Tony 'The Badger' Hargraves makes his living as a horse racing and sports trader on Betfair. He's on the podcast to give you some pointers on how to read the market so that you can get the best available odds more often than not.

Punting Insights:

The best market indicators to help you decide when to place your bets

How he helped a professional punter manipulate the market

Why anyone using the standard Betfair interface is at a big disadvantage

The reasons why the Betfair market is a far better guide than a bookmaker

Today’s Guest:

Tony Hargraves

Betfair App directory

Bettrader Evolution from Racing Traders

Bet Angel from Gruss Software

Get the Transcript:

Dave Duffield: Welcome back to the show, Tony. It's been a couple years now since we had you on.

Tony Hargraves: Yeah, thanks Dave. Good to be back. Still over in the UK doing my thing over here on the sports and racing.

Dave Duffield: One of the reasons I wanted to get you on today was basically we always get the common question is when they should be taking odds and it's not an easy task to have that experience in how to read the markets, so I wanted to cover that with you today. The Betfair market's very closely monitored by both bookies and punters locally. We wanted to get some indications from you on how to read that market and help guys out on when to bet.

Tony Hargraves: Sure. I think that the best way I can help your listeners out is just to explain pretty clearly what it is that I do. I look at Betfair, I look at the bookmakers and I use trading software, which I find is the key component which is the difference. Some of your people might not have heard of trading software, but it's all available and connected to the API. There's several options that you've got out there, but what they do that Betfair doesn't do is you have a ladder view. What you can do is rather than just look at your normal Betfair webpage where you've got three prices either side and you don't really get any information on the page, with trading software you can convert that to a ladder view so you can pretty well see every price from $1 to $1,000.

Say you've got a horse that's trading at $3, what you can do when you look at the ladder view is it clearly shows you where the top and bottom of that horse has traded since the market opened. Say I'm looking at a horse, the top of the range might be $3.70, and the bottom of the range might be at $3.00. I can go and look at that and I can see straight away the horse is trading at $3.10 so I know instantly well that's the lowest that it's been all day, so it's at the bottom of the market. I probably don't want to back that horse at the moment because I'm getting the worst value, it's the lowest price it's been all day.

Now one of two things is going to happen. That horse will either continue to come down in price, which in that case it means people are backing it, but you're still probably better off not betting at that point because you're taking the worst value. As you know, I'm sure you've told your members, betting is all about getting the value. I would find that I'd watch that and if the price rose up to $3.60 or $3.70 I would then back the horse at that price because it's at the top of where it's traded all day. It's unlikely to go any higher and I'm assured of getting the best value.

Dave Duffield: For the Australian market, it's obviously a lot less liquid than the UK, does that make it more difficult to read or can the volatility work in your favour?

Tony Hargraves: The volatility is a lot greater than the UK markets and it can work for you as much as it can work against you. Obviously if you get on at the right time and the volatility goes with you, you'll make good money; but if it goes against you it's bad.

That's also where this software helps me greatly. I can clearly see that horse that's trading $3.70 and a bottom range of $3.00,