High Frequency Trader / Betting Opportunity?

[Craig]

.
I don't fully understand this advertised trading opportunity, but I wonder if it'll be of interest to any of the successful traders on the forum who are being hit by Betfair's PC? Unfortunately, it all goes over my head:

Betfair initially introduced their Premium Charge for winning customers in 2008, to an array of criticism from their biggest winning customers. In 2011, they went further and increased the charge on profits for these customers, to 60%. In effect, this was targeted at high-end syndicates and traders as well as auto-execution algorithmic players, also known as robotic players.

Due to Betfair's dominance as the world's largest betting exchange, traders using any winning strategy to make consistently high profits, have no option but to accept their 60% 'fine'. However, more and more winning football traders are looking for other strategies and platforms away from Betfair.

Asia offers a unique opportunity for winning football / soccer betting strategies, within pre-game or in-play betting. BetRecruit has successfully introduced several Betfair Premium Charge players to Asian-facing trading platforms offering better value and unlimited winnings with no premium charge. These can be either 1x2 or Asian Handicap lines and can be manually or electronically traded.

Our clients are looking for winning traders in football betting, whether you are currently working for a bookmaker, a syndicate or from your home in your part time. These groups can offer high-speed, low latency betting platforms with comparable liquidity to Betfair across pre-game and in-play markets, 1x2 or Asian Handicap. They can also offer leveraged or credit betting and fully confidential market access.

For a completely confidential discussion on how to increase net winnings by avoiding Betfair's Premium Charge, sponsorship opportunities and/or electronic API plug ins for football betting, contact BetRecruit today.

This seems to be a general advert for successful football traders (presumably, very successful), but they also have a specific vacancy that includes racing traders:

High Frequency Trader / Betting

Job reference: HFT09024J
Location: Work from Home
Salary: £80K-£100K basic, £200K OTE
Job type: All
Sector: All
Date posted: 27/11/2012

Company

The company offers their clients access to proprietary trading platforms with aggregated, global liquidity from bookmakers and exchanges globally. This offers high liquidity with plenty of value and arbitrage opportunities, similar to platforms that exist in the financial sector. The quality, scale and speed of HFT plug ins will dictate the profit level of the project.

The Role

You will be working on a permanent full time basis, but be working from home. You will be remunerated on results but the basic pay will be guaranteed for 12 months while you begin trading. Access to all bookmaking lines will be given from day one, although no ownership over intellectual property, including statistical data, will be transferred between yourself and the company. The client will fund all trading with a limit to be agreed, so no financial risk is taken by the individual (albeit if no profit is generated, no bonus will be paid).

Candidate Requirements

Candidates must have experience of trading an automated model with high frequency execution of trades, ideally within sports such as football, horse racing, tennis or golf. The method and technology used in your modelling and plug in is not important and their technical teams will work closely with you to ensure your integration runs smoothly.

Salary

The basic salary will be paid at between £80,000 and £100,000. On a quarterly or half-yearly basis, you will be paid an agreed proportion of the gross profit over the period. Estimated total earnings are expected to be in the region of £100,000 but can be significantly more depending up the performance of your project.

If you're a proven trader paying 40%-60% PC, then perhaps there's something here for you? Good luck if there is!
.

[doris_day]

That's very interesting. Thanks for the post. There must be something in it for the company and I can only assume they're able to offer less of a take than the 40% than Betfair do. I'd be very wary however of giving them the details of my algorithm as they then have you by the balls and could charge you whatever they wanted or even worse - use your algo independently of you. Too much of a risk for me.

[gavind]

There must be something in it for the company

I couldn't agree with you more on this. Question is, which one is it?

[Craig]

.
The advertisement is on the website of betting industry recruitment firm BetRecruit. As is usual with agencies, they give no indication as to who the end client is.

I can certainly understand concern about protecting algorithms, which of course are the successful trader's livelihood, and his or her intellectual property.

Would access to trader algorithms be a realistic expectation of the end client? I can't imagine that there's a single 40%-60% PC payer on the planet who would allow a third party access to their hard-earned secrets, no matter what riches and rewards were promised.

As I indicated in my original post, I don't really understand what the opportunity actually is. My initial interpretation of it was that the end client could be one of the sports betting hedge funds, who are looking for successful traders to trade part of the hedge fund's capital, perhaps using Asian books, with a view to sharing profits — proprietary trading I think it's called. That said, I can't see where horse racing fits in with this imaginative scenario.

Where would such firms go to find their talent? It's all very well recruiting the best of the quantitative graduates from Oxbridge, Imperial College or wherever, like the City firms do, but they'd cost a fortune to train up and might still turn out to be useless. Why not do a profit-sharing deal with proven traders instead?

If the opportunity was something along these lines, then perhaps the client would expect to see absolute proof of (very) successful trading over a representative period of — at least — several years, rather than unrealistic demands to inspect algorithms?

For those few on the forum who are at the top of their profession — and are being hit with a huge exchange tax bill as a result — could it be worth making contact to at least establish what the advertised opportunity is? If they ask for access to your intellectual property, then just tell them to sling their hook.
.

[finleystep]

Has anyone managed to work out the company advertising this role? would be very interested to hear.
Thanks

[Craig]

.
I never did discover who the client was, finlaystep. Interestingly, the post — or perhaps an additional, identical post — is still being advertised: http://www.sportstradingnetwork.com/jobs/

If this is proprietary trading for a syndicate, or some such similar arrangement, then I would expect them to be permanently on the lookout for talent who can earn them money.

As an aside, the rest of that website contains some articles that might be of interest to Gruss users and forum members. Unfortunately, it's still going over my head.
.

[doris_day]

I might apply for that just to see what happens

Thanks for the up. It's a nice site with some useful stuff to read.

[doris_day]

Sent my application. Let's see what happens.

[finleystep]

Good stuff.
Look forward to hearing how you get on

[Craig]

.
Good luck with that, Doris.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
.

[doris_day]

No acknowledgement or response. In fact, perusing the site in general, I'm not convinced the jobs and 'network' is real.

[U.F.O]

Those same job's have been advertised on repeat for years now,
if they were even real to begin with, i guess they would have found there man long ago .

[finleystep]

I though perhaps it might be Gambit Research.....?

[dflowe]

Hi I used to run a very high frequency trader on betfair....and was stoped for a while so betfair could upgrade as I was slowing down the servers....I did earn from it some 20 -30 k a year yep you read it right, then bf decided to introduce the dreaded data charges.....so earnings were restricted, then the high earner charges.....still not enough profit for them, then came the (oh god I cant remember) price cross maching? and now there are very very few opertunities of over or under round that hf trading can exploit on bf so the servers and trading software is redundant. I did work with betangel for a time and peter used my servers but he now sells his own space.
If the other exchanges get more liquidity there may be some opertunities but just not yet....

[doris_day]

Yes, Betfair will kill the exchange with their extra charges. They are all based on the fact that its poorly designed. If they pushed prices the concept of data charges would be redundant.
Unless there is a sea change at Betfair we've seen the best it can offer I'm afraid. I consider myself lucky that I was involved in its heyday.