User Comments

For now the tennis bot supports two parameters SetScore and GameScore, only GameScore parameter is mandatory.

GameScore defines current set score. What you suggest could have more general use if we introduce on which set the game score should be applied.

So I would suggest using: PreviousSetGameScoreIndex parameter and PreviousSetGameScore parameter.

What do you think about it?

Eduardo, I do not know from which comment you started to follow that debate, but as you could maybe notice after 20 or so comments, all that was just chitchat. Why I call it chitchat? Because from what was said, I created two other articles with videos, and Ilya did not bother to comment that or mentioned it in his further debate.

My conclusions:

1) It is impossible that whenever someone from this forum will cooperate with other member to make anything which could be shared.

2) The level of understanding of the base features any betfair trader needs to manage is very poor.

3) I am sure now that right naming of essential features is very important. It is pity that on this forum there is actually no member now, who natively speaks English and would be willing to correct us all. For instance the name bot, from my understanding now it was unfortunate to call it bot, maybe order, rule, or something like that would be more appropriate. I already renamed “My Bots” view to: “My Orders/Bots to Execute”.

Eduardo, your concern was subscription level and amount of features you can buy for your subscription, but you know that it was never a problem. Whenever someone asks me for Professional subscription for an amount he/she is willing to pay or donate I did/do so, but he/she should be at least an active bfexplorer forum user.

Eduardo, I am sorry to hear that you lost some money just because you did not understand what staking plan you actually execute with your strategy and what maximal liability could be reached by your bot settings.

I think you used some of bot triggers from My Staking Plan series, describing how to program a bot trigger with a custom staking plan:

The staking plan was implemented by Eric’s requirements for his betting strategy:

If there is a loss, double my stake and add previous loss to my stake.
If there is a loss and my previous bets are in profits, then double stake only.
If there is more than 3 consecutive losses then bet with default stake. 

So the bot trigger implemented two parameters: Stake and NumberOfRecoveryBets. Depending on what betting strategy was executed, we do not know if his action bot placed back or lay bets on selected horses and at what average odds range, only he knew what could be his maximal labiality on his final bet placed at the recovery plan.

Knowing what you actually do and what could be maximal liability bet when executing any staking plan is absolutely crucial for any successful strategy.

The worst case scenario is when all goes well when testing and without aware of the risk you switch to execute your strategy with real money too soon. That is a price you paid to learn that you must test weeks and not days to test your strategy.

Here are my answers to your original question:

First of all, you already used a bot trigger with staking plan implementation, so if you wanted to add some stop criteria for your action bot, for instance when total target loss is reached then such criteria should be added to the bot trigger code.

You tried to use “Execute Till Target Profit” bot setting the bot parameter: TargetProfit to -10.0 (minus ten), hoping that such bot setting will stop your action bot execution when loss is reached.

Such settings cannot definitely work, and there 2 reasons why it cannot work.

The bot implementation works only with profit, if bot would implement target loss then you could find it in bot parameters listing, for insistence the parameter would be named: TargetLoss.

The bot checks if target profit is reached by comparing the current profit with the target parameter value. When current profit is bigger or equal to set target profit then action bot execution is stopped.

In school we learned that zero or positivity value is bigger than any negative value, right? Even minus one is bigger than minus two, therefore your bot stopped action bot execution at first execution, as 0 is bigger than -10.

I can update the bot: “Execute Till Target Profit” to work with a target loss in my next bfexplorer release.

Please translate to Spanish what it means “Entry Criteria”.

Those parameters, if set then refer to the current market ProfitBalance, so your action bot will continue its execution only if current Profit Balance on the market is greater or equal 10, that means that on this market you already placed bets and your current profit balance is >= 10.

It would be really great if you mention which bot you are using, and if you refer to some article on forum, then add link to this article.

I wonder why you do not set this parameter using the "TriggerParameters" parameter of the Execute Trigger Bot? It seems you like to overcomplicate things; otherwise I do not understand the way you think.

