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

I looked at the Chelsea game to see what I could do with it. The plan was to put in the back bet in at the start of the game for 90 Euro and then lay off a third at 5 minutes and another 3rd at 10 minutes then green up at 15 minutes. The odds were slow to come down I thought but I still had it with 6 Euro profit on the unders when all the laying off was done. I put in an extra lay bet on the unders to leave it at about €3.80 on either side under and over. I did this with BetIE and in learning mode.

I also looked at the European games on but the liquidity was low on those games and I was not impressed the way the odds were moving. I did one of the games with 100 on and greened up at 15 or 20 minutes leaving a profit of 7 Euro. It was Bayern (Germany) vs Aris (greek) in which the final score was 6 – nil. The first goal didn’t go in until 25 minutes so it worked out prety good.

I wanted to make a video today of the  but I left it too late, the 20 day trial was up unfortunately. I will set it up when I put in some more money into Betfair at the beginning of January. In the meantime I have been looking at the stats for the first goal in Premiership games. Using the Soccerstats.com site I put data into a spreadsheet for the first 17 rounds of the season. This is what I have come up with….

At 5 minutes 93% of games are still nil – nil
At 10 minutes 82% are still nil – nil
At 15 minutes 68% are still nil – nil
At 20 minutes 61% are still nil – nil
At 25 minutes 56% are still nil – nil

So you can see that trading in the first five minutes should be great for making money. Only 7% of the games have a goal and that doesn’t mean that the back bet placed at the start of the game is lost. Unless there is a very quick equaliser it is possible still to trade out after a couple of minutes and reduce the possible loss. Or you can place a bigger back bet after that goal and trade out as quick as you can after that to bring it even or perhaps make a profit. It needs a larger back bet maybe 3 or 4 times the original so that you are making more per tick of movement after the market reformed. Or you could leave the initial trade running and be able to trade out when the odds get back to where you started.
It all depends on the game and some knowledge of the teams would be useful too.

My next move is to watch how the odds move in the next couple of rounds of the Premiership and see what sort of movement I can expect and the money I should win when things go right compared to the money that could be lost when the goals come thick and fast. I want to know if there is an optimum level of odds for the first back bet – how fast do the odds change and how many ticks the market moves on average at the start of a game and also after a goal has been scored. I will want to see what number of ticks it is usual for the market to move to when the goal has gone in. So that if I trade out straight away what level of loss will I lock in.

I am determined to use the stats to see if I have enough of an edge to make money from this strategy. Is it best to let all games go 15 minutes and green up or is it best to lay off in 5 minute intervals. Instinct makes me think that laying off gradually is going to be a best option as the first goal gets more likely as the minutes tick by. I think that the stats will give me the best strategy for making money with this market in Betfair. I expect that the gradual lay off and a re-entry into the market after a goal is scored to make some extra trading a few ticks and maybe to add a little more at the end of a game when there is still a nil nil scoreline. There is also the under 3.5 goal market to turn to on some games which could sweeten the pot a little also.

The other statistic worth noting is that so far the percentage of goals at the final whistle that are under 2.5 goals is 53% and in combination with making sure that I have a back bet at a value price then the under 2.5 goal market will be lucrative enough.

The day was successful yesterday, Sunday because first of all I got a profit and secondly because I managed to recover well from an early goal in the Barcelona game. Fancy going down a goal in the 2nd minute at home to Deportivo ???

Earlier I had worked a nice profit of about 5 euro and I was looking to add more to it in the final game of the day, I placed the buy trade before the game started and there was no chance at all to trade out with such an early goal. I was fortunate that I was able to do some trading after the market reformed to reduce the liability. I brought it back to 13.09 Euro when the goal went in from Barcelona at 41 minutes to equalise. I decided to leave it alone at that stage and do some trading in the under 3.5 goal market. I further reduced the liability buy locking in another 3 or 4 Euro. Then I went to the under 4.5 goal market when there was 70 minutes on the clock and bought a position with the view to hold it as long as possible and let the position expire at 100 on the BinarySoft BDI and take all of the money.

