Steamer Drifter Bot Review

There comes a time with every trial when it’s time to call it a day.

But it’s not always easy to pinpoint when that moment should be.

Sometimes it’s obvious. Particularly when a product has failed miserably.

I shall spare the blushes of those responsible by mentioning no names at this point.

But I digress.

My point is, with products that deliver modest profits, there is always the temptation to trial for just a little bit longer.

So it has been with Winningmore’s Steamer Drifter Bot.

But I realise now, I have kicked the can down the road for so long, I’ve run out of road.

We are standing at a major junction, dear reader.

In one direction, there is a sign pointing towards a Neutral rating. But straight ahead, there is another, bearing the word, “PASSED”.

So which road shall we finally take? 

Read on to find out….

For all my doubts, it’s actually been a very consistent trial.

Month #1 proved to be a false start, as I had a problem with the software that necessitated a bug fix and a re-download… so month #2 became the new month #1.

Month #2 then produced divergent results  – meaning, backing steamers did well but laying drifters didn’t – so I abandoned the latter and concentrated, for the rest of the trial, on the former.

Matters went sideways in month #3 — specifically, we made money in the first half then gave it all back in the second — but we got back to winning ways in month #4, with a shade over 10 points’ profit.

And in month #5?

Well, once again, I banked a small profit.

This time, it was 9.4 points, so.. a fraction less than in month #4.

The overall performance summary for the trial now looks like this:

You can download the complete results log for month #5 by clicking here.

I wish all my trials made 58 points’ profit – especially with no effort whatsoever required from me.

I don’t have to locate the best odds, log on to bookie sites, place bets – or anything.

I am making money simply by opening a piece of software and letting it run on my computer!

On the other hand, it’s not often that we run a trial across 1,455 markets. so our total profit equates to a return of just 0.04 points per market.

Meaning, I have to trade 25 markets just to make a single point’s profit.

Which is why, month after month, I have kept asking myself… Is the profit margin too narrow for me to be able to award a Pass mark?

And I’ve kept postponing the verdict, hoping that another month’s data will deliver a clearer outcome.

But instead, what’s happened is something quite unexpected. I just keep making a little bit more money each month.

And this, I think, is the point.

The tool’s performance has been extremely consistent. For confirmation, just look at that strike rate!

We did have a very slight blip in month #4, when we achieved a rate 1.8% below the long-run level, but generally we have hovered around the 38% mark.

Contrast that with your average human tipster who, in my experience, is far more likely to deliver a feast-and-famine experience, and thereby test your nerves more.

I feel confident that the bot will steadily deliver winners at the same kind of level, month after month, so that, in turn, gives me a pretty high level of confidence that I will continue to bank steady profits.

Summary

I really have no choice, I think, but to award SD Bot a Pass.

I haven’t got the drifter option to work yet and maybe I never will – but frankly, who cares?

After a while, you just forget about it. It sits in the background on my computer and keeps doing its thing.

Once you’ve keyed in the settings you wish to use, firing it off each day is the work of a few seconds.

And then, at the end of the month, you typically find you’ve quietly banked a few points’ profit.

Seriously, how can I not like this?

I have set the thing up to trade every selected horse in both the Win and Place markets (1 point in each), though you can opt for Win or Place only if you prefer.

Naturally, if you go for a different option to me, you’ll get a different strike rate.

So, after almost 1,500 traded markets (and certainly even more bets than that, as it often selects several horses in the same market), Steamer Drifter Bot has earned its Pass mark.

You can learn more about this remarkable piece of betting software here.

Lucy

Update: 26th March 2015

I keep on saying I will soon end my trial of Winningmore’s new Steamer Drifter Bot.

But I keep changing my mind too.

The reason being that, with a bot, it’s just so easy to kick the can down the road, and effortlessly run up another month’s data. You just switch it on and forget about it.

Last month I stated that I would definitely be “back in late March with my trial conclusion”.

So here I am, just begging for one more month with SDBot….

I like this product you see, but I still find it soooooo hard to believe a piece of software can really do this….  🙂

It’s been a tantalising sort of trial. Overall very promising, but somehow not quite convincing enough.

Month #1 proved to be a curious experience that ended with me finding a bug in the software, downloading a new version and effectively restarting the whole thing from scratch.

