I recently purchased a copy of the Laz-IE Trader software from Betting Profit Software. This program is an environment that facilitates profitable trading in British horse-racing markets on the Betfair.com betting exchange, both before a race and while it is running. Before committing to buy I couldn’t find any objective reviews for this so I’ve decided to write one. I have several good and bad things to say about this software so please read this piece in full to get the complete picture of my opinion.
The program costs £85 by Paypal which I feel is a fair price for what you get but although the website displays a picture of a box (as shown here) you don’t get a box, or even a CD. Having paid the money you are taken to a web page with a link to download it. However the link only downloads a small program called the BPS Viewer which then itself downloads the Laz-IE trader program. Therefore not only do I not have a CD, I don’t even have a downloaded file that I can burn to a CD myself. I really dislike this. I therefore suggest that you save the download web-link somewhere safe, and also your Paypal transaction number, so that you can obtain another copy of the software should you need it. In my case I installed it on an old Windows XP computer but decided it was too slow so installed it again on a faster Windows Vista machine (that’s why I was glad I kept the download link). The installation on Vista wasn’t immediately smooth; the software complained that it couldn’t find the file MSCOMCTL.OCX. This might be something I did wrong but fortunately with the help of Google I found a copy of that file, downloaded it, then registered it (not as simple on ultra-secure Vista as it used to be on previous versions of Windows). Many users might have to ask for help at this point. It’s interesting to me that although I provided my email address when I purchased Laz-IE Trader, I haven’t received any communication from BPS, not even a simple ‘thanks for buying our software’ email. Unlike other software vendors they haven’t indicated whether I will receive upgrades or new versions in the future.
I ended up with two new programs on my computer. The first is the BPS Viewer which seems like a proprietary web browser that downloads and displays the Laz-IE Trader manual and a few silent videos, as well as documentation relating to other BPS products. Personally I prefer to have my own copy of the manual but the viewer does permit you to print it, and if you have Acrobat as I do you can take a copy as a PDF (I subsequently discovered that this manual is freely available to everyone as a web page here). The viewer gives the first indication that the software has been written by an amateur programmer. When you first load it a box pops up saying “Please wait a few seconds while we check your registration”. However the box remains on the screen, not for a few seconds, but indefinitely until you click a button marked Close Me. I assume this is an amateur attempt to replicate a ’splash screen’ that many software packages use to show that they’re initialising, except that a splash screen automatically disappears. When this happens every time it soon becomes extremely tedious to click a Close Me button just to open the viewer.
The second program, the one you actually run to trade on Betfair, is called Bet-IE, which can be purchased separately for £97. The Laz-IE trader appears to be just a component or module added to Bet-IE. The documentation states that some of the functionality in Bet-IE has been disabled in the cheaper Laz-IE Trader but I couldn’t see this. All the buttons on my version of Bet-IE seem to work. You start the program in the usual way by double-clicking on a desktop icon or selecting from the start menu and it displays, yes you’ve guessed it, a box asking me to wait “while we check your registration” and the only way to dismiss this is to click a Close Me button. It’s as if they sat down and said: “How can we really irritate people who use this software?”
The first step in using the program is to load the list of betting markets from Betfair. So you click on a Load Markets link and guess what happens…..yes that’s right! A box pops up saying “Please wait while we load the Market Data”. That would be fair enough except that the box stays there. After ten minutes it’s still there and you can’t continue until it goes. The only way to to dismiss it is to click its OK button. But wait: while the box is displayed it doesn’t actually load the market data at all. The data only starts loading after you’ve clicked OK! Aaarrrrggghhh!
Having loaded the markets list you choose the market you want in the usual way. Laz-IE Trader works with UK horse racing (win markets) only. Clicking a race displays a grid containing price data for each runner, which looks familiar to existing Betfair users. Unlike the Betfair website though these prices aren’t automatically updated. To enable the automatic updating of the market prices you need to switch it on, and you do this by clicking a red button labelled Market OFF. Yes, that’s right, to turn on updates you click the off button. Having done this the button’s colour changes to green and its caption to Market ON. I’ve never previously encountered a system or machine anywhere where you press a red OFF button to turn it on and a green ON button to switch it off. It is annoying, and counter-intuitive features like this lead me to conclude that the software was written by a young or very inexperienced programmer, possibly a teenager in his bedroom. Not only have they not read the Microsoft style guide for designing Windows interfaces, they haven’t even stopped to think about what would work best. The program is littered with puzzling anomalies like this. For example if you want to cancel all unmatched bets you click the Cancel UnMatched tickbox. But why is it a tickbox? A tick doesn’t appear when you click it. It should be a button. Tickboxes are meant for flagging entries in a list not executing a command.
