Programming for Betfair: A Guide to Creating Sports Trading Applications with API-NG

Note - Any reference within the book to the website www.betfairprotrader.co.uk should now be read as betfair-pro-trader.blogspot.com

The Betfair exchange, coupled with its API, permits a suitably skilled trader to code complex trading applications, which would not look out of place in the financial markets. This book offers a sports trader the chance to build their own trading applications, regardless of their programming ability.

Each chapter of Programming for Betfair contains snippets of code that combine to create a complete trading application. The application is geared towards horse racing but can easily be adapted to other sports on Betfair's exchange. Using Microsoft's Visual Studio (downloadable for free) the reader is shown how to code an application that will gather prices for any market on Betfair's exchange and then place bets into that market.

The reader is shown how to automate their trading so that they can remove emotion from their trades and scale up their trading for increased profits. Further development of the application permits it to save data from Betfair onto the reader's hard drive for offline analysis and visualisation in a spreadsheet for the purpose of building trading algorithms. Also covered is an enhancement of Betfair's charts so that charts can be automatically updated and compared.

The final chapter of the book discusses ideas for taking the application and the reader's skills to the next level. Topics discussed include constructing your own trading indicators, volume analysis, trend following, arbitrage, low-latency trading and many more.

James became interested in sports betting at a very early age when his father would call out to him for random numbers with which to fill out his football pools coupon.

That led James to an interest in statistics, probability theory and eventually a degree in computer science. From there he went into research and his EDDIE project became the genesis of The Centre for Computational Finance and Economic Agents at the University of Essex.

After leaving academia for The City, working at Reuters on finance related research projects, James is now a freelance consultant, quant developer and writer on sports betting markets. James sometimes blogs on www.betfairprotrader.co.uk