Christmas Trading Update

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The chosen one

Hope you all had a nice Christmas and new year! On a personal note, I got engaged over the holidays and celebrated by eating my body weight in chocolate.

Markets act strange in the festive period…

Right off the bat, I noticed that sports markets are a very different place over the festive period. Lower leagues in particular often had very little liquidity which made trading fairly difficult.

New years day horse racing was madness, partly due to bookies offers from the likes of SkyBet, William Hill etc. This resulted in every man and his dog wanting to lay different horses so prices were all over the place. Martin Futter at Betfair Trading Community very nicely pointed out that the Smarkets market for the 13:20 Cheltenham race had been 98% overround for a considerable amount of time.

(This meant that you could lay every horse at current odds and come out with a guaranteed profit)

I acted strange over the festive period…

My betting was sporadic and not always as methodical as it should have been which resulted in some stupid losses.

Chasing losses is so 2015…

With a strict new staking plan and bank roll management, I feel confident in saying I won’t be chasing losses anytime soon. What I didn’t expect, was to have trouble chasing wins!!! Talk about a 1st world problem eh?

Here’s an example of todays football trading (this was the screenshot I wanted to show to you guys):

Screen Shot 2016-01-03 at 21.11.48

And here is the same days profits an hour or two later! You’ll notice when I lost, it was more than the £6 maximum I’ve been setting my stakes/liabilities. I have no explanation for this other than I was feeling really smug and didn’t pay enough attention to my bets. £28 of my hard earn profits eaten into =[

In fairness, there should have been a goal in the Marseille game, and the Real Madrid game! But, somehow I managed to stake almost twice as much.

Screen Shot 2016-01-03 at 22.32.34

Laying low makes an awful lot of sense….

I’ve come to realise that my risk/reward ration had been way off for way too long. I’d been laying draws at odds of 4-5 sometimes and when they didn’t come off, it would ruin my profits for a few days.

Instead over the past few days, I’ve been laying correct scores/draws/winning teams at odds of 1.06 (being the lowest that’s come off!) up to 1.8ish. Not only does it make you feel like a god when you win a lay bet at such low odds, but it’s making a lot of sense and the profits are showing for it.

Do your research. It pays off big time.

One thing I always avoided was research as it felt too much like work. But, it really doesn’t take much effort and has helped improve my profits tremendously. I try not to place any in play football trade without checking out in play stats, previous game stats, market odds and any other factors I can find. If an opportunity arrises and I miss it, tough. It’s much better to keep your bank balance level rather than going in blind and potentially making a stupid loss.

If you’re not looking for value, you won’t find long term profits.

Value is something I’ve come to learn a lot about over the festive period and has made the biggest difference to my profits. It deserves a post of it’s own which I’ll be writing over the next few days. In summary, don’t settle for mediocre/poor odds! Even if you win that bet, your long term profits simply will not exist.

Happy new year!

Written by laurencestanley