The Footy Trader

Premiership over for the season just the FA Cup to look forward to, although I will be working when the game is to be played.

There is the final of the UEFA Cup to look forward to I suppose. I will be €45 better off whatever happens although it will be easier for me if Rangers lose as I have that side of the deal laid on Betfair.

I suppose we can enjoy the European Football during the summer but without England in the mix it will not be so interesting for us English. I expect I will give my support to Spain instead. I have not seen so many of the Spanish La Liga games this year as I have been watching more English TV

Tags: UEFACup, Premiership, Betfair, betting, La Liga, FA CUp

Well who would have seen that. That is the beauty of the F.A. Cup and it is brilliant to see the smaller clubs getting in with a chance. It gets so boring to always see the top four clubs getting all the silverware.

I was trading on the game. I was in at the start of the game and only had a small trade going but I traded out when the odds were not moving very quickly. There must have been general expectation of plenty of goals at the start there. I was busy watching the game so I didn’t get involved again and it looked like Chelsea were constantly threatening to score all the time. I must see if I can get a TV closer to the computer so that I can follow what is going on better and still do some trading.

Correct Scores

With the dutching of correct scores my trial is still going great 560 euro up so far despite having a small loss today. It would have worked today also but Betfair wasn’t playing properly today when I was trying to set up the dutch for the Blackburn game. That would have had me break even.

To the left is the dutch I set up on the Barnsley Chelsea game.

I was in and out 8 minutes from the start in the under 2.5 goals market. I was not able to concentrate on the game much so I left it at a profit of a third of the 1% of the betting bank profit target for the day.

Just looking at the score 89 minutes gone and Portsmouth are in the lead. That’s a turn up for the book. I would consider a late lay bet on Portsmouth in the dying minutes in case of a late goal from the Reds, but they are already in extra time and the odds on the lay is at 1.15. I would do it if the liability is going to be really small for instance at 1.02 or 1.01. The a late goal from man United would be marvelous.

I love using BetAngel due to the fact it is what the professionals use to trade on Betfair, but today I decided to use SoccerMystic for a change. Still think that there are too many windows popping up sometimes but despite that is really is good to be able to see how long I might have to wait for the odds to drop down from the start of football game before I can put in the hedging bet to close the trade and be greened up. Soccer Mystic has a sweet graphing tab which sees the future.

I kept to my 1% profit target and was in and out of the market with the Middlesborough vs Sheffield United in the FA Cup replay in the the first 10 minutes of the game. Boom it was done and then shut up the shop. Seems to work the best for me to not be greedy in the first place and then to keep the time period of having a liability down to a minimum.

First of all to mention that the 80/20 tips came through on the last race at Wolverhampton. The horse Nigella got placed and took the profit to €29.96 which is 1.34 points up with 20 euro stakes.

Not so good with the tips from Racing Place for the day with it being minus €42.52 and thats minus 2.12 points of the betting bank. The total at the end of the day was still €104 in front. Good job it started with a very good days’ results on the first day. So far today with half of the days’ results in for Saturday it is down some more at €60 for the total. Still could turn around as there are plenty more races to come.

The 80/20 tips for the day are doing better though, the total is up to €85 so there is approximately an increase of €60 so far. I will update at the end of the day.

Football trading

I have a trade going at the moment on the Liverpool vs Barnsley game. Before Liverpool scored I put one on the match odds for them to win. I was trying out the Liability mode in BinarySoft and after the goal I clicked on the lay side to try and green up with out changing any settings. It got totally messed up and I and trying to rectify the matter now. It got to half time without any more goals. Liverpool should win the game but I would still prefer to trade out and have the profit locked in. To try and rectify the matter I put in another back bet on Liverpool but the odds didn’t move at all in the last 10 mins of the first half. When it starts again probably something will move and if Liverpool can get another all the better.

Update……

Anything can happen in the FA Cup and it was such a good idea to trade out of the early bet I had on Liverpool. Not long after I traded out Barnsley equalised and would you believe it but they actually won the game with a 90 minute goal leaving Liverpool no chance to reply. I lost 44 cents on that first bet but I made 52 cents on trading of the under 3.5 goals market.

I then traded on the Man United game and you can imagine what a disaster that was. I made most of the target 1%  on the under 2.5 goals and changed to the under 3.5 goals when I got caught with a goal and not being greened up. I traded out of that to a loss of €5. I went then to the under 4.5 goals to make up some of that and then traded on the Barcelona game at Zaragoza. I was left with a minus for the day but it was small enough and manageable,  minus 2%. It could have been worse, handy that I was able to make it up with some further trading.

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.

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 did just 2 games today Le Havre vs Montpellier with a profit of 0.80 and Prague Vs Plzen. With the French game I could have had more as it ended nil nil but I wanted to just do a quick in and out type trade just after half time. The Sparta Prague game ended 3 – 1 but I was greened up well before the first goal came at 27 minutes. The Swansea game in the FA already had goals when I got to look on the results web page so I didn’t bother with it. The final score of 6 – 2 make me think I would not have made money but the first goal was not until the 20th minute so I would most likely have been green by then.

I was looking for the market anomalies again with the Sparta game but with a 8 second in play lag I didn’t get on any of them quick enough.

Profit of €1.65 which brings the betting bank back up to €41.63. It is going to take some time to get it back up to where it should be but I will surely do it – You watch me……

Racing Place
Just had a quick look at the stats so far for this month on RacingPlace and it seems they are doing better than last month. For the month 0.94 points which is not that good I suppose but the last seven day have been decent at 21 and a half points of profit. I wonder if you should have a rule with Racing Place that you stop betting for the day if you get to a certain level of profit. I one comes in the placings at a higher price and the running total for the day is higher than the best you can normally expect on average from the system then, why not stop and get back in the next day.

When I am trading football though I think that having a target for the day is OK but if you stop when there is more left to trade onwards, are you losing out on possible profit? The good reason to stop would better along the lines of having traded a long period of time and you are getting jaded and not making the best decisions. I mean if you stop just based on a target then you have to start again the next day anyway. In a run of trading what is the difference between 30 mins between trades and one day? – Just a thought – What do you think?

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