There was a time when I would have looked at a trading strategy losing 1,350 units and thought there was only one sensible thing to do. Bin it. Instead, I kept every bet. The Master Collector was an automated research strategy that placed 49,172 actual tiny-stake bets into the live Betfair market. These weren't historical results dropped into a backtest. Real bets were placed, at deliberately tiny stakes, and the results were collected. And overall, they were terrible. After

If you're testing a Betfair trading strategy, one of the first questions is obvious: does it actually work? The less obvious question is: how will you know? Backtesting can be incredibly useful. It lets you examine historical data quickly, test ideas cheaply and reject obviously poor hypotheses before risking money. But when I started building what eventually became the Trade Carefully Research Framework, I wanted something else as well. I wanted real bets in real markets. So

Seventy-nine. That is the longest run of consecutive losing bets recorded by Dog Pound so far. At the August 2026 V1 checkpoint, the same strategy had completed 2,100 actual live bets and was +466.54 units ahead after commission. Those two numbers belong together. +466.54 units. And 79 consecutive losers. The first is the number people selling betting systems like to show you. The second is the number that tests whether you'll actually survive long enough to experience the fi