Just starting

cluckhead

It's definitely not easy to make money; my experience is much the same as birchy's inasmuch as the margins I achieve are laughably small - couple of hundred grand a year stakes to make a thousand pounds or so - nowhere near minimum wage when you consider the work involved. Even then I have the odd losing month, so giving up the day job isn't an option (yet ).

If you couple this with the fact that betting exchange markets are still evolving, so a method that was profitable a year ago may well be a loser today, you will see that this is just a hobby for most of us, although if you are bright and work hard at it the main cost will be time rather than hard cash.

There are two ways to make a living from botting - (1) buy shares in betfair  (2) do what gruss and stefan do, write the easy bits, put them in a slick package and sell them on - my two bob on the current flame war is that these are valid products, but using this forum to plug them is out of order. It's a DIY forum, after all - If stefan wants to contribute for the fun of it, I'm sure he could offer a lot of constructive advice; unfortunately most of his posts to date are just adverts for his framework.

denp

You are dead right, mate. I think you can classify 'systems' into two broad groups; trading (or market making) and punting (where you take a view on the 'true' price and bet to that). I'm a punter myself, because that is the challenge that captured my imagination thirty-odd years ago. As you say, punting isn't that time-critical, but cluckhead's original post talked about  "buy low sell hi etc", which I assume makes him a trader - hence my low latency advice.

I do not know who the admin of this forum is, I tried to remove all my posts and my profile from this forum. Please admin do so immediately.

-stefanbelo

That's a damn shame, i thought you were going to show us how to write some proper code?


P.S., i found out how to leave in 2 mouse clicks. It's not rocket science.

Speaking of Brendan, I haven't seen a post from him in over a month - I hope he's alright.

That is a bit of a shame stefan, your botting ideas and so on do make for interesting reading. In addition, the platform you write your bots on is a great platform, which has some real positives to it. Unfortunately it is closed to people like us who like to look at what is going on in the guts of the program. For writing pure bots, the platform you use is great.

I think most of the people here though are more interested in starting pretty much from the ground up - designing their own UI, finding their own edge, rather than building on a predefined platform which by its very nature will be limiting in some way or form. I haven't explored the platform so I can't say what those limits are, but using a platform like the one you do, unless you have quite an intimate knowledge of how it works, you are simply looking at the betfair API through a hazy window.

I can well understand that access to the rather expensive transactional API has to be regulated by business interests, but what about releasing a version which a) is somewhat open source and b) is limited to just the free API? Shouldn't be too difficult to remove the vendor ID from the code and allow people to substitute '82' instead should it?

I wouldn't want to see someone leave the forum in a huff - the idea of this place I think is to allow bot builders to share ideas after all, along with coding help and swapping information about how to get the best from the various APIs out there. Don't take off, just throttle back on pushing the one platform.

click 'edit your profile' (top right of page)
click 'manage forums' (top centre of page)
click 'leave forum'

As i said, it's not rocket science.
I guess the interesting point here is that now we've tackled Stefan over his blatant spamming, he suddenly wants to leave...so that suggests he hasn't (and never has) had any intentions of inputting anything useful. It's sad. It's very, very sad.

I'll second that austin

I'll second that austin

Find it hard to believe I posted that twice - everything went slow but I only pressed it once. Hmm.

I thought it was an intentional pun.