the drawing board and rewrite all my triggers. Having learnt a bit along the way, my latest attempts went much better and the processes were more efficient for it.
This was actually the first weekend I felt comfortable enough to allow my football bots to run completely on their own. It was a nice feeling checking the P&L at the end of the weekend to see everything working the way it was supposed to. Part of me just wants to ramp up stakes and just let rip but I know that's not what I need to do right now. Stakes started small and are increasing proportionately to the bank, I keep a % of bank liability per market to ensure that each market can only cost me a certain amount (if for instance my bot goes on strike or BF goes down etc.).
My results this weekend are from the two football bots I'm running right now, Phootie Alpha, which I mentioned before here, and Phootie Beta. Alpha is the main earner by far, as it has been running longer and has had more time to grow it's bank and increase it's staking. Phootie Beta is a different style bot scalping small gains and aims to be more of a consistent and slow earner. It started well and mimics my scalping techniques when I first started participating in these markets in 2009. I have only been running Beta for a week, so it's early days yet, and I'll need much more of my own data to be sure it will be profitable longterm. At this stage I'm more confident about Alpha but it's not anywhere near a certainty, I keep telling myself I will need at least 10,000 results before I can start making any conclusions on any of this.
My horse racing bot is still a work in progress. I haven't really gotten my teeth stuck into it yet, mainly as I could see early on my trigger writing skills needed considerable improvements. Now the Phootie bots are up an running it will most likely be my next project. I'm also quite optimistic about a Basketball strategy I've been testing last week on the Eurobasket competition. Once the NBA kicks back in that particular strategy should be ideally suited.
