Article

Case Study 1 - Back a list of horses and green up at a % offset

I have an idea of what I want to do but no idea how to do it using Excel and Cymatic in order to automate it.

This is what I want to do:

1) Back a list of horses I've selected and listed in column A of a spreadsheet, from all of the days races, sometimes several horses in the same race. I want to back the named horses at say 1 minute before the scheduled off.

2) I'd like the option to green up or trade out (free bet) for 55% offset from the back odds while the race is in-play on any of my horses that are trading low enough. Eg If I backed at 10.0 I want to lay the same horse in-play at 4.5.

That's it basically. Is this possible? Even if only one of these two things are doable that would be awesome.

http://www.cymatic.co.uk/forum/topic691.html




With this first article I will start publishing case studies of using bfexplorer features. I took the case studies from other betfair software vendor’s forums, so required features are real case studies, the users are struggling or having problems to execute. In each case study there is a link, so you can check the status of requested feature on those forums, or just compare used approaches with bfexplorer ones.

You are welcome to post your own request or a case study you find on Internet, and you would like to execute with bfexplorer.

So how to back a list of horses and green up at a % offset?

1)
You need to create instructions for your trading bot, what is the opening bet, and at what conditions it will be placed, when your bet position will be closed, and how, by placing hedging bet or NET stake.

Use My Bots and add your new bot: Place Bet and Close Selection Bet Position. Set the following parameters in the OpenBetPosition group: BetType – Back, Stake and in the CloseBetPosition group: ProfitLossType – Percentage, Profit – 55, Loss – 0 (if you do not want to close your bet in loss).

2)
To create your list of horses open races in Event Browser and in the Bet Event view, or in the Market Selections view select your horse and click on the context menu (use right mouse button click, to activate the context menu) Add market selection to Bot Executor.

After selecting your horse/s you can close market in Bet Event view, and continue with other markets/races.

3)
When you are done with creating your list of horses/selections, you can open Bot Executor for Selections view. You need to assign which bot you want to execute on each selection. Select a horse or horses, and click on the Apply Bot button, select the bot and click on OK button. Now you can start bot execution on your horses by clicking Start button. Your bot/s will be executed at set time; the default value is set to 1 minute before official race start time. You can change these parameters in the setup panel.




On Cymatic forum the user asked for another feature: Oh, and another idea that occurred to me. How can a staking plan be implemented to the above or any other spreadsheet bot?

So using bfexplorer, how you can apply a staking plan to your trading strategy?

I already wrote about it in the article: Bot Trigger – My Staking Plan (1).

The attached bot script shows how you can apply your staking plan calculation, and how to execute an action bot with the new calculated stake. In this case the used action bot is trading bot, therefore the stake parameter is: OpenBetPosition.Stake

Comments ( 4 )


  • Mir.
    12.8.2015 9:14:22

    Yes, this process is working... but user wrote in point 1) Back a list of horses I've selected and listed in column A of a spreadsheet, from all of the days races, sometimes several horses in the same race.

     

    In this solution you must select horses/Selection manually.

    That's not bad, but it's not exactly as entered.

    -------------

    Why I write about it: because we omit option with external source; like TXT, CSV, XML files - which can be shared etc.

  • Betfair Bot
    14.8.2015 13:49:10

    Miro, I think you still do not understand one big advantage of bfexplorer solution the Bot Executor for Selections offers.


    If you prepare a list of your selections then you maybe use a lot of different sources: a tipster service, a timeform web site, internet blogs of enthusiastic bettors showing good results, you can find really a lot on the Internet those days. So what you do is copy & paste horse names with race start time, as the only information to associate betfair market with your selection, you can misspell names, and do a lot of other mistakes, I know it as I built quite a lot of bespoke solutions which were loading such excel or csv files and executing some strategy with my app.


    Common mistakes were different horse names on betfair and tipster sites.


    You can prepare your list in what suits you, but as you manually open races in bfexplorer and select your horses you cannot make any mistake when entering your selections to the Bot executor.

  • Mir.
    14.8.2015 14:03:06

    I do not question the usefulness Bot Executor for Selections...

     

    There are good reasons for using bot Executor for Selections (explained in your comment) but solution it's not exactly as entered. Thats all.

     

  • Betfair Bot
    14.8.2015 15:05:29

    The solution is named: Back a list of horses and green up at a % offset, and can be fully implemented by what bfexplorer offers now.


    If the rest of befair api apps offer Excel solution as the only way how to automate betting or trading on betfair, then it really does not mean the best way, just example: Try to implement Be the first in queue bot in Excel VBA, you will certainly fail to do so, try to implement a staking plan to Excel betting, and so on.


    Excel integration uses COM to push data just one way, to the Excel, there is some speed limitation as well. If you think that Excel actually places your bets, then it is not so, the hosting app just reads the status of some Excel cells and depending on text command the hosting app executes this command. It also means that you cannot do anything beyond those commands, if you would like to extend them then you will have to ask app provider to do so, with my bots and triggers everything is open, you can actually interact with bfexplorer through your bot or bot trigger code. 


    I know that if you want to argue then you will find argument to do so for anything.