That was the best way i could describe it.

I am looking in to trends in the betfair market.

I am trying to work out what i make of a horse that has had a stack of money traded on it, relative to the overall total traded in the field.

A $2 pop commonly has 80%+ of the total traded in the race. Does this mean we can read in to anything? Is it the backers getting stuck in to it, or is it the layers laying the thing flat out? There would of course be some doing a bit of both i admit.

I kept track of a few today (i know its aaaaaa-all), and noticed when a favoured horse had been traded on heavily but still remained a 'good' price (ie 3.50+) it was beaten and perhaps the layers were controlling that price, hence a lot of layers vying to get first in the queue.

The problem seemingly lies in the fact that laying a horse everybody wants to lay and backing the ones that everybody else wants to back leaves you with empty pockets long term.

I would like to hear others views on this, and if anyone has investigated further.

Long term i would like to work on some sort of formula to take advantage of these 'trends' if in fact they do exist.

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All generalizations are dangerous.

This is an interest of mine also but moreso from a trading aspect. The things I've discovered so far is that just using the weight or money, or prices matched on a horse, is not the best. The reason is that there are lots of "mugs" out there and people who follow the crowd because they think it means someone knows something different. The things is everybody has different ideas on what factors mean what when picking winners so this is flawed...but it does sometimes create times when heaps of people get in and chase the price up/down (and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy - if enough punters get back a horse then the need outweighs the supply and the price starts firming, thus "proving" their original thoughts were right that everyone knows something about this horse)

The best thing to think about when analysing a market is to go against the crowd. Generally if a price is chased up/down a few ticks from the "expected" price it will generally correct itself. The hard part is knowing which are actual firmers (where need is always outstripping demand) and which are just bouncing around due to misinformed punters.

I like to use WOM as an indicator but that's all it is - an indicator. It's not a sole factor to look at. Some other things to look at are:

• Price trends over time (10+ mins) - check out the BF graphs or record what prices are doing. If you see one that has firmed consistently then will more than likely continue on that trend
• Trends of other horses (especiall 2-4th favs) - if one horse is going to firm/drift then others generally have to compensate for this change
• Book% - very important when weighing these things up. Further form 100 the harder it becomes to pick why prices are changing

Well thats a start. Hope something in there helped!

Thanks for the input goty.

i will take it all on board and test a few things out.

I am hoping to send a bot out in to the uK markets each night and potentially lay or trade but i will test first at very low stakes.

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All generalizations are dangerous.