To Buy or To Build? Program Your Own Bot

You may have come to the same conclusion as I did, many years ago, that the best way to increase your wealth is through scaling your income. By scaling I mean increasing your income without having to increase your workload. Scaling can be done by having your capital working for you and by having others working for you whilst you are occupied with scaling your income yet more.

Having others working for you means that you can earn residual income after your employees have been paid for their time. Better still, if your employees are virtual assistants, computer programs or bots that act upon your wealth acquiring strategies then employee costs are minimised. Unlike humans, bots do not need to sleep and once created there are no future expenses. Better still, if you create the bots yourself then there is no expense in setting up bots to work for you. 

When I first started trading I did so using Betfair's website. I wanted to increase my work output and scale my income and so I initially turned to third-party trading software. However, this didn't help my desire to scale my income. The reasons were

1) Third-party trading software tends to be very limited in its ability to handle all markets simultaneously and therefore maximise the scalability of your income. Such trading software is often based around Excel, which will inhibit your ability to handle all markets in parallel.

2) Third-party software locks you into a certain way of trading. The trading ladders make you see price data in a certain way. The financial charting is of no use in sports trading.

3) Asking a third-party software provider to include functionality so that your trading strategies can be implemented alerts the provider (who is usually a trader too) as to what your strategy might be.

4) By writing your own software from scratch, without using any libraries from a third-party, you can be sure that you will be trading securely and that there will be no eavesdroppers whilst you implement your trading strategy.

5) When you write your own software you are no longer charged a monthly subscription as is the case with third-party trading software. You can keep your money in the bank and use it to grow your wealth.

I decided to use Betfair's API to create my own bots, implementing strategies that did not use any functions available in any third-party application. Even today, my strategies are using functions that are not in any third-party application. I have no intention of asking for such functionality to be added to a third-party application because then other traders will happen upon my strategies and I will lose my edge in the markets.

Further Reading

Programming for Betfair: A Guide to Creating Sports Trading Applications with API-NG