Despite these criticisms a lot of work has clearly gone into this program and notwithstanding its infuriating user interface it does seem to work as the programmer intended. It uses the Betfair API to communicate market data and trades with Betfair’s servers and my trades were all submitted into the market and matched (or unmatched) in around a second or two (although the screen updates are tantalisingly suspended while the bet is processed so you have to wait to see how the market moved while the bet was being matched). The trading revolves around a ‘Volume of Money’ percentage figure that appears to display the ratio between the current lay odds and the ’tissue’ lay odds predicted by the BPS people. When this percentage exceeds 100% a colour change highlights the runner as a possible candidate for a back/lay trade. Another key feature is a Weight of Money bar to the left of each runner which shows at a glance the comparative amount of back and lay money waiting to be matched. This is very useful. When you think conditions are right you can submit with one click a back or lay bet for a preset amount into the market. Then, watching as the price lengthens or shortens, another click will either submit the opposing lay or back bet for the same stake, or for a calculated stake that ensures a profit regardless of which horse wins (assuming the market moved in your favour of course!). There’s also a LazIE Bet button that will submit back and lay bets with a preset number of ticks between them which I have used effectively Note that this is not a system, it is a tool. It requires the user’s judgement to decide when to open and close positions so no two Laz-IE Trader users will achieve the same profit or loss. I suspect that some people are natural traders whereas others are not, and the only way to find out is to try it.
This brings me to another feature of Laz-IE trader for which the author is to be commended. The software has a learning mode so we can practise trading without risking any money. In learning mode the program behaves exactly as it would with live trading with the (not unreasonable) proviso that it doesn’t check the volume of money available before matching a bet so if I submit a virtual bet for £100 at odds of 2.8 it will show it as matched if any money was available in the market at those odds, even if it was less than £100. This isn’t really a problem and the opportunity to gain confidence by trading without risk is a really nice touch.
So how do you trade? Well this is where the manual comes in. It’s a 55 page book that’s packed with information. I read it through completely three times to make sure I ‘got’ all the concepts. I could be unkind and point out that whoever wrote it (it’s unclear but might be someone named ‘Dave’) didn’t excel in English at school. The punctuation is all over the place, apostrophes are abused, and sentences run into each other without a full-stop in sight. Despite that, let us be clear that whoever wrote this manual knows what they’re talking about and deserves to be taken seriously. I know from personal experience that an illustrated manual like this cannot be thrown together in a few hours. It will have taken days of work to describe the many real-life scenarios in this manual and the writer appears to know their subject. I would urge anyone who buys Laz-IE Trader to read the manual carefully before risking any money.
So does it work? Well yes it does. It requires concentration and patience. You cannot walk up to the computer, place a couple of bets, and walk away. Like so many things in life I suspect that trading with a tool like this becomes easier and produces better results the more you repeatedly practise. Use the learning mode to begin with. Sometimes it seems as if the market is conspiring against you and every time you open a position the market suddenly moves the ‘wrong’ way. But little by little the losing trades become fewer and the winning trades become more. After using the learning mode for a while I started trading with minimal stakes. There’s no substitute for trading with real money, no matter how little, for keeping focussed and getting a buzz of excitement. If you study the example at the top of this piece you’ll see that while trading in just £5 units I backed Shared Edge at odds of 3.85 and laid it at 3.0, backed Ever Cheerful at 8.2 and laid it at 7.2, and backed Ardent Prince at 9.2 and laid it at 8.8. The result was a race where I couldn’t fail to make a profit.
In the event Suhayl Star won, an outcome I could never have predicted, but the nice thing about trading is that you don’t care which horse wins. You focus on creating a profit regardless of the outcome. So in that example I won only £1.41 on the race but since it was a guaranteed profit, not a gamble, and since my maximum risk at any time was only a fiver that is a very satisfactory result. Scale it up to a more realistic £50 risk and I’d have made a £14.10 profit for about five minutes’ work.