BinarySoft BDI has a nice what it slider thing where you can move the slider to see what you need to get a certain profit of loss on your current position. Even without that I could see that I would win €5.47 if it ended under 4.5 goals. I ended the day with €1.12 which isn’t a huge amount but as a percentage is good. Like I said I think being able to recover to a profit after the early goal is a super lesson. Still very pleased with the way that the BinarySoft BDI works. One thing that I have found to be really ice is how easy it is to spot anomalies in the market. What I mean with this is that sometimes there is money available on the lay side at a lower price than the the current best back price. It is nice to be able to put in an order and have it filled then immediately put in the next order and have an instant profit. These don’t last long but if you are quick it is easy money.

There have been a few games where I didn’t really want to trade because the liquidity was low and the prices don’t move so fast . I am not keen on the matches either where there is more than a tick between the back and the low price. Although sometimes it is possible to put in an order which is the best price on the back side and then when it does get matched put in an order on the lay side which is going to be the best lay price available and get it matched reasonably quickly.

And especially tough for supporters of Birmingham City. I was doing great today and I had just about got back to level after the couple of bad days I had during the week. Then the trading today was working great I traded on 4 games and the profit was coming on nicely. Then I was working the Birmingham City game, they were playing at Newcastle. I was greened up before the first goal but I felt I could get a bit more. Of course there was a goal right after. I reckoned that there was a high probability of a third goal and I was right.
The only trouble was that at 88 or 89 minutes I chickened out and traded out the position to take a loss of nearly 60 Euro. Boy was I miffed when the goal went in at 90 minutes. The only thing I should have done after trading out of that position would have been to put in a lay bet on the draw. I could have put in a large enough bet on there not being a draw and at that stage of the game in the market it would have not cost much if it stayed at the draw. For example if I got it at 1.01 then the 100 bet would have a liability of 1 Euro.
So my betting bank is way down now and instead of being a few days behind target I am sixty days or more behind target. I will still make the target in the 365 days of trading but this is certainly a bit of a set back.
The other thing I perhaps should have done is to have taken the 20 Euro hit after the second goal and then watched to see what was happening with the game. Decisions, decisions.

I will let you know more but now I am going out for the evening so all trading is on hold for the evening.

Right now I am sitting at my desk writing out by hand laboriously Bird in the hand is worth two in the bush 100 times – because it is a lesson I need to learn really badly, soon. Sometimes I get up in the night or early morning unable to sleep and I have a cup of tea and a biscuit and then go back to bed again. Often I type some things in the blog during the tea period or just read some things that I am interested in, like photography on my favourite web sites like Strobist.com for example. Last night though I thought I would have a look at some NBA basketball games, maybe I could add a little to the bank while I suffer insomnia.

There were 2 games in play on Betfair and in one of them I had a small profit then managed to try one more trade and lost it. So I was looking at a loss of 1.33 for most of the game. Right at the end though there was an opportunity to change that, I took it and had a profit of 68 cents to take home. That was the Utah vs Sacramento game. Utah were winning most of the game but took it in the last quarter.

The other game is where I had my mental challenge, my brain wasn’t up to speed I think and I didn’t read the signs well enough. Although to be fair the signs were a little confusing. For the first half of the game LA Clippers were leading convincingly 49 – 36 and in BinarySoft BDI the price went up to BP85 I had traded up to a profit of somewhere around 3 Euro. During the second half though the Clippers could not score and lost the game. I didn’t trade out of position because on my live score page it showed that they were leading by some points still. That was false though as the page wasn’t live refreshing as it should have been. They lost the 3rd quarter 15 – 18 and late in the game when I did get a more true idea of what was happening the scores were level I traded out to a loss of €22.53. I waited a little in case they could still get back the lead but it was not to be and the final score was 78 – 87 The Milwaukee Bucks won the game.

So why didn’t I trade out sooner?? First of all was the mixed messages I was getting due to the non update of the scores page. The other thing was that when I was trading up the Weight of Money indicator was showing that it should have been going down while I was trading it up. This was I believe due to there being a big lump of money on the layside sitting at the top end of the market which made the indicator look wrong.

Ah well I will live to fight another day even though I will have a losing day again today because I am not going to try chasing the loss. I will be about 20 days behind target for today and I will have to set my sights at 3% for some days to get back on target. When I get 1% profit on a game I will leave it alone and look for another game to work with.

