Well, after pumping up my Betfair account with a few extra spare dollars (meaning, you have spare cash?....), I decided to get my hands dirty, and trade the Australian horse racing markets, backing and laying.

You need numb balls of steel, especially to trade in increments of 400 pounds, such as Adam Todd of RacingTraders.com. I was only trading minimal stakes of AUD$6.00 on favourites with low odds. Managed to make one sucessful trade of .54cents without hedging. Lost a few cents on the next trade, as it quickly went against me. I managed to trade out the position, but at a slight loss.

I then assumed that it would be possible to quickly take a loss if need be, and got cocky on the next trade. The whole idea behind Betfair and the software Bet-Trader Pro takes some getting your head around. I'm still getting comfortable with the whole process. Anyhow, I experimented with seeing how quickly I would get matched, if laying, and got the position filled somewhat quickly at 2.62. I then watched in disbelief as the market dropped away to 2.30 and stayed around this figure. I assume that if need be, I could get my order filled at this price rather quickly and left it too late (.30 seconds) before trying to close out the position with a slight loss. Unfortunately, I couldn't do this, and had to take a 9.62 loss. Ballocks! I then sat there watching the NSW TAB online results, which, sure as hell, the horse I layed won the race. Ballocks!

Oh well, we are prepared to pay for this tuition, and hopefully it all pays off in the end.

I also would like to mention that I was tracking the NSW TAB prices an comparing them with Betfair. I'm sure everyone else is doing the same thing, as well as the other bookmakers. This could be a deceptive useless method of trading, basing my trades on the NSW Tote. We will see....