The script uses filePathName to save your results to CSV file. You must change the value of filePathName to reflect your computer settings, I mean existing drive and folder on your computer.

http://www.r2d3.us/visual-intro-to-machine-learning-part-1/

Delete all workspaces, exit bfexplorer and reopen it again, recreate your workspaces.

Video is from old bfexplorer, but the concept is the same.

Create in NinjaTrader new instruments and name them SEL1, SEL2, SEL3 … 

Activate/Connect External data feed in NinjaTrader.

Open a market and NinjaTrader tool in bfexplorer.

Select a market selection you want monitor, and activate Monitoring in NinjaTrader bfexplorer tool.
In NinjaTrader you will that Orders panel is populated with data, well of course if name of instrument is set to SEL1.

Now you can create a new chart in NinjaTrader.

Miro, “Trailing Stop Loss” bot had been operating correctly in my video. Maybe the name of the bot or just its parameter name: Loss is a little bit misleading. This bot actually never closes your bet position in loss, but only when your bet position can be closed in a profit, and when the biggest reached profit is reverted to lose its profit by set amount of ticks (the Loss parameter).

On my video you could see that when I executed this bot it set the target odds two ticks above the open odds, what were 3.05. Now when odds moved down the target odds was set x ticks lower depending on for how many ticks odds went down.

The Loss parameter was set to 2 ticks; those 2 ticks make a buffer zone for closing bet position. It is pity that I switched from ladders to grid view at the moment when “Trailing Stop Loss” had been triggered.

I wanted to show that bfexplorer in that moment operated with matched orders/bets and with automated orders/bots, so I showed Market Bets and Market Bots views side by side, and similar like you cancel unmatched orders/bets, you can stop automated orders/bots.

In my video I created special type of bot which used to close bet position by trailing stop loss in profit, and close selection bet position at odds. I hope you understand how this bot was constructed, and how the ladder entry was used to set odds at which the bot should close bet position in loss, it was set to 3.35.

Miro, how is the bot presented in Market Bots view when running?

It is presented as a Selection Bot, in the column Selection there is a selection name on which the bot is running. It means that Profit value is a current selection profit balance you can see as red or green value presented on close buttons, or anywhere in bfexplorer user interface (Watched Selections, Ladders, Market Selections buttons, or Bet Event selection buttons)

I believe you already figured out that if you click on green or red button/rectangle anywhere in bfexplorer, the selection bet position is hedged to this value.

There is only one bot running on market and its profit value is associated with market profit balance, the bot name is: Close Market Bet Position.

ProfitBalance parameter can be found in criteria editors as well; in these editors I will change naming convention adding Selection to the parameter name.

It would be a good idea if you post separate article if you need to discuss specific bot functionality. Discussion to this article is more chitchat than anything useful.

I think you found out that I added Comments page:

http://bfexplorer.net/Comments

And we all just read those comments without adding useful information to the theme of the original article.

Miro, I think that is a good question for Ilya, he has more experience on trading on financial markets as well, and if I am not mistaken trailing stop loss works this way on financial markets as well.

Ilya, your assumptions are wrong when thinking about betfair market and products for them. Just do your research, and you will find out that most vendors are ISV (one person “companies”, better to say enthusiasts) There are some attempts of software house/s to enter this market, with the same wrong assumption they can make big money. The same wrong assumption you have got about betfair and their R&D.

Funny enough to mention the fact that we had to pay them for api access and they used us to test new things or get them feedback for free.

Miro, I think you do not understand a concept of bfexplorer bots which offers different functionality in each of them.  To close a bet position on a selection there are:

"Close Selection Bet Position"
"Close Selection Bet Position At Odds"
"Trailing Stop Loss"

None of them repeats a functionality of another one. The last two mentioned bots could be combined to create a new bot to close bet position with set Loss, and Profit target.

Ilya, actually I am a trader, or better to say a bot operator. Eduardo and Miro know me for years, we never met but we know each other through bfexplorer. Back in 2007 I discovered betfair as a bettor, and like many others at start it was maybe a good luck but I won a good amount of money, with a novice luck it all turned wrong way couple months later.

