Last year I reviewed Risk Free Trader – a fresh and quite innovative way to find potentially profitable Arbitrage trades between Betfair and the bookies. When first brought to the market, this was a purely manual system and required a degree of dexterity near to race time with a keyboard, calculator/spreadsheet and your web browser. With a narrow window of opportunity that exists whilst the prices are still available it can be a rather frenetic time to ensure you get your bets matched on both the exchange and have your bet accepted at the required odds by the bookmaker to ensure your profit.
Steve Davison has now joined forces with the creator of this method and with his programming team come up with an automated method to find these arbing opportunities with relative ease.
Named Zero Risk Trader – you log into the software select UK/Irish races, select your staking requirements and if necessary a required ROI for the trade and press the Scan button. All qualifying race selections will appear with the amount of money currently available on the exchange and the current Bookmaker(s) offering the required price to maximise your return. There is also an autoscan feature whereby the software will refresh the list every few minutes keeping you up to date with any further qualifying races/selections as the markets fluctuate throughout the day. Double clicking a selection in the results window shows the detail for the selection and what the outcome will be if the horse wins, places or loses the race. As the title suggests, provided you place your stakes in accordance with the detail on the screen and get all of your stake matched at the price shown, you will not lose/ at worst, breaking even.
The software works very well indeed and takes all of the drudgery out of going through the racecards manually checking for viable arbing opportunities. You are able to change the stake values on the selection detail panel and the arbing results will change accordingly to illustrate your profitable outcome.
However, and this is no different to the comments I made in my previous review. This is arbing, and you will need to keep a number of bookie accounts along with your Betfair account regularly topped up with cash. Furthermore, the returns on the trades are of course relative to the size of the stakes you place, and with most of the opportunities being at the higher end of the odds range during my time with the software so unless you are happy betting with reasonable sums of money / a large chunk of working capital, this may not be for you. For example : placing bets of say £10/20 for a net return of £1.50 really doesn’t seem worth the effort as far as I am concerned.
One other thing to be wary of is the availability of money on the given market. Because of the way this method works, sometimes you may think a great trade has presented itself only to find that sufficient money on one side of the market is not there. Reducing your stake to match the pool of money that is there, can make you realise quite quickly that the trade is not worthwhile after all.
Here are a few examples of trades that I found using the software. You will note the Potential Betfair Liability column which shows how much money you would need in your exchange account to enable the trade.
| Betfair Price |
Bookies Odds |
Potential BetFair Liability
|
Profit
|
|
18.5
|
19
|
-£263
|
£6/£6/£0
|
|
14.5
|
17
|
-£175
|
£5/£6/£0
|
|
10.5
|
15
|
-£638
|
£62/£78/£0
|
|
3.95
|
5
|
-£342
|
£18/£40/£0
|
|
5.7
|
7
|
-£1032
|
£70/£101/£0
|
|
12
|
13
|
-£840
|
£22.5/£25/£0
|
|
11.5
|
12
|
-£512
|
£16/£16/£0
|
|
4.9
|
5
|
-£368
|
£22/£20/£0
|
|
10.5
|
13
|
-£451
|
£9.6/£16/£0
|
|
16
|
21
|
-£488
|
£40/£46/£0
|
A note of caution however, more than ever the bookmakers seem to be wiser and able to spot people using their account facilities for arbing. So, you will still need to operate with a degree of caution when flinging money about between bookmakers, (they will have the last laugh).
The software makes the task of arb selection much simpler and for those interested in getting involved at this level in playing the markets it is a valuable tool and very reasonably priced too. If you are serious about using this you should be able to make the purchase price of this back quite quickly. There are two pricing options (note: you cannot, nor realistically would you want to(!), purchase the software WITHOUT the trading strategy manual):
1) Trading Strategy Manual + Software Access for 3 months at £199.95
6 month software renewal £99.97 / 12 month renewal £139.97
2) Trading Strategy Manual only £149.95 (if you purchase this first or can offer proof of your purchase of this manual when it first came out last year- you can only purchase the 6/12 month software renewal option shown above ie. no 3 month option is available)
On the merits of the software alone, which does a great job of simplifying the tedious process of finding the trades – Approved. But with a note of caution : ensure you keep the stakes within reasonable limits and follow the suggestions for cashing out money from the bookies in the strategy manual, this will hopefully avoid the claxon sounding and an account closure email from the bookmaker winging its way to your inbox.
You can get Zero Risk Trader here:
http://www.cash-master.com/ZeroRiskTrader.php
Filed under Backing,Each Way,Horse Racing Systems,Laying by Guy
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