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Topic: I pose you all a question

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blackmagic
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50 posts
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I put this up in the wbx forum to see if there was any general interest.

I’m a programmer and have written a few bots myself, I don’t understand how people could buy one out of the box that would work and make money since the liquidity of the markets are so low.

I was thinking about offering something up that would give all the elements of a bot, i.e. market data, order manager, position placement but who’s heart(or brain) is scripted so as anyone could take the base code and write the actually trading strategies in python to actually decide what to do.

I have no idea if anything like this already exists, or if there is any really demand for this since the skill set to use it is relatively niche.

Anyone have any interest or ideas?

http://forum.wbx.com/viewtopic.php?p=341212#341212

There was absolutly none.... Which has lead me to the conclusion that the number of people that have the skill set to write a bot is minimal at best but the number of people who could wirte the logic for the strategy is even slimmer. Since the comunity here is a bit more sophisticated, do you know any estimate of how many people there are that actually do automated betting via the bf api or other any exchanges?

On a side note i met a girl in a bar who worked for betfair and i said to her (thinking she would be impressed) "yeah, i do statistical arbitrage on bf via the web api". she stopped looked at me for a bit and just said "so your a nerd?" Sadly it didnt get much better from there on... She sadly also had no idea what the ratio of people are who use the api vs. people to tele-bet and hand bet via the web site.

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03rd July 12:39 p.m.
nadat
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30 posts
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Sounds like that last sentence could have been a little shorter: "She sadly had no idea".

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03rd July 13:09 p.m.
dbowes
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11 posts
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So basically you met a girl who probably worked in a betfair call centre and tried to impress her with you statistical and programming skills...

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03rd July 13:10 p.m.
fred77
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91 posts
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I reckon a lot of people who buy bots are just buying the dream... I imagine the nitty gritty of coding a working strategy is beyond most.

Anyway, yes something like this already exists, and Stefan will be along shortly to tell you all about it :p

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03rd July 13:18 p.m.
blackmagic
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50 posts
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She was a freind of a freind so I can assume she was at least 25% legit.

She worked in the bf poker marketing department which means she spent most of her time hanging out in mote carlo with people who were your basic arms dealer types. BF makes a hell of a lot more from their poker business since I think people spend a lot more of time trying to electronically arb in poker since you can form a relative market fair value.

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03rd July 16:06 p.m.
austinpodhorzer
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70 posts
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My feeling is that anyone seriously considering writing a bot will be able to do the nitty gritty themselves anyway, or at least learn how to quite quickly.

The hard part is figuring out a winning strategy, not the nuts and bolts.

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03rd July 21:03 p.m.
blackmagic
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50 posts
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austinpodhorzer's i would have to disagree with you. I think that there are two real skill sets around writing a successful bot. You need to understand the market place and have a strategy that works by hand, but I think the the skill set to build the trading tools that allow you to take advantage of you trading ideas is completely different. After the small amount of research I have done I’ve however come to the conclusion that even a really cut down scripting engine would still be out of the reach of most people as a lot of the "bots" offered on the market only involve clicking buttons.  Its a shame that i am too lazy to even for that!!!I've also come to a separate conclusion that the extra liquidity introduced by more people using fully automated bots is beneficial to me since it will only serve to narrow the spreads that can be so efficiently exploited. 
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04th July 09:10 a.m.
myrddin
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27 posts
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Five, or even three, years ago you were probably right; writing code to interact with dynamic web pages was a specialised skill-set. Nowadays there are so many well-documented libraries and code examples kicking about it's pretty easy to hack together a working bot. (Only today, nadat has posted examples in C#, ruby and python). I have to agree with austinpodhorzer, if someone is at the stage of having viable ideas for automated strategies, they will learn the programming skills required. It's not always plain sailing, granted, but this forum, and fred's before it, are invaluable for the coding numptys among us (myself included).

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04th July 10:53 a.m.
blackmagic
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50 posts
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Thats the thing... I am thinking bigger.... much bigger.

Writing an exchange connectivity api is easy enough. I mean writing the layer in between the interface api and the strategy. Things like a MarketDataProvider so you can register for price call backs across exchanges. A decent order manager that'll maintain your book for you, make sure its up to date and give you ability to balance it for you.

Basiscally providing enought in the Api so as the person using it would have to write a maximum of one class per bot.

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04th July 15:21 p.m.
austinpodhorzer
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70 posts
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There are probably a plenty of people that have written all that stuff but keep it to themselves...

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04th July 15:33 p.m.
myrddin
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27 posts
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If it was done well, I can see people using something like that. Not sure how much they would be prepared to pay, though, and the potential market is, as you say, pretty small. One thing that makes it even smaller is the diversity of languages people use for botting - you aren't tied by the betfair end, so people use Visual Basic, C#, ruby, python, java, php (some poor sods even use perl). It would have to be blindingly good to get people to switch.
I think if you are prepared to put in a lot of work for little or no return, you could get a reasonable level of uptake for something like this (especially if you are writing the stuff anyway for your own bots). As a stand-alone commercial project, I would say it's a non-starter.

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04th July 17:34 p.m.
bmsleight
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47 posts
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As fred mentioned - Stafanbelo's website is:-
http://bfexplorer.net/

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04th July 17:42 p.m.
toy
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9 posts
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Blackmagic, imo supplying the base code for accessing the api is a good idea but I don't think there would be enough demand for it. I think the people with the strategy ideas approach people like us to actually code them. I have a partnership with an Oil Options Trader who has a fantastic understanding of the market dynamics and betting, but he would not have the time or the inclination to sit down in front of a computer and play with scripts to automate his strategies.

Btw, what was the girl like?

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09th July 11:38 a.m.
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