In month #2, I started to make some real progress, especially with steamers, to the point where I decided to abandon drifters altogether.

Just as I was starting to get excited, the second half of month #3 really spoiled things – though the month as a whole very nearly broke even.

And the good news is that in month #4, we returned to winning ways, adding around 10 points via my new steaming-only strategy.

You can review the complete results log for month #4 just by clicking here. Note that I am using £1.50 per point so £73 profit translates to around 48 points.

Summary

The bottom line is: 48 points’ profit from the last 3 months’ operation, including 1,101 traded markets.

Seriously, what’s not to like?

I am very close to awarding the Steamer Drifter Bot a Pass.

After all, since I abandoned drifters, I’ve made steady profits. And when I had my one blip, I still finished the month level.

SD Bot no longer scares me, which is really saying something, given my initial alarm at the prospect of allowing a piece of software access to my money!

Or perhaps I should say, it doesn’t appear to endanger my bank with the settings I’m currently running. Because you are left free to make quite a few parameter settings by yourself.

That said, I found Winningmore quite helpful when I asked them for set-up advice.  Likewise, I am happy to share my settings with anyone who decides to buy the product from my site.

So… why not just give it a Pass then?

There are two reasons:

1. The “points per market traded” metric above is very low. Meaning that, if this thing is finding an edge, it’s a tiny sliver of one…. and I need to be sure!

2. Because I simply don’t need to! It’s the easiest thing in the world to run the software for another couple of weeks.  It’s completely hands-free.

So… one more month it is!

If you’d like to find out more about SD Bot in the meantime, you can do so here.

Lucy

Update: 26th February 2015

I’d been planning to wind up my trial of Winningmore’s appealing new Steamer Drifter Bot this time.

When I wrote my last report about it, I believed the trial was heading for a neat and natural conclusion.

Yes, in spite of my well-documented, deep-seated reservations about betting bots, I was warming to SDBot!

For, amazingly, by gazing at the numbers, I believed I’d found a pattern.

And that pattern was so simple: ditch the drifters and focus the bot on steamers only.

By doing so in month #2 alone, I’d have banked over 38 points. So naturally, I couldn’t wait for month #3!

Would this new, steaming-only strategy finally win me over to the brave new world of betting bots? 🙂

Sadly, it’s turned out to be a bit more complicated than that. 🙁

We had a wonderful start to month #3, but unfortunately a truly dismal finish.

The upshot was that I lost 0.37 points over the whole period.

Not a disaster of course, but certainly an almighty anti-climax!

Betting at £1.50 a point, the headlines for the new backing-only approach now stand as follows (noting that month #1 data no longer apply, as they involved both backing and laying):

The complete results log for month #3 is here.

So… what are we to make of this month’s sideways trading?

We traded a lot more markets in month #3 – 611 in all! – bringing us to a total of 883 markets in which we’ve let the Steamer Drifter Bot just place back bets.

That’s an awful lot of data.

And I can’t help feeling that 37.3 points banked from 883 markets is a lot less impressive than 38 points from 272 markets.

However. There is, perhaps, another way of looking at it.

For although our returns have fallen this time, the strike rate has barely deviated – from 39% last month to 38% this.

Which suggests to me there may be an underlying consistency within the method.

Unfortunately, this month’s profitable trades have happened to be at the shorter end of the book.

However, the fact that a very similar percentage of our steamers came home in front still makes me wonder….

So… I’m going to decide not to decide!

Or, to put it another way, I’m going to give SDBot one more month to prove itself.

Can it maintain its admirably consistent strike rate for a few more weeks, but this time deliver winners at slightly longer average odds?

Let’s hope so!

I’ll be back in late March my trial conclusion.

In the meantime, you can find out more about Steamer Drifter Bot here.

Lucy

Update: 24th January 2015

I am now two months into my intriguing trial of Winningmore’s mysterious new Steamer Drifter Bot.

Long-term readers will know that I have mixed feelings about the notion of automated betting.  So I approached the trial with a mixture of caution and optimism.

My mixed emotions were not relieved by a difficult first month, where first I lost money, then required a new version of the software, and, finally, begged for – and received – brand new parameter settings, advised by Winningmore themselves.