What I wanted to do with the game that went against me was to use a stop loss to trade me out when the tide turned. But I found that with Basketball the swings of the market are big enough that you could have a swing that knocks out the stop loss and takes off the profit while the overall movement is up. Lessons to be learned……

There was a guy Steve that did the 1% challenge before so that he could have a very special day for his bride. He wanted to pay for the wedding with the proceeds of trading on Betfair. Started with 98 pounds on 6th march ended up with 874.76 on the 30th April. He started with numbering the bets but must have got fed up with that, as on the last page of the forum thread there are no numbers there. His stated aim was to get the betting bank to £500. He seemed to do pretty well with that challenge. Just looked at the results from May 2007 to October 2007 and it is not so impressive with £408 being the running total.

There is another fella called Richard Wildman going for a 100 to 100,000 challenge and he is having a go at coding his own betting software also. I have got very fond of BinarySoft during this weekend though so I don’t think I will follow that example. Especially now that I have BinarySoft working on my Mac.

I am still waiting for the cash to hit the betting balance from the bank, but I think that tomorrow will be the day. Then I have to think about the money management. Steve mentioned above took money out of the betting bank in Betfair to keep a steady amount in there. I think withdrawals like that are easier if living in the UK. For me it would take a few days to move money out and cost me to move money in also. So I will perhaps think about money movement of that sort in larger chunks and not too often.

So I am still in the ready for the off mode with trading but I have had a good weekend of trading though. The account is now up to 26 Euro from something like 15 Euro before the weekend. I traded mostly on football matches in the under 2.5 goals markets but this morning I had a quick go with an American football game just to try it out. Going by how it all worked and the size of the trades I think I will be able to hit the targets much easier and safer when I have a larger bank to work with.

In terms of money management a good strategy would be to work to double my money first. So then I could take out the original amount and do whatever else with it and then I will be effectively totally risk free with the money that is still left in there. I might do that and I might not, still thinking about it.

With the unders 2.5 I plan to use stakes large enough in the games I plan to do for the day that will let me trade a small number of price movements. I think it will be good to take the number for the daily target, divide it by the number of games I will trade on that day and the set the tick amount in BinarySoft BDI that I can be greened up in the first 5 minutes of the game.

When I made the last post, I had thought I would start on the challenge straight away even though I had only €17.09 in the betting bank. Then I was trading away on the unders and of course I didn’t get greened up before the goals went in. I was working on the EUFA game between Zenit St Petersburg and Nurnberg. It was going just great. I was in and out of the market just loads of times and up to 75 minutes in the game I was greened up to a nice profit. Then the goals started……. and I ended up losing about €4.50 on the game. It was a shame really but the trading had been going so well. I made a small amount on the Elfsborg game and a reasonable amount on the Bolton game. The net result was me being down by €3.38 which if I was going by the €100 I was going to have as my starting point would have been 3 days worth of 1% approx being behind on the first day of the challenge.

Maybe it is better to wait until I have all the funds in the Betfair account so I can do a proper job of it.

Things are not so bad now as yesterday I brought the bank back to €15.79 despite having a loss on the St Pauli vs Kaiserslautern game. I went for one more go and as soon as the bet went in the market suspended and there was not much I could do to try and bring it back again. I just traded out for as small a loss as I could. The end of the day yesterday saw a profit though and now I am nearly back to my €17.09 that I had.

One of the reasons for the profit was I believe down to using some new software. I have been looking for something I can use native on my Mac. I don’t like have to start up a whole operating system just to use 1 or 2 programs in Windows via Parallels, but there was not much choice really. This software I used yesterday is BinarySoft and it is cross platform so those of you that use Windows can use it also. It is not just for the Mac. It has a super ladder interface and has a different approach to the trading. You do everything based on a percentage of the probability of it winning or losing. When I first looked at it I found it very strange and difficult to get my head around the concept. But after using it live I found it easy to use and pretty easy to understand.

The way it works is that you buy or sell a position on the market. The “binary price” is a value between 0 and 100 which is simply the percentage chance of the event occurring. As the event becomes more likely the binary price will move towards 100; as it becomes less likely the price moves towards 0. The bet will “expire” at a level of 100 if the event occurred; or at a level of 0 if it did not occur.

