Smart Markets P&L NULL values

Question

Just trying to make sense of the Smart Markets historic results.

Is there a clear definition of the columns anywhere? Specifically what's the meaning of the "BSP Place" column?

Also what's the meaning of the NULL values in the "BSP Place" and "BSP Win" columns?

If it means that the races aren't availabe on betfair then it would be resonable to assume no bet is placed on those races, taking that into account the performance of this metric is drastically altered:

Update:

For reference, here's the code used to generate this plot: https://gist.github.com/samuelcolvin/11082286

Answer 1

Hi,

BSP place refers to the Betfair Starting Price for the place market.  This is not used in calculations of P&L, but if you are wanting to see how performance is for place bets only, you could use this.

For NULL Values, these appear because the automated script that fetches BSP failed to find a valid BSP for the selection.  This is usually because the Betfair page that stores BSP results has failed to update.

So you are right to ignore NULL values in calculating any P&L from Smart Markets.  However, overall Smart Markets is not profitable, if Racing Index is to be believed.  

http://www.racing-index.com/tipsters/proofed/betwisesmart.html

The Smart Markets selections are automatically sent to Racing Index as soon as they are put on the website, and Racing Index then use their own Betfair SP and Industry SP returns to calculate returns.   We only started this script some months after Smart Markets was started, so the returns from the early days of smart markets in 2009 and 2010 (which were very good as I recall) will be missed - however, the more recent performance is probably accurate.  We haven't checked particularly - I find the best way to use Smart Markets is as a proxy for which horses are being shrewdly backed (so there is a discrepancy between Betfair prices and industry SP), not necessarily as a pure backing system at SP.

Hope that helps.