The Search for
Structured Data
When I began high-frequency trading on horse racing in 2010, I hit a massive bottleneck: Information Friction. Racecard data and results were locked behind clunky web interfaces, designed for casual viewing rather than professional analysis.
I spent hours manually scraping sites, opening dozens of tabs, and wrestling with unresponsive UIs. It was inefficient, prone to human error, and—above all—it was costing me money. Professional-grade CSV exports were non-existent unless you paid a premium subscription fee.
Outsourced Friction
Originally, I outsourced the script development to India. While the logic was sound, the Time-Zone Latency was a killer. A 10-minute bug fix would take 48 hours, leaving my trading floor dark for days at a time.
In-House Sovereignty
I took control. I learned PHP to build my own proprietary scraping engine. The goal was simple: Zero Latency. I developed scripts that fetch raw racecard data and compile it into clean, high-speed Excel-compatible formats.
Today, that internal tool is open to the BFG community. You no longer need to waste time browsing multiple websites or paying for data access. Simply initialize the download and pipe the CSV directly into your Excel models or trading bots.