I like the under 2.5 goal market and what I did was to buy a position for €0.10 per point at the price of 48. When the market goes up by one point I have €o.10 of profit and if it goes down by a point I lose €o.10. It is that simple !! So the way it works is that as the odds change on Betfair getting shorter the number in BinarySoft get closer towards the 100. I found that a good way to do it in BinarySoft is to put in a sell order either manually or as a trigger on an unmatched buy order and as soon as it hits the price it greens up.

Each game varies by the amount that the market moves but there is always movement in the right direction when there are no goals being scored. I like to have things greened up by 5 or 10 minutes if I can. I will have to make a video of this in action so you can see how intuitive this process is.

I did have a loss on one game that I wanted to catch up on if I could. I was down about €4 on the other game and I used the function in BinarySoft to show me what price I need to get to make up for the loss and have a bit of profit on the game I was working on. I just entered the sell order in the ladder and let it run. the game was still at nil nil so I reckoned it would be good for it. Worked out fine anyway with me greening up to a profit of €4.34 whatever happened in the game. Not bad considering the amounts I was trading with – I had a back bet in of €5.05 at betfair odds or 1.98 and another of €0.07 at 1.81. I had two lays at 1.59 for €6.29 and the final lay of €11.96 at 1.67. I wish I could remember now the numbers from BinarySoft because it would make more sense.

What is nice about the BinarySoft way of trading is that I don’t have to adjust the size of the stake to be able to green up. It is just a simple buy low and sell high thing. I know I am waxing lyrical about this software and might seem like a sales pitch but I really was impressed. I have been trying loads of different trading softwares lately and this is the one that made me go WOW! I still have affection for BetIE, which is great for dutching of the horses especially with the LazIE added extra. BetTraderPro is good too and for Windows is the one that is good for trading if you don’t like trading binary prices. The tabbed interface of BetTraderPro is good and so are the green up facilities. I still am more impressed with BinarySoft though which also has a way of looking at more than one market.

The others that I have looked at recently have been BetExplorer which is OK but I find the choosing the markets  somewhat tedious. MarketTraderPro I found to be very interesting and priced well. It has a decent ladder interface which is easy to use, and the possibilities for the triggered betting is limited only by your imagination to come up with ideas to take money out of the market. I might consider using that more if I see better results from RacingPlace as I could roll my own triggers to do what is necessary to get the horses backed in time for the races for the day. Must not forget BetAngel which is a pro application with Pro pricing for the paid version. I have the free version and I like the green up on it.

I was reading Ray the Sports Traders’ blog a couple of weeks ago and he stated that if you could do 1% per day as an increase of your betting bank then at the end of one year you would have €3,778.34 at the end of that year due to the compounding effect.

So here is the challenge to myself and my readers – Let do it !!!

As soon as I have the 100 in the betting bank at Betfair to get it started, which will be in a couple of days time I will document the rise of the bank from the 100 to the €3778 in 365 Trading days. Note that it is trading days that I am talking about, it is only fair after all to have a day off now and then. I am so keen to start today that I may just go for the 1% of €100 with the betting bank that I have already of €17.09 Euro.

I will be trading on the football as per usual and when there is no football I will have to find another sport that I can use to make the 1% per day. On 92 days I should have a betting bank of €249, half a year it will be €617 and on day 274 I expect to see €1527.76 sitting there.

The plan is to aim for 2 or 3 percent for the day but be happy if I make the 1% which will be the daily target.

I will tell you the total of the bank for the day and whether I am ahead of the target or behind by how many days. It would be great to see in the comments if there are fellow traders working the same challenge, so get posting if you are doing it too. I will be using Betty the betting bot for my trading, and probably testing other software for my readers along the way too.
Good Luck to us and good trading.

Seemed to work a little strange this evening with the Blackburn vs Villa game and indeed with all of the games of the Champions League too. The games are still running and I have bets on the Valencia game still to do the job and also a loss on the Villa game. I just decided to trade out of a losing position with 4 Euro at risk and leave it so that if it is under I lose 89 cents and 2 Euro if another goal is scored. Villa are winning 2 nil away from home.

I did have a small profit there and decided to go one more spin with the back and then lay after the first goal and the second goal went in before I could seal in the profit.

