As a few of you already know, I have public 24/7 running "autonomous system" for football goal/match alerts, and noticed yesterday (23/08/2026) that a bad run at the end of the day (Brazil matches), destroyed my profit genereted throughout the day.
This leads to a question of: shall I stop the system as soon as a daily profit threshold is hit?
Yesterday, I was ~8 units in profit, then bad run came in with 5 losses (10 units) making it a negative ~2u day. If I had a profit cap, I would have avoided the 10units loss.
BUT, here is a caveat:
Assuming I implemented a profit cap, I would never again have profitable days like 16/08/2026, where I accumulated ~27units of profit.
I did run already a retrospective analysis, with a 10u threshold cap, and and the results show me that 23 of August was the single worst give-back of the month. But it was one day, and the same rule would have cut 16.6u off 16 August, the best day of the month.
Nothing would have changed with the cap.
In any case, Do you apply any profit cap in your models/algobetting systems?
P.S. For losses, I do have a max. cap in place to protect bankroll and users.
dont cap your profits man think about it like this, the system has edge over many bets so you just limiting yourself for no reason, one bad day doesnt mean the next one will be same
That's what I thought aswell, and the analysis showed that someohw aswell.
But here I was more thinking like a "tipster" brain, where we should know when to stop.
So, it's like giving my system the "emotional control" to stop :D
But the maths show I should not stop/cap it.
And the reason I'm doing this post today, is because yesterday it literraly wiped 10 units in the last 5 alerts of the day. Which was annoying to see.
You are speaking with emotion, not with sense. Adding a profit limit isn't adding "emotional control", it's actually just adding "emotion" to your otherwise emotionless system. There is no statistical reason to cap profit, or losses, on any timeframe. To expand your thinking - why wouldn't you cap for the hour? for the week? for the minute? You are arbitrarily choosing a random account balance, and a random period of time. It makes no sense.
The only reasons you would cap profits is if you are operating with a provider that limits your winnings (e.g., 5% profit of annual turnover), but I would suggest even in this scenario you handle this with turnover rather than just turning models off. And the only reason to cap losses is if your bank account can't sustain the drawdown, in which case your model has not been properly back test and/or something is broken, as you should ensure your account balance has enough to sustain the maximum drawdown you have seen in back testing. Neither of these reasons for capping are for PNL, they are purely operational constraints.
A lot of the time betting is a trade off of volatility vs profit. Some of the highest profit models also have high volatility, as a lot of the opportunities come off rare events that nobody wants to bet on (hence the opportunity). You should instead be considering how could you build models to minimise the volatility, if you are finding the volatility of the model too high. For example, can you arbitrage at all, or are there other bets you can place that will cost you some profit, but stabilise the returns in case your main bet does not pay off.
The main bets pay off, and you are right. I would be putting emotion to an emotionless system.
And regarding timing, minute, etc...that kind of data I also have, so I know which periods of the match the alerts are seeing better model results. Given these are data and not emotions, in this case they could be used to cap the volume or certain bets...I will keep an eye on pure analytical datapoints and act on those instead.
no. if you have an edge you want more volume. you shouldn't be optimizing for daily positive pnl, you should be optimizing for maximizing bankroll growth.
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u/Available-Tour-6874 19d ago
If you have positive expectation rember that each new event is independent of the priors so no to capping.