Hedge your bets
Last night in the champions league we had a range of generally uncompetitive matches. Only Galatasaray vs Braga exhibited the characteristics of a match that could potentially be tight.
Of course you can never quite tell in Football. The average number of goals scored is quite low so results can be highly variable. A ball in the back of the net off a ‘wicked’ deflection, why are all deflections ‘wicked’?, could easily see a side take the lead unexpectedly. From there, as the time ticks away to zero, the opponents have a limited opportunity to turn things around. . With football uncertainty reigns supreme so to reduce your variability when betting or trading, especially where events all have the same start time, you should try hedging your risk across a number of markets. If we look at last night you can see the benefit of this: –
Betting
Let us say you just picked one match to back the home team. You could have picked the big win, though that would have been unlikely, as it was only 1 major win out of 8 matches. You could have easily chosen incorrectly as you had 6/8 matches or a 75% chance of getting it wrong and losing your money. However, if you backed all Home teams with £100, you would have netted a cool £457. By hedging your bets across many markets your judgement shifted to one of, ‘Will there be an upset tonight’, rather than ‘Where will the upset occur’.
Backing the draw would have returned -£415 to level stakes, but backing ‘1-1’ would have broken even – hint of a trading strategy there!
Talking of trading, all these positions so far would have been just traditional outright bets only but you can see how hedging by betting in more than one market can work pretty well, but it works even better if you trade: –
Trading – Match odds markets
By trading we mean taking a position then exiting that position at some point during the match.
If you backed the home teams and traded out, then rather then picking 2/8 being winners, you would got 4/8 winning trades by backing the home team. Switching to backing the away team you would have won 6/8 trades and achieved 4/8 wining back to lay trades on the draw, there was only one winning draw back bet on the night.
The interesting thing last night from a trading perspective, was that two matches produced a profit whether you backed or laid the home team, away team, favourite, outsider, or the draw. Basically you would have won whatever you did, as long as you traded. That in a nutshell is the beauty of trading.
Summary
So, betting or trading on one market is fine, but often narrows your task to a difficult scