The Footy Trader

I worked with the Chelsea vs Reading game using BetAngel and I had a trade started at the start of the game and I stopped it when I had the 1% of my bank in the bag. I gave it one more go before the first goal to add a few more cents to the profits. After the first goal I went back in the again to bring the profits up to around 2% of the bank and left it at that. Good enough, I get into trouble when I get greedy.

The other thing I was looking at was the correct score market. For each of the games on tonight I set up a trade dutch on BetIE. I used BetIE because it was a test that I set up. Very handy to have a learning mode in BetIE. With each of the games there was profit. I used 100 Euro for each of the games and the liability and the profit varied according to the odds available in the game. Only with the Manchester United game did I put in an extra bet because there was 2 goals and I wanted to cover the scores not covered such as four nil. I didn’t need it in the end but I wanted to see what effect it would have.

The profits worked out like this:-

Chelsea – 82.08 Derby 39.14 West Ham 42.07 Everton 2.00 and Manchester 28.73 – the total came to €192.12
The average of the winnings comes to 38.24, which is good when you consider the chance of going outside of the dutch is 1 in 4. So long as the average is higher than 25 then there will be profit there. I could have made 58.70 but as I said I put in an extra bet just in case. Also with the Everton game I set the profit lower for the score of 0-0 seeing as only 8% of games finish with that score. I would have got €51 if a goal had been scored there.

So as you can see it looks like it could be profitable to work that system, but I think I would like to test it over a longer period to see how it looks after a month or so.

Here is the picture of the Chelsea setup in BetIE

This was one of those games that really doesn’t work well with the unders. I was chasing a break even for to whole of the game and looking to do it by making some in the under 3.5 and the under 4.5 goals markets. Not long before the 5th goal I had seen the odds drop so that my liability of 30 euro was coming down and I was thinking in terms of trading out without greening so that the liability would be on the unders. The reasoning behind that was that Spurs were 4 goals to nil and I expected that Arsenal would at least leave the place with a consolation goal, especially with the intense rivalry between these two teams. The liability had come down to 15 Euro and I was about to put in the trade and of course the match is suspended and I am stuffed.

Earlier in the game I could have got out for a small manageable loss but then 20/20 vision in hindsight is a wonderful thing. It was another lesson learned and I will have to be more careful next time. I was using Soccer Mystic again and also BetAngel. I still prefer BetAngel over soccer mystic despite the extra tools more useful to the football trading. I imagine this is probably a personal thing due to the number of windows that pop up all the time with Soccer Mystic compared to the compact behaviour of BetAngel.

The other thing to mention is the market maker button which I was trying out with that game, First time I used it it was fine even though the lay on the unders hit first the lay on the overs did get matched later, to leave a small profit on the game well before the game was due to start. The second time the order of matching would have been the same except that the second bet didn’t match and that was another thing that made things more difficult to deal with in the game when all the goals were going in. The reason the second bet didn’t get matched was that the odds came down about 5 ticks from where I entered the market and so there was no chance to get the second part of the trade done. Something to look out for.

Later this week I just have not really traded much. I looked in on Wednesday evening and there was only one game and frankly I couldn’t be bothered. On Saturday there were the FA Cup games and they can be quite erratic so I left them alone also.

I am still thinking of value in betting and I am wondering what is the percentage of games that are not 0-0 that stay under 2.5 goals and what would I have to get in the odds to have value. When the odds have gone up after the first goal is there enough of a price to be of value to be able to leave it and take more money off the game. It shouldn’t be too difficult to work out 8% of games are nil nil approx. So how I just have to look at the correct scores data to work out the percentage. I will let you know when I have more information for you on that idea.

I am also keen to look at the dutching of the correct score, maybe setting up the dutch on the 7 more likely scores and the adding to it if there are goals which look like it might go beyond the dutch. I will do some testing and let you know on that one too. I will be able to use Soccer Mystic easily for the dutching or even BetAngel if I wish.

After my disappointments with the interface of Soccer Mystic yesterday , I thought I should actually read the user guide. It is good to try out software without doing that first because you get a better idea of how intuitive it is, and mostly it worked well enough. I didn’t need to have the Confirm Bets checkbox checked to make sure that the software didn’t lose me some of my betting bank when I clicked on something I wasn’t sure about. It is all pretty straight forward.

While reading the user guide I found myself thinking ‘Wow thats cool’ a few times and being impressed with the tricks it has up its sleeve to help me make money. Some of the things were a different way to do something I can do already in another part of the software, but with the control over what happens being set differently. For example in the Bookmaker tab (which only places lay bets) I can set how much I want to stake, how much I want to have as profit or just go by the minimum bet amount and then by using the Margin Maker checkbox on the unders side of the market, see what odds I need to have the lay bet go in at to make the money. It is similar to making a back bet on the unders then laying off as the price comes down when no goals are scored at the start of a match. The difference being that the back bet part of the trade is replaced by making a lay bet on the overs side.

impressed with the tricks Soccer Mystic has up its sleeve

I also tested out the Make Market button on the One Click tab. This can be used in the time leading up to the start of a game when there is not much movement in the prices. I clicked the button when the back price was 2.12 and the lay price was 2.14. Soccer Mystic then places bets on the wrong side of the market as it were. So orders went in for a back bet of 2.14 and a lay bet of 2.12. When both of these orders are filled there will be a profit due to the spread between the prices asked for in the order. I did it with the Spurs vs Arsenal game about 20 hours before the game was due to get under way, and left it overnight. In the morning both of the bets had been matched and there was a small profit from the minimum size bets Soccer Mystic had placed for me. The only thing is that you don’t have any control over which bet gets matched first and you might need a plan in case one of them doesn’t get matched when the game goes to in play. I expect though that doing this well before a game is due to start there would be only a small risk that it doesn’t work out as it is supposed to.

Another area of interest is the correct scores or even the match odds for dutching. With the correct scores there are certain scores that happen more regularly than others, so by making a bet that covers those scorelines you can have a good chance to make money. I think I would prefer to test that theory though by seeing how many times I need to win that type of bet compared to how often it loses and what effect that has on the betting bank. The strategy can be enhanced though by covering a correct score possibility that is unlikely to pay back smaller or not at all if it happens. The effect of this is that you get a better percentage profit overall while having a smaller risk. There are about 7 scorelines that happen more than others. I will give you more about that in another posting.

Soccer Mystic can also be connected to Excel the spreadsheet to make automated bets if you know how to do that in Excel. I don’t know enough about that to comment right now but will perhaps look at later.

The ability to have the stake size determined by the price you want to make per tick is useful too. This is because of the tick sizes not being equal. In the table you can see that the smaller odds have smaller sizes in terms of movement too. So if you want the same amount of profit per tick at the smaller odds you will have to increase the amount of the bet. With this you can make the same amount of money under the odds of 2.0 as you do with the odds between 2.02 and 3.00

I didn’t expect this in Soccer Mystic as I thought I would only find this in the BinarySoft program.

Looking forward to this evening and the game between Spurs and Arsenal and increasing my betting bank some more.

Couldn’t get the Price Predictor working again today with Soccer Mystic. Still think it is something to do with the time zone thing. Despite that, I made a 3.5% gain on the betting bank by trading on the unders 2.5, 3.5 and even the under 4.5 goals. The first in and out trades on under 2.5 went well and I was on target for profit by 15 mins into the game. Then I went for one more dip and of course a goal went in. When the market reformed I put in the same amount again and then waited until I was in profit again. I saw a similar amount of profit on that market as I had initially and I was out of the market when another goal went in. I had a total of 14 trades before the under 2.5 goals was settled.

I decided to move to the under 3.5 goals market and had eight back and lay trades and I was out of it while it was still safe and I had by then moved to the 4.5 goals arena. I just did a small trade on that and perhaps could have let it run but with the game at 2 -2 I went for caution and traded out before end of the game.

I was still more comfortable with BetAngel than with Soccer Mystic, maybe if I had got the Price Predictor working I would have been happier. I still think that there ends up too many windows especially if you are working with multiple markets and even though I dare say you would get used to it if using the software on a long term basis, I don’t like the clutter. Tabs would be better, although there are quite a few tabs in the windows that present themselves anyway. Maybe I would be less annoyed if I was just using one or the other rather than trying out BetAngel and also Soccer Mystic at the same time.

OK – Just looking at what we have in Soccer Mystic in the first of the windows, the one where you select the markets you want to work with. There are tabs for Odds, Unmatched Bets, Matched Bets, Log and Soccer Desktop (the browser which shows you the Soccer Mystic web site)

So I choose the game and click on the button for trade and another window comes up with a new load of tabs – One Click, Ladder, Manual Bet, Dutching, Bookmaking, Matched bets, Saved bets, Excel, Log and Rules. I decide to use the ladder because that’s the best to use with trading and I need to see more of the ladder so I expand the tab so I show more of it. Guess what – Yep thats right – Another window to fill my screen.

I arrange the windows so that the ladder is on top and the trade window underneath with the matched bets showing . That way I can see what was the latest bet to be matched . Would be better to have that info in the ladder window as it is in BetAngel. Good that you can choose how many rows of ladder you want, might as well show as many as you can fit in vertically to get the most information. Good to have access to the charts with the button but I still like the BetAngel charts on the enhanced ladder view.

There is only one green up button on the ladder tab for each side of the market of the unders, one for under and one for over. I prefer the extra options in BetAngel and I like to use the manual close button on BetAngel that lets me work out what odds I want to aim for to get whatever profit is there. Or see how far the odds have to come down if I put in the last back bet just before a goal was scored and I need to wait to be able to trade out.

Update:- I see that there is a Trade Calculator in Soccer Mystic that does the same as I was able to do in BetAngel. Just need to have it pop another window to get it working……

I have not worked out the Make Market button on the One-Click tab yet. I will look in the users guide soon – I promise. I know I am complaining a lot about the software but I feel sure that if Peter at BetAngel is reading the blog he might have a think about the feedback here and make it better for all users. I know Soccer Mystic will get better over time anyway. My blog is not to sell the software blindly to my readers but to inform about the pros and cons as I see them. I reckon that if I wax lyrical without mentioning the parts I am not so keen on then the blog becomes less credible.

As it stands with the Soccer Mystic right now, I recommend taking advantage of the trial offer for the 30 days and see how it fits your trading style on Betfair and decide for yourself whether to keep with it.

Good Luck from Wizardgold – Will be working with Spur Arsenal game tomorrow

I got my hands on BetAngel and SoccerMystic and as soon as I have has a bit more time with them I will make a video about using them. My first impressions on the whole are positive. First of all I have to say I was pleased that the support team were on the ball. I had a few questions revolving around the non functioning of the Price predictor in SoccerMystic. Seems that the problem lay in the fact that I am here in Spain in a different time zone – GMT+1 and I had to set my computer to the GMT to make it work. Still not getting full service with it but then I might have to make the same setting in my Betfair profile to get it all to tie in.

Out of the two pieces of software I preferred BetAngel professional, I felt it was more sophisticated because it had been around longer and probably had more testing. The both softwares are from the same stable and I still think Soccer Mystic has a great future ahead of it for the footy fans. I can’t really do the horses as I can’t get the horses on the television here, so having SoccerMystic and it being a one trick pony in terms of which markets it is good for in Betfair doesn’t bother me. There are plenty of tricks it can do within the confines of the football markets anyway.

Another difficulty I had today was that it wasn’t updating in real time for a while and I had to keep pressing the refresh button. I think that was more to do with the internet connection here today than with the software as it was happening with both softwares and the problem was intermittent.

I liked the thing in BetAngel where it showed me what I would win if I was to green up with the odds that were there. The choice of the normal green up and the reverse green up was useful too, especially when the market was bouncing around the chance to put in the lay bet at the back price which was more stable meant that I wasn’t going to suffer making a lay bet a too high a price if the market changed in the split second when I was clicking the button. That practice allowed me to grab one more tick of profit also.

I liked the compactness of BetAngel and the tabbed interface compared to SoccerMystic which comes up with new windows when you hit the price Predictor or the trading button. I liked in BetAngel there were charts updating in real time when it was showing enhanced ladder window, though it took me a while to work out that I could see more of the ladder by expanding the window. I didn’t need to see the light green part at the top which was for setting up offsetting or scalping along with stop loss configuration. I wonder if it is possible to change the priority of that??