But what is strange is that the liquidity didn’t seem to be in the markets for the unders today. Many times I looked and there was a gap of 5 or 6 ticks in between the back and lay prices. So when you place a back bet you have to wait for the lay side to come down 6 or 7 ticks before you can see some profit instead of 2 ticks. I looked at the chart/graph show showing the movement of the prices and the first part of the match the wasn’t the usual downward trend of the prices that I expect to see. Weird

It is important to show that you can deal with a problem and protect your betting bank

stuff. I think I will have to make use of BetIE with the learning mode in a few games to see if this is going to be a regular pattern.

Update

The Valencia game ended so I have a small profit there. I had some profit from the Liverpool game and the Villa game will make it either a day of no profit of a small loss.

That’s OK though because it is important to show that you can deal with a problem and protect your betting bank.

Well Villa scored a third and that leaves me with the small loss of 1.17 Euro overall for the day, no worries though as it could have been worse if I had not acted upon the situation.

I have plumbed the depths with the losing the money on that horse race last week but I have been working the 2.5 goal market again and had a series of winning trades. I have been able to increase the betting bank from the low point by a small amount of Euros but a nice percentage. Better to work with a proven profit strategy than to go the very risky route of trying to win back losses too quickly with unsound practices.

19% increase in the betting bank in 3 days of trading

The percentage increase in the betting bank since the low point has been 19% approx. I am happy with that because looking at it terms of percentages makes it scalable to when I have a larger betting bank to work with.

I have been assessing more betting software and of course I make comparisons with BetIE the betting software that I have been using for some time now and find to be very competent. Why look at other software then? Well there is never anything that can be all things to all men (or women), each of the software programs I have looked have strengths and weaknesses. BetIE is a good allrounder and particularly good with the horse racing. Very good options in BetIE for dutching, hedging and basic trading.

For more advanced trading I find that there are other programs that do it better, though mostly it is the addition of a longer trading ladder that makes most of the difference. BetTraderPro I have been trying and I do like the way it works for the trading. The trade off (pun intended) is that it costs more to own or use. You have to either buy minutes of use or pay monthly. BetIE is great in that you only have to buy it once and you have good software that works with good support and no monthly costs.

BetAngel is a pro software that I have as a back up for when I want to do a greening up and BetIE sometimes struggles with that task. I have the free version of BetAngel and I plan to try out the test that is available for 20 days.I will be able to give a fuller report on what I think of BetAngel. It does look to have some great charts to help with the trading as well as the ladder interface.

One I am looking at now it MarketFeederPro. Like BetIE it has a learning mode which I find invaluable for testing out possibilities to see if they will work. It has a ladder interface which I don’t like as much as the one in BetTraderPro, but useful all the same. Another good point in favour of MFP is the fact that you can buy it outright and not have monthly expenses. A negative is that it does cost more than double the price of BetIE. But….. It does have a very interesting quasi programming or scripting that means it can be used to do things automatically. I am still finding my way around this, so you will have to wait to get more comment on this aspect of the program.

With MarketFeederPro you can tell it to look at all horse races for the day and apply certain criteria to the betting on those races. You can set up your own ideas as a script that will run independently once you set it in motion. Obviously while this is a benefit it is also something that could be quite dangerous and hazardous to your betting bank if you get it wrong. At least though you can test it fully with the learning mode though. I have the trial period with this until the 5th of next month so I will be able to tell you more as we go. I have been trying out a set of triggers with the under 2.5 goal market and it needs a good bit of tweaking to work that way I would want it to work. With the horse racing I have been having success with hedging on the favourite. There is a nice thing that sets up a greening up on Betfair trading based on a percentage target that you put into the settings.

I will tell you more about MarketFeederPro in the next few postings here. I suggest you have a look for yourself also. So you can see what I am talking about. There is a nice long testing period, which is totally necessary due to the complexity of the program. More so that you can test things out than you need to struggle with the interface though as it works in a similar way regards backing and laying.

Racing Place

The last 2 days have been profitable for the RacingPlace with just over 27 points of profit reported. Seems like they are getting back on top of things there. The last 7 days shows a profit of 38.28 points which would be 382.80 if you are using a stake of a tenner.