At that time I made a good decision and did not deposit money but started to analyze what went wrong, and then I discovered there are some apps for trading and betfair offers web service to access their data.

I started to develop a program which would make me to be a trader. Betfair offered free api, with limited speed and full transactional api for which I had to pay 200 GBP per month. To cover those 200 GBP per month I released bfexplorer 6 months later after my first running app at the end of 2007.

With a new api, betfair released last year, I do not have to pay those 200 GBP for now, we will see in near future if betfair will change that. On the other hand there is a decline on betfair in every aspect.
I think you already noticed that my web site is quite different, it is more my blog, than a web site trying to sell product, therefore I have no problems, to make fun of my app, or just to discus other products, and give them a credit, if they earned it.

As I said I listen to what my users say sometimes, mainly when there are some good ideas to implement.

Miro, “Trailing Stop Loss” bot had been operating correctly in my video. Maybe the name of the bot or just its parameter name: Loss is a little bit misleading. This bot actually never closes your bet position in loss, but only when your bet position can be closed in a profit, and when the biggest reached profit is reverted to lose its profit by set amount of ticks (the Loss parameter).

On my video you could see that when I executed this bot it set the target odds two ticks above the open odds, what were 3.05. Now when odds moved down the target odds was set x ticks lower depending on for how many ticks odds went down.

The Loss parameter was set to 2 ticks; those 2 ticks make a buffer zone for closing bet position. It is pity that I switched from ladders to grid view at the moment when “Trailing Stop Loss” had been triggered.

I wanted to show that bfexplorer in that moment operated with matched orders/bets and with automated orders/bots, so I showed Market Bets and Market Bots views side by side, and similar like you cancel unmatched orders/bets, you can stop automated orders/bots.

In my video I created special type of bot which used to close bet position by trailing stop loss in profit, and close selection bet position at odds. I hope you understand how this bot was constructed, and how the ladder entry was used to set odds at which the bot should close bet position in loss, it was set to 3.35.

Miro, I did not ask you to compare ladders but automation functionality of Bfexplorer and Market Feeder. It is clear that automation is built on base logic/algorithmic blocks which operate on different entry parameters/rules.

I asked you if Market Feeder offers similar type of betting operation like “Be the first in queue” and if not, if such functionality can be implemented by triggers, what I think cannot be done by Market Feeder.

If we compare what type of strategies can be built by bfexplorer bots, and what type of strategies can be built by Market Feeder trigger rules, then Market Feeder base blocks are:

Placing bets, cancelling bets, placing offset bets (hedge bets) on selection, hedging market, and set rules triggers those actions.

With bfexplorer the base blocks are bots with specific functionality, and triggering is made by programming bot trigger, or by using those 8 construct bots…

Never mind, we can end this discussion now.

Eduardo, open bfexplorer home page, at the end of the page you can find Bfexplorer Statistics with real number of current users.

On the forum there are at the moment 3 active users, all of them free Professional users, two of them Basic subscribers, and one non subscriber who donated and were willing to post on bfexplorer forum so I gave him free Professional access as well.

The most of bfexplorer users do not even bother to post anything on forum, so I believe they found bfexplorer features useful and have no interest on any changes.

There are 3 features levels for bfexplorer. You can use free version for years the only requirement is to post on bfexplorer forum, no one uses this option.

Basic subscriber is bettor on betfair. Professional subscriber is trader, or bot operator running his/her automated betting or trading solutions. I have got 3 or 4 active professional subscribers for whom I built bespoke solutions, so applications according to their requirements.

Your problem is that you want some features which are implemented by bots, what is the feature offered only for Professional subscribers.

I work from 5 to 10 hours daily on bfexplorer or on support, so I am not able to offer anything more for free. Well, of course I use my app for my own bot strategies, so most of that time is time I spend on my own betfair research activities.

Starting from bfexplorer  1.7.5743, all “bot triggers” will be released as compiled assemblies as well.

After downloading .zip file from bfexplorer web site, do not forget to Unblock it.