Surely, I thought, these guys must know how to get the best out of their own product?

And with that idea in mind, month #2 suddenly seemed a much more mouth-watering prospect.

Could my new settings now set me on the path to automated profits?

Well the answer appears, increasingly, to be yes.   But the picture isn’t entirely straightforward.

Given my general hesitancy, you will be unsurprised to read that I’ve been trialling at £1.50 per point. This is perfectly possible with the bot, as it is clever enough to let you work round Betfair’s usual £2 minimum stake restriction.

On first look, the results from month #2 are OK, if not quite as spectacular as I’d been hoping for.

My general feeling was — not bad, but quite a modest return for such a lot of trades.   Even if the job of placing all those bets was being handled by the SDBot.

If you add these profits to the 29 markets I traded with the same settings at the end of month #1, you have the following overall profits for the new method.

However, as I occasionally watched the bot, I did get a sense that steaming was working much better than laying.

Maybe I was imagining it?

In order to check, I first looked at the results in the place market only, as I am just betting on steamers here.

These results indeed suggested that backing was going particularly well, as 9 of my 14.6 points in month #2 could be attributed purely to backing in the place market.

Furthermore, unless I was doing much better backing than laying in the win market, they also seemed slightly counter-intuitive.

I’d expected to make more money from win rather than place betting, as, if the thing worked at all, the longer odds in the win market should presumably produce greater returns, though, of course, at a lower strike rate.

I thus decided I had to understand what was going on in the win market.

So I took the plunge and trawled through all my SDBot win market trades in month #2, deleted the lay bets, and calculated the return from backing only.

This was not a straightforward exercise as some trades involved multiple backs and lays, but hey, the things we will do when we scent a profit!

The results were remarkable.

I then added the place market returns to the win market backing profits, to show what backing only in the two markets would have delivered in month #2.

It looks really appealing!

Frankly, 38 points per month would do very nicely.

If you’d like to see the full results log, you can download it here.

Summary

So … is the Steamer Drifter Bot the Holy Grail of betting, that long sought-after miracle that, in the words of many a betting system advertisement, will turn my PC into an out-of-control ATM spewing cash at my feet?!

Honestly, I don’t know.  But it would be nice. 🙂

Now, I am working to Winningmore’s suggested settings, so these are the sorts of results I’d been hoping to get.

But then, I’m using their drifting parameters too and am getting nowhere quickly with them.

Also, I can hear the distant murmuring of the word “backfit“… the argument that essentially says, we can make any set of test results look good if we filter out the losing bets!

So what are we to do with SDBot?

I propose to continue into month #3, but only place back bets and drop the lays entirely.

This is very easily done within the bot. Every other parameter will remain unchanged.

If I get a similar return in month #3, I may just permit myself to get a little bit excited.

I’ll be back in late February with my next report.

In the meantime, you can read more about the Steamer Drifter Bot here.

Lucy

Update: 26th December 2014

I’ve never had a huge amount of success with trading bots.

So it is with some trepidation that I have approached the testing of Winningmore’s new Steamer Drifter Bot!

There is something slightly scary about a piece of software gambling with your money.

Can this thing really be trusted?!

And am I as deranged as my partner happens to think I am, for believing that a software programme may be able to make money for me, without human intervention?

It’s been a bumpy ride so far, but there is still cause for hope.

My initial results with the SDBot were mediocre, bordering on poor.

However, a new version, coupled with some new parameters, has renewed my optimism by producing more promising results.

One of the key things to understand is that, as a user, you still have to define parameter settings for the bot to use.

These include:

• required odds movement
• applicable odds range
• win / place market stake split
• market test timings (i.e. how far in advance of the race start you would like the bot to test live prices)

It’s not immediately obvious to me what these settings should be, and as a result, it has perhaps been no surprise that I made a pretty poor start!

The first 151 markets produced some indifferent results, in spite of what I thought was a respectable strike rate of 47.7%.

Lessons Learned

Two points stood out.

1) Looking through my results, I noticed some pretty big losses, with no fewer than 10 markets producing drawdowns of over £10. 

In contrast, I’d only won over £10 in three races.

This suggested that I’d taken too big a risk with laying, where the liabilities are greater.

