different types of market, open at different times.

Hi,

I am loading both football and horses into the same profile.

I don't wish to use unnecessary resource by having all of the markets switched on, before needed.

Is it possible to switch a market on at a set time before its scheduled start.

For the horses, I would like to switch the market on 30 seconds before the off, and allow my trigger to place qualifying bet 10 seconds before the off.

For football, I want to witch the market on 4 hours before the off, check for a bet, and place the bet if qualifies. If its possible, once the football bet is placed, I'd like to switch the football market off until just before kick off.

Is this possible?

Thanks

Hi
Basically you need to have some sort of refresh in order to operate in a market. I use a mixture of scheduler and triggers to set the idle refresh rate. You can also have a look at the monitoring setting: limit the number of simultaneously refreshed markets / events to x, as this will give refresh priority to markets with closest starting times.

using triggers to adjust refresh rates I would suggest something like this for your football markets (refresh rate in seconds):
set markets idle refresh to:
45 to 60 from 250mins before the off, this should give you a bet check approx. every minute
120 or thereabouts after bet placed
30 from 2.1min before the off (to catch the last 120sec refresh)
5 or whatever refresh you need from 30sec before off 

you can do something similar for your horse markets

this will certainly reduce resource usage.  

some more info here which was written before Betfair lifted the request limit, though the resource bit still applies.


    

That's great help MarkV, thanks

I do have one more question.

Using this approach, would it be safe to simply set monitoring to 5 hours before the start, from a resource viewpoint?

Thanks again.

Yes sure, I'm running triggers sometimes from 3 days before start time with a refresh rate of 900sec when things are quiet and use triggers to adjust the refresh rate according to action in the market. I think you will need to try out for yourself the optimal number of concurrently refreshing markets as it depends on all sorts of things. Oxa gave an estimated figure in these release notes and I'd say that's about right. However, depending on what you are doing in the horse markets, you may need to lower your refresh rate a lot for the football markets, and possibly reduce the number of refreshing football markets while the racing is on.

Again, thanks for your help and link to other items specific to this..

I do more question if that's OK..?

In Oxa's article, it mentions that the simultaneous market refresh should be set around 80 to 100...

I have set the simultaneous refreshed markets to 70 - and I would like to know if it would be detrimental to set it at a level below the recommended range? Could I set it to, say, 40? or even 20? - does it give priority to the earliest start times?

I am setting the monitoring at 5 hours, and I have the default refresh rate set at 60 seconds. I generally have ALL of the horses events loaded, for both win and place. My interest is around 20 seconds before the off, because I place SP bets. For the football, I will have the refresh rate set at 60 seconds.

I have not decided on this yet, but with the football, I may ask for 1 or 2 ticks better, when I place my back bet, and I would prefer the refresh to be quicker, at the time of bet placement, and continue this higher refresh rate until the bet is matched, so maybe every 5 seconds is my thinking - and, once the bet has been matched, or its say 30 minutes before the off, accept the best price and then set refresh to 120 seconds - is this a plausible approach? I suspect no more than 10 football matches to be present, maybe more on a Saturday - not yet sure how to cancel an existing bet, but I will figure that one out.

I am setting a trigger to have the horse refresh rate stay at 120 seconds, until 20 seconds before the scheduled off, then set it to 1 second, given that I am placing SP bets, I could even set this to 5 seconds. I am a little concerned if this will work, because if I have refresh every 120 seconds, will I still be able to check for 20 seconds before the off, if it has done a refresh at for example 30 seconds before the off - not allowing my 20 seconds trigger to fire? If my thinking is correct, I would appreciate any input to help me with this one.

I do have an odds range that is acceptable for the SP, whereas you can only set a minimum price on back bets, I have a 'layout' trigger if the SP value is higher than my rule, and so, if the actual_sp is within my range, I will then look to set the refresh rate to perhaps 10 seconds.

Now, here is the final question, which I am not sure about...

I am using a SAW on a couple of my strategies - and every horse for which a bet is placed, has a trigger to create an entry into a csv file in play, and when it finishes, the result is written to a further CSV file, using sel_name and sel_place, and I have an application which will read this file, and if we have a winner, the application will delete entries in the selection file, meaning MF has nothing left to bet on in that particular strategy. So, my question here is, given that the in play refresh is 1 second, and the idle refresh is set to say 120 seconds - once the market has settled, will the trigger write the entry to the file immediately, or does the refresh rate at settled become the 120 seconds?

Thanks

I think in general you will need to test this out for yourself as you will get a feel for what is the optimum refresh rate for the number of markets you are working with.

If you are active in the horse markets only in the last minute before the off, rather than loading all the days markets it would maker better sense to use the scheduler to load say the next half hour.

I don't think it will be detrimental to set simultaneous limit lower as long as you can still operate correctly with some buffer, e.g. 20 football and 1 hours worth of win and place, say 16 markets, so a limit of 40 sounds good.

When using triggers to adjust refresh rates from long to short it is good to do it in stages because you are right, if you go from 120sec to 1 sec at half minute before the off you will miss it.

Pretty sure as soon as a market status becomes "settled" any trigger which should fire on "settled" will do so. I think this is still the in-play rate, but perhaps just do a quick test trigger to write to a file when settled to test it.

The other very important resource saving setting is the default market history depth. If you don't use variables that use market history then set it to 1 or 2 minutes. See the helpfile on this setting for more info.