My Background
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.
In 2018 I took voluntary redundancy, leaving the company I’d worked at for well over a decade. With the luxury of redundancy money behind me, I took the opportunity to dip a toe into a few other waters, including the Betfair Exchange. Remembering my Bookmaking experience and race reading skills, I thought my best chance of successful Exchange trading would be to focus on in-running horse racing.
My Trading Journey Pre TPD Data
Fast forward six months and I was trading in-running horse races full time, making consistent profits and all thoughts of returning to any “day job” had gone. Obviously, quick decision making and reaction time is key and I was using my preferred trading platform, Bet Angel, 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.
My Trading Journey Post TPD Data
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.
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!
My Final Thoughts
The TPD data is very 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 – the technology is not currently accurate enough to be hammering the 1.01.
The data is however extremely useful in building up a data-driven picture of the race as it unfolds and to highlight value in the market mid-race. don’t expect it to give you a speed and accuracy advantage – expect it to give you a data advantage. Don’t expect it to give you a speed and accuracy advantage – expect it to give you a data advantage.