So I decided to tighten up on my drifting parameters: in particular, ignoring all horses that began drifting from a base price of 5.

I also took some advice from the Winningmore team, and they supplied me with a completely fresh list of settings.

2) I noticed from the underlying bet detail that in some races, the stakes the bot was using were for less than my specified amount.

I had chosen £3 a point, split 50:50 between win and place.

But in one race for instance, the bot had correctly picked out a winner at odds of 7, but only put on a back stake of 38 pence, and a place market stake of exactly half that, at 19 pence.

All very odd!

I asked the Winningmore team to look at the problem – and in response, they duly despatched a new version of the programme!

Yes, it appears I somehow found a bug!

So… I am now testing a new version of the product and, I suppose, should consider the trial as having restarted.

The first results with the new version and the revised settings are more promising.

Clearly however, we have a fair way still to go.

I have had a short break from the trial (I genuinely find bots that unnerving!), but plan to restart the thing on Boxing Day, when there will be no fewer than twelve meetings to choose from!

Summary

I’m still unconvinced about bots but desperate to be proven wrong.

I do feel better more positive now however, knowing that, from now on, I’m working with settings that Winningmore have supplied me with.

On the other hand, I’m slightly concerned that my trial has managed to flag up a software bug!

Let’s hope my initial wobbles prove just to have been teething problems, and that Boxing Day brings me a pile of Christmas gifts!

Merry Christmas to all my readers!

Lucy

Original Introduction: 29th November 2014

We’ve always had pretty mixed experiences with software trading tools, or ‘bots’, on my site.

I don’t propose to go over old ground and review them all now – seriously, the story has just been too painful, not to mention expensive! – but equally, I refuse to give up on the idea!

And anyway, I rather like the look of this one. 🙂

Welcome then, one and all, to my trial of Winningmore’s Steamer Drifter Bot!

And, without further ado, here follows my “SD Bot FAQ”…

1. What is a ‘steamer drifter bot’ when it’s at home?

It’s a piece of software that bets on the Betfair market on your behalf.

Specifically, it backs steamers and lays drifters – based on the belief that these market movements reflect expert punter sentiment.

It therefore should save you time and (hopefully) make you money too.

2. Is it difficult to run?

No. You enter a few parameters at the outset into the Settings screen then press a big button labelled Start.

It then runs happily in the background!

3. Why use a bot at all?

Good question!

In theory, the bot can trade the market without getting tired, needing a stretch or a coffee, or getting upset if it has a bad run.

It may therefore help you trade in a more rigorous manner and look at your betting in a more dispassionate way.

I find, with bots, that I tend not to react to every individual bet, but review my progress with a little more perspective (e.g. on a daily or weekly basis).

4. Do you need bookie accounts?

No. All bets are placed on the Betfair exchange.

5. How much does SD Bot cost?

The product is available on licence only. It currently costs £69 for six months or £99 for twelve.

6. How much will it make me?

Of course, that’s what we’re here to find out. The sales page suggests we should be aiming at a few points per day. Actual profits will obviously be heavily dependent on point value.

If it works (big if!) SD Bot could be very profitable, simply by virtue of the fact that you can let it run all day, every day.

I intend to use it to trade daily UK and Irish racing. I cannot imagine trading every single race myself but this thing has no life or kids and doesn’t get a stiff neck!

7. What are the technical requirements?

The sales page summarises them as follows.

8. Can I tell what it’s doing or is it a “black box”?

Yes, all trading settings are visible to the user and can be varied at any time.

The manual comes with some recommended settings that I intend to follow in the trial.

You can also hear all about it by watching the sales video!

9. How do I know it won’t ruin me?

There is a stop loss facility.

So assuming that works… no problem!

10. What size bank should I use?

Not sure.

I suggest 100 points’ minimum as SD Bot is going to trade a lot of races.

11. Will it get in the way of other ‘normal’ betting?

Well, no basically, but of course your results will be intermingled on the Betfair Profit and Loss screen with any other betting you may do.

Summary

I absolutely love the concept.

The idea that a piece of software can trade the markets and make money for me is almost intoxicating.

So.. can SD Bot seriously, actually, deliver regular profits?

I’ll be back by Christmas with my first report!

Lucy