I would like to comment more about the Price Predictor but I didn’t really have it working enough to be able to use it properly. What I can say was that if the signal strength was showing that it could give a fairly accurate idea of how the prices would pan out, then the predicted price was close to actual prices. I checked it a couple of times and I need to look at it a few more times to comment on this with confidence.

So how is it in use? First of all it is easy to get the games you want into the first window of the SoccerMystic, thats important when a match is due to get started and you want to get in there as quickly as possible. then you choose the game and hit either the Price Predictor or the Trade button. Like I said next you get another window and I would have preferred to see a tabbed interface which is easier to navigate around. Speed is important when you are trading.

I will go into the software more as time goes by and I will make a new video later this week, but for now I can tell you that I saw profits this weekend despite some early goals. yesterday I increased the betting bank by 11% and today 1.5% which is respectable, especially with a small betting bank. Today when I had to work with the  goals  in the Wigan Everton game I was able to trade out by using the under 4.5 goals market. I did have some profit after the first goal and was greened up, then I thought I would try one more shot at it and then the second goal went in. The 3rd goal was early in the second half also so I just had to take the loss on the under 2.5 goals. I was pleased that I was able to get back most of the loss bar a few cents with the under 4.5 goals market.

Then I decided to do the Manchester City vs  West Ham and they only played a couple of days ago in the FA Cup, a very boring game with few goals. Today though there were goals at 8 minutes and 16 minutes. With 2 goals in there I went for the under 3.5 and the under 4.5 to bring in a small profit. I could have waited on the under 2.5 market as the final result was only 1-1 but I had traded out for a loss of €11.09. I still made a profit on the game of a few cents. What was most pleasing was the strategy that I worked with it by moving to the other markets and leaving them to get as much profit as possible first from the under 3.5 and then moving to the 4.5 goals.

So look out for the video podcast to come about BetAngel and Soccer Mystic. I know I am looking forward to using them some more.  They have some great trial offers so that you can see if they suit you and the way you trade.

I saw the game on the TV last night and I was trading on it also. I had one in and out quickly type of trade using LazIE in BetIE and had a small profit locked in. I went to go back in there and changed the number of ticks to 2. The price on the back side was 1.66 but when the bet went in the price had changed and my bet didn’t get matched. LazIE put in the second bet order on the lay side 2 ticks away and next thing was that the lay bet got matched.

What I should have done was to put in another back bet and took the loss of a couple of ticks and started again on it. I thought though that maybe a goal would happen at some time and I could trade out of it later, so I left it. The match was dire to say the least and at half time I traded out. The odds had changed quite a bit by then though and I was looking at a loss of my gains I had yesterday. In the end I put in another back bet and brought the loss down to €1.94. So there you go another lesson to learn. I should have made money on the game but didn’t. No worries at least it was only small.

I was doing the quick in and out thing with the Reading vs Spurs with the LazIE button in BetIE and just after the second back bet went in to have another go at it the game was suspended and there wasn’t much I could do about it. The options were to leave it and wait for the odds to come back down again to be able to trade out or to put in some more at the higher odds available and trade out as it comes back down. The second option is a bit more risky because there is more money in there possible to lose, but so long as there are no goals it is quicker to get to the trade out position.

I went for the second option and I traded out half of the extra after about 5 or 10 mins and took 5 ticks. Considering the ticks are worth more at that level it can be the best option, I traded the second part of the extra another 4 ticks down and the liability was looking OK at that stage. The game was still at nil one to Spurs. I let it run some more and got to a stage where plenty of the game had passed and I had only a small liability with a winning amount nearly double the liability.

No worries about the risk level at that stage because I had the possible loss covered with the gains from the Barcelona vs Sevilla Copa del Rey game. In the end I had a profit from the trading for the evening of 8.1% of the betting bank. Not too bad of a result I think.

I also used BetAngel this evening because it does such a good job of greening up with small amounts

Forex Trading

The dollar is moving up and down loads today and the draw down on my position is now at -33% with the balance growing from the grid trading on the position. Working well within the expected confines of the robot setup.

