Friday 20 January 2017

Turning Worms

A busy day for the blog yesterday with a year high 2k visitors stopping by, a figure boosted by one reader who let me know via Twitter that he is reading the blog from start to finish.

A few comments, starting with this one from James, who wrote:
Excellent post. How long before the first irate fan boy turns up to defend their masters?
It's rather bold of Caan to be asking his readership which car he should buy with their money.
Imagine a mugger asking his victim if he should buy an iPhone or an iPad with the contents of their wallet.
No wonder Caan doesn't sell his wares through Amazon. Instead, opting to sell only through his website with no chance of a refund through PayPal, if the PDF or video turns out not to be up to scratch.
All to be expected from a pair of characters who started their careers in sales and marketing and appear not to have left it.
Bet Angel is decent enough software for manual trading (whilst such activity lasts), although Advanced Cymatic Trader is just as good but much cheaper. I just wish Webby would stop making out that it's a money printing machine that anyone can operate, which it plainly isn't.
Caan is just the sports trading equivalent of Jordan Belfort, a motivational speaker and nothing else. His blog posts are vacuous and often semi-literate, which probably hits the right level for his readership.
Yours,
Sidney James. Somewhere Up The Khyber Pass. Fworrrr! Nyah. Nyah. Nyah!
I actually thought that Caan started his 'career' in the Army, followed by a spell with BT as a fibre optic engineer, and support for that opinion comes from the second comment from ProTrader2017 who not only knows his way around trading software but is also highly amusing and well worth a read. i wish I'd written it myself:
Some wit from James, what's the world coming too!
I was discussing the various Betfair 'pros' with a fellow trader recently and we both came to the conclusion they all seem to be aligned as 'star strikers' for the various software sellers. Hard to know if this is by design or just one of those quirks that each team's striker is also representative of the team they support ;)
Adam Heathcote set the community, and BetAngel fortunes?, alight with his rise to fame and fortune but then disappeared after the failure of Exchange Secrets, possibly too secret that nobody fell for it. Was Adam too 'wet' to represent BetAngel, had just played his part or taking the limelight from the owner? Either way it left an opening up front for the happy go lucky and reliable balding uncle Peter to fill the position. Peter likes to play on his stable financial background and regales us of his business meetings in the USA possibly aiming for a more discerning crowd. Every now and then we get the odd (shill?) poster no longer satisfied with his fortune as a stock market trader and asks if his skills would be transferable as a sports trader.
As if he even needed to ask, of course the answer is a big YES from me, and me, and me, as the forum eggs him on to even greater riches and freedom.
The 'Wimbledon' of the trading world seems to be the maverick GeeksToy squad who aim for a completely different demographic relying mainly on ex-army 'grunt' Caan Berry as their main striker. Ain't got no education, just works and plays hard to reap those rewards of fancy cars and flash holidays. All backed up by fancy websites and once only offers of free geekstoy subscriptions with every ebook. Hard to imagine Caan coding and setting up a website but I suppose if the club owner is a web programmer it's not that hard. Geekstoy also have a reserve striker in the form of little known Jack Birhead who also regales us of fancy holidays in Barcelona from his grans bedsit somewhere ooop north.
Lower down the divisions we have the once mighty Racing Traders whose fortunes have dwindled and now have to rely on the 'abilities' of the straight talking aussie 'The Badger', so good he even has his own nickname. And finally the relegation fodder, Gruss, whose star striker AintItaRightMugsGame is an ex Betangel player, obviously not good enough to make the first team and passed to Gruss on a free transfer. Luckily for ItsAMug his council estate in Coventry is in the Midlands where the Gruss founders are conveniently based so he can always pop around to borrow a cup of sugar if there's ever a lull in the activity on the busy Gruss Forum.
On a side note I just noticed not everyone is swallowing the hype and someone's pointed out a lot of old 'sleeper' shill? accounts have come out to cheer on the team in this hour of need.
"by SeaHorseRacing » Fri Jan 20, 2017 11:42 am
This thread is turning into a wakening of the dead. :lol:
Some old timers back it appears?"

Well I never, have the worms finally turned?
Brilliant stuff. 

If ProTrader2017 doesn't have his own blog but would like to contribute to this one from time to time, he's very welcome.

A couple of comments on the above, first and foremost, balding is a sign of maturity and experience and enables the top of the head to function as a solar powered love panel. The expensive girlfriends love it, or perhaps it's the villa, pool, and expensive sports car they love. Just don't tell my wife. 

I have no real familiarity with Bet Angel, Geek's Toy or Gruss, but there are some great evocative descriptions in the comment above. 

With rare exception, the barriers to entry into the financial markets include a decent education, and thus sports betting is where the less educated tend to end up. Webby's education in English and Mathematics appears to have stopped at puberty, and Caan's grammar is similarly woeful. 

This is not to say that there aren't some smart people trading sports, although it appears to help if your initials are JB with Joseph Buchdahl and James Butler to the fore. 

Despite having the requisite initials, Joe Bloggs is not so smart, leaving school with few qualifications and often joining the military before leaving to live "in Grandma's bedsit" or on a council estate somewhere where they stumble across Betfair and for no logical reason whatsoever, decide they have a rare talent for trading. 

Unrealistic blogs and vendor blogs are partly responsible here, encouraging the naïve to skim over the question of how they might have an edge over others far better qualified or experienced or with earlier access to information. 

The overriding message is "Don't worry about that - just buy my software, ebook, trading class and join the rest of us who are all making fortunes".

James had a response to ProTrader2017's comment, writing:
"Some wit"? How dare you?
You encapsulated the state of play rather well.
That's you marked for life then. ;) Welcome to the club.

I hope Uncle Peter doesn't have your email address otherwise you'll be getting the treatment. I keep copies for those nights when I struggle to sleep.
Finally, speaking of earlier access to information, the screenshot below showed up in my Twitter timeline yesterday:

Not the easiest to read, and I don't care tuppence for horse racing, but I doubt that too many traders were using the feed from At The Races. I have no precise numbers for the time delay for pictures from Melbourne to the UK, but imagine it is well over eight seconds. In the absence of any explanation from Webby or Caan as to how this significant disadvantage can be overcome, I'd suggest not entering the ring. Anyone happen to know how Australian Open trading volumes are this year compared to prior? 

1 comment:

James said...

Caan has most certainly been a sales director.

However, selling PDFs as non-returnable digital media on PayPal has proven more lucrative than selling solar panels with their annoying money-back guarantees.