I’m easing myself into the tournament from a trading perspective. After all, it’s been four years since the last one! You also have this problem in that only handful of world cups have been ‘tradeable’ before on the exchanges. Way back in 2002, the exchanges were still quite immature, to the point where I don’t have enough data to comment on that tournament. Even the tournament after that was a little weak in terms of real betting data.
Trading before the off
Because liquidity is so high at the World Cup, even on small stakes though you can get a decent result. I traded a separate account on this match to show this, these results were achieved with just £100 stakes. With £11 doesn’t seem much it’s a 10% return on staked used and, of course, there will be a significant number of matches at the tournament and stakes of £100 are more than comfortable, even on lower volume exchanges. You are probably missing a trick if you are not giving pre-off trading a go.
The early part of the tournament
I spend most of the first set of matches ensuring my general approach is correct and that I’m getting a full understanding of how the market ‘feels’. The feeling is important as this tells me what trading style to adopt and how aggressively to adopt it. Feel is all about how the market is moving and how much money is there, and how quickly it is matching. Once I know that I will know just how far I can push things.
My overall strategy for all football matches is simple. Try and earn as much as possible before the off at low risk, then use some or all of that money in-play. By trading a match before the off at low risk you get some ‘free money’ so you can put that to use in-play and compound your initial earnings. You don’t need to do anything fancy, you just need to adopt a sensible trading strategy.
Even if the initial earnings are small, they can turn into much bigger ones. It’s amazing how doing this can lead to quite big returns for relatively small risk. As it’s a knockout tournament team will be really focused on just getting through the next game. Anything can happen!
Just how big is the world cup from a trading perspective?
As you know liquidity on the world cup can be significant. On that point, I do have data on the World Cup. I posted a video this week to talk through some of the data. I was going to write it up, but that was going to take far too long, so a video seemed more appropriate. View the video if you wish, as this may help you get a better idea on how the tournament could shape up based on the data from previous worlds cups.
Anyhow, I hope the video is useful. Good luck with your trading and whoever you are supporting!