Last year I started a demo account for the ForexforSmarties no trading method. What happens with this method is you buy a position using 2 trading pairs in the right ratio and let it run to take the money from the interest or swap payments. I had a great start with it and in the first month I closed the position a couple of times to take the profit when I was checking it on a weekly basis to add 4000 to the 10,000 balance. I forgot about it for some time and it has been in drawdown for some months now. About a month ago I could have closed the position and still had a good overall profit of 2,500 on the 10k position. The plan is though to let it run for a year to see what sort of profit can be made on such a trading method.

At the moment it is in the doldrums with the draw down at 9,500 and the equity a lowly 4,500. I would be wondering about the margin level at the moment which is at 400% and there is a chance that it could hit a margin call despite there being about 1000 dollars of interest on the position. Lets see what happens, how safe is this method with the dollar being so volatile and weak right now. So long as there is no margin call I have belief that the system will make a profit when the year is up, even if it needs an extra month to hit the target, seeing as you don’t close a position if it is in drawdown and have to be prepared to wait until the profit number comes back.

I’ll Keep you posted …..

It is nice to earn a little extra from our blog sites to help pay for the hosting and the time we take to do the posts and for any of my readers that would like to add something to your own web site I can fully recommend Text Link Ads. Only been with them a few months and it is out performing Google Adsense by a long way. I have been paid 5 times from Text Link Ads and the amount is growing monthly too. You do need to have an established website that has traffic going to it already and a decent Alexa rating. In any case I am impressed by it.

The blog Betbot has suddenly vanished into thin air and the Betdaq fellow has not posted for some time either. I know I have not posted much this month so far but that’s what happens when you have visitors. Tomorrow I will be back to the grindstone again. I am looking forward to trying out the Soccer Mystic for 30 days and I will probably make a video of it to show you how it is in action.

Microstock

My main preoccupation for a while is going to making images, illustrations to build up the portfolio on Fotolia and get accepted on iStockPhoto as an illustrator also. Luckily I will be able to do that and keep working on the Betfair trading at the same time. The illustrator thing is following on from the photography. I sell photos on various microstock sites and what is nice about it is that once I have the photo loaded up there, it can sell many times. So it is a do the job once and keep on getting paid type of residual income that I love. I chronicle my microstock progress on my Spondicious website so if you are a photographer and you think you can take photos, why not have a look.

Football Trading

Last night I was able to have a quick trade on the Crewe vs Leeds. I only put €8 on the back bet under 2.5 goals and took profit of 3 ticks. I wasn’t going to be able to give it full concentration so I was just going to let it run. If I wasn’t busy with other things I would have took a few more ticks off it after the goal also. The first goal went in around 36 minutes with Leeds scoring the only goal of the match.

Forex Trading

The dollar is still very weak and my present position is moving out of the reach of the grid trading for the robot. So I will have to be content with the interest I am getting daily on the trades until the hedge trade comes back in line. Today it is running with a 22% drawdown on my position although the grid trading has added more than 3% to the balance since it was started 12th December. All in all it is doing what it is supposed to be doing.

I was very tempted to do something with the Sevilla vs Barcelona game this evening as it was on the TV but this week I can’t get anywhere near the computer in the evening to do any trading. You kind of have to be paying attention when you are trading and having visitors makes that impossible. As soon as I can I want to have a run with the Soccer Mystic to see if it is as good as it looks for trading the football.

Forex trading
In the meantime the robot has been trading for me on the forex and gathering a few cents here and there. I have a trade running since December 12th that started with a balance of $435 and is now at $449. The increase is from the grid trading that happens when the market moves up and down. The drawdown has been in between 5 and 17 percent which is quite normal. So long as the balance keeps on growing with the grid trading that’s OK. Don’t forget also there is interest being earned daily also. I have the robot set so that it will take profit and restart a new trade when there is 5% of profit not including the grid trading money. This robot is from forexforsmarties.com and if you have not seen how it works so far then take a look. Check out the videos that show you how to get started.

Any questions let me know – I always like to hear from you anyway.