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Week ending 23rd April 06

Posted by Aegist on April 24th, 2006

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Week ending 16th April 06

Posted by Aegist on April 23rd, 2006

Opening Balance = $2,533.52
Bookmakers funded = 6-7
Bookmakers Used = 5
Number of Trades = 6 (1 cancelled)
Profit = $53.92, 2.13%
Closing Balance = $2,587.44

This week saw one great 10% arb on an NHL game which basically made most of our profit. Otherwise a really quite week as SBP was often offline. Luckily we had trials with ArbitragePro and SportsPunter to keep us trading

I started to regrett narrowing our bookmakers down to only 6, because it become quickly apparent that we weren’t getting enough arbs coming through with such a narrow number of options.

Shane

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Background – The first month or two

Posted by Aegist on April 23rd, 2006

To give a quick background, I started trading with a small sum of money pulled together by 3 of my friends and myself. $1000 AUD each and we started out with about $2700 USD at the end of february 06. We placed our first arb on the 1st of March and the first month and a bit we didn’t keep very good records. We learnt to do better than that now!

Over the course of the first month and a half, obviously, we had our large learning curve. Now of everyone I have spoken to, I think my friends and I have probably been the worst arb traders ever, because I haven’t heard anyone else have this bad an opening month.

Between march 1st and April 7th we made a total of 27 trades. We had two major losses (one of $250 and one of $330), and most of the rest were minor profits. The final profit/loss of this period was -$422.49 If you ignore the two major losses, we would have made $157.51, but this is the curse of the learning curve. Making mistakes might happen to you too…although as I said, no one else I have spoken to has been as unlucky as we were

The two losses were 1. $250 bet at pinnacle lost after BetAndWin limited my second bet before I could place it. If I had my time again I would have placed the limited bet and found secondary option odds to hedge the remaining difference, but this was like my first arb…so I left it uncovered and paid the ultimate price.

The second loss was made by my friend who managed to back ‘under’ twice, instead of over and under. Stupid mistake, and I gaurantee it won’t happen again. LOL. Obviously the result was over… imagine if the result was Under… I could be telling you all how great we are at trading arbs right now because we made huindreds and hundreds of dollars in our first month!… lol. No. instead we lost both bets and ended $330 out of pocket.

Offsetting these losses were a number of deposit bonuesses, re-deposit bonusses and friend referal bonusses. We didn’t record any of these at all though, so have no track of how much we got.

The bookmakers used varied. We used a few once or twice, then pulled funds out and moved to others and back and forth as we could and needed to. At most we probably had funds in about 10 bookmakers, but we have since narrowed our bookmakers use. I will report how amny we used as each week comes. In the opening month though we did get large sums of money stuck in Carib Sports and 5Dimes. Carib sports charges a flat $10 fee to withdraw, and we had managed to get over $400 in there for like 2 weeks with no activity. We had to bite the bullet and tkae the $10 fee on withdrawal. We haven’t used Carib since simple because we dont want to deal with the withdrawal fee (thoguh they were an alrght bookmaker otherwise). 5Dimes was pretty good, but you have to withdraw money mornings to get it out for free, and we forgot to withdraw one week, so we were stuck with too much money in there for an extra week too… I am jsut saying this so you know that this will happen. Try to organise your bookmakers so that you don’t end up winning all of your bets at a bookmaker which will charge large fees to withdraw….

So anyway, that is the background leading into the now time, the more current progress that I will be recording from each week.

We leave the ‘opening period’ with a total balance of: $2533.52

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Odds And Bets 3 Day Trial Review

Posted by Aegist on April 12th, 2006

My 3 day trial of the service provider OddsAndBets started at precisely 7pm Australian EST (+10) (which was midday by the time set by OddsAndBets, so I assume they are at +3??). The interface consists of a website with very clear text descriptions of each arb. New arbs are displayed with an Orange Highlight for the duration of that refresh. The screen refreshes every 30 seconds.

Part of the trial involves having all bookmakers included. This is obviously good for seeing how many arbs their program finds, however it also means you have to sort through which arbs are relevent to you and which ones aren’t. Paying customers pay more for the inclusion of more bookmakers, however in this circumstance, it is probably better to have less bookmakers, so you know exactly when YOU have an arb and when you don’t. I only actively use 5 or so bookmakers at the moment, so I would happily use their cheapest option.

In order to change account settings you have to email them, which seems to be quite troublesome. I have emailed them simply to ask what I can change. At the moment there is no audible alarm for higher arbs, and no method of screening bookmakers you don’t want.

Watching SBP next to OddsAndBets, the arbs come up at essentially the same time (depending on refresh point, but the same refresh in anycase). SBP consistently has more arbs than OddsAndBets, although this seems to be because 1. SBP has a few more bookmakers than O&B still, and 2. because O&B does screen arbs of less than 0.3%, while SBP shows everything it finds.

I have only been looking at this website for about 2 hours now, and so far my thoughts are that it really needs an audible alarm, an easier interface with the options than email, and a pop-up menu like SBP has… that tool is invaluable. The audible alarm is great for large arbs: when you hear that, you KNOW that you want to jump on it. But having an alarm ringing constantly because you ahve set it to 1% is annoying. But having the window pop up in the lower right hand corner momentarily every minute isn’t bothersome, and allows you to know when there is an arb which you could use if you want to. This window allows you to otherwise ignore SBP while you do other things. O&B though, because it is a webbrowser window really must be on top in order for you to see whether there is an arb or not. Right now for instance, I am writing this post on it, and I have no idea whether there are any arbs on O&B or not (there could be a snooker arb or something!) while I know that SBP has no arbs in my included list that are over 1% because the window hasn’t poped up at all.

That difference is critical so far in my mind. As I continue with this trial over the next 3 days, I will write to O&B a few times, and I will ask them if they can somehow implement some sort of scripting which effects a similar result for their software as the pop-up window (Note: The pop-up window in SBP is not the traditionally hated “pop-up”, but more like the MSN messenger alert window. It slides up in the lower right hand corner and then slides away without redirecting the focus of your windows.. ie: You can keep typing while it happens without your cursor being moved…)

Shane

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	Background – The first month or two »

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