September 13, 2022
By James, Bet Angel and TPD Zone User.
In 2018 I took voluntary redundancy, leaving the company I’d worked at for well over a decade. In a demanding industry, my role over the years allowed me to develop quick logical thinking with an eye for data crunching and analysis. With the luxury of redundancy money behind me, I took the opportunity to dip a toe into a few other waters before I would be forced to plan my return to the daily grind.
One of these waters was betting exchange software and I plumped for Bet Angel which I’d read offered one of the best mixes of manual and automated trading tools. In my dim and distant youth, I’d worked in a bookmaker’s office and so I was exposed to a lot of horse racing. Back then I’d always felt I had a knack for picking out the likely winners whilst watching the race live on a screen, but at the time of course there was no way to profit from this skill. Remembering this I thought my best chance of successful exchange trading would be to focus on in-running rather than pre-off.
Fast forward six months and I was trading in-running horse races full time, making consistent profits and all thoughts of returning to the daily grind had gone. Obviously, quick decision making and reaction time is key and I was using simple tools on the Bet Angel ‘One-click’ screen to help me place trades as fast as possible.
Over the next few years my trading became more sophisticated, and I delved deeper into the automation side of Bet Angel to customise my trading screen with more complex data flow and trading options. Then in 2021 along came a huge shift in in-running horse trading. Bet Angel and TPD announced a tie-in which meant for the first time live GPS data could be displayed almost instantaneously along with the existing data flow on my Bet Angel ‘One-click’ screen. Suddenly I had the position, speed, distances, stride frequency and more, of every horse in the race flashing on my screen and a whole new world of data was unleashed.
At first, I used this new data only to augment my manual trading, such as checking who was jumping the most efficiently, how far back were horses off camera, and who was closing the fastest in the straight. The TPD data is powerful but should NOT solely be used with the objective of beating everyone else to 1.01 price on the winner, as it crosses the line! By enhancing the smoothing of the data using Bet Angel History Lists, highlighting value in the market became more straightforward.
I quickly realised there was also opportunity to combine the power of TPD data with Bet Angel automation, to write rules that trade automatically during the race. It won’t come as a surprise that I had to invest a significant amount of time to learn the Bet Angel software inside-out to make things work how I wanted. Don’t get me wrong this was a hard slog, but the reward is I now trade all TPD races automatically, whether I am sitting at my PC or relaxing down the pub!
