As some of you might have noticed we recently restarted (30th of August) the stats of the Trademate bot on the landing page. We did this as the bot was “betting out of control”, basically it did too good to be realistic. The bot does not actually place the bets at the bookmakers, but registers trades that show up in Trademate that falls within its presets as specified on the bot page. So the numbers were real, but the problem was that it started to register bets with several thousand dollars on smaller games, which would not have been possible to do in reality. Therefore we decided to reset it. With time, were sure it will perform well with time.

So we are writing this short post to give you a little better insight to the bot. As mentioned on the front page the bot is only a simulation of what results you could expect if you place the trades we suggest.

Within Trademate you can sort the leagues you can bet on into two groups, recommended leagues and all leagues. Recommended leagues only contain the biggest leagues from each country and sport, this is for the user who doesn't want to get limited quickly as it's easier to stay under the radar when you bet on bigger leagues. You can read more about staying under the radar here. Because the bot is only a simulation we let it run on all leagues. It also placed bets on all our supported sports except tennis, as this has a tendency to create high variance especially on the smaller leagues.

Another step we have done to reduce the variance both for our users and for the bot is the staking strategy known as Kelly’s criterion(link to wiki page). The Kelly criterion can have a tendency to be too aggressive that’s why we offer to place bets at both 30 and 50% of what the Kelly recommends. The bot itself places bets at 50%. Below are the stats from the previous bot before we stopped it.

Every day there are several hundred games being played and each game can have more than a hundred lines so each day at Trademate there can be hundreds to thousands of trades spread across all our bookmakers and getting them all will be impossible. This is the bot and you should use the presets in Trademate to sort out which trades you want to see.