There are a few things I’d like to change. I wish the software made it more obvious when a race was actually running. There were several times when I was concentrating so much on a trade that I failed to notice that the pre-race market had been suspended and was now running. The race header does change from counting down to the scheduled start time into the word ‘running’ but it’s easy to miss this. I’d also like the stop-loss facility to be simpler and more intuitive to use. Many of my losses have arisen purely because the market moved against me and I was too slow to close an unprofitable situation.
In conclusion I recommend this program. Since it depends upon input from BPS’s servers every time I run it I have no idea how long they’ll remain in business or if one day I go to use it and find it no longer works. In that sense you never really buy the software, merely rent it for an indeterminate period. I’m slightly sceptical about the benefit of the Laz-IE Trader ‘Volume of Money’ percentage and alerts as an indicator of trading opportunities; sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. But using the weight of money graph and an instinct that comes with repeatedly trading I think it’s possible to return a profit on nearly all races if you work with concentration and discipline. I’ve never been interested in video games but I think trading with Laz-IE Trader could easily become addictive. If you have the time to sit at a computer through the afternoon, are reasonably numerate, and have the patience to read the manual and learn the concepts, this software is definitely worth a try.
Update on 22nd March 2009: After another weekend of using this program my confidence has grown. I have traded 26 races this weekend (22 on Sat and 4 on Sun). Only three races were losers for me, and they were early on Saturday when I made careless mistakes because I was ‘rusty’. Was I lucky? Only time will tell. However the last twenty races have all returned a profit and that is either very lucky or this trading really does work. The most important thing to remember is that you don’t have to trade. If I lock in a profit before the race starts I have tended to leave it and move on to the next. If, as in a few cases, I still have an open position at the off then I can usually trade the natural volatility of the market during a race (as long as it’s not a 6 furlong ‘quickie’) to return a guaranteed profit. I certainly wouldn’t claim that you can profit from every race but providing you balance the natural instincts of fear and greed in a calm manner I’m pretty sure this program does allow you to make an overall profit from Betfair trading.
Update on 28th March 2009: I’m definitely getting the hang of this trading using Laz-IE Trader now. I traded 17 races today, one at a small loss (once again, early in the day when I was rusty after a busy working week), then 16 profitable races. I can only reiterate that it seems to be a clear knack, and once you get ‘in the zone’, focussing on the markets and sticking with it until you make a profit, it becomes, not exactly easy, but stimulating and fun. I’ve tended to start on a race about 8 or 10 minutes before the off, focus on the favourite or second favourite where most of the volatility is, and when I’ve locked in a profit of a few pounds I leave it and move on, even if there are still several minutes remaining before the start. That way, if things move against me (as they did several times) I’ve got a chance to recover my loss and turn it into a profit. You really should give this a try!
I have written twice before (on 21st February 2009 and 24th December 2006) about downloading BBC Radio programmes as MP3 files so that they can be saved for personal listening at a later date. The trouble is, the Beeb keep changing the way their Listen Again service works so the methods I described no longer work all the time. Even since my post of a month ago the source code of the iPlayer has been amended for some programmes so that we cannot see the name of the .RAM file to download. The method described below works but it is tedious to obtain the required download link. The only good news on this is that the link is static for regular programmes (at least until the BBC changes something) so I can load the links into Audio Hijack Pro on my iMac for example and it will download several Radio 4 programmes automatically week after week without further intervention.
and hit the Return key. Within a second or so WGET will download the file that contains the real URL of the program you want. In the case of this example the file is named RadioBridge_uk_1415_bbc_radio_fourfm.ram and is just 189 bytes in size. Open that file using a text editor (e.g. Windows Notepad or OS/X TextEdit), not using RealPlayer which will probably be the default application for a file of that type. You will see, as shown here, that the file contains the real URL of the Real Audio stream using the rtsp (Real Time Streaming Protocol).
I reproduce below an excerpt from Steve Haywood’s book Narrowboat Dreams (Summersdale Publishers Ltd, 2008). The book is a lighthearted description of a journey by inland waterway from Banbury, Oxfordshire to Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. The start of chapter four nicely encapsulates what, for me, is the attraction of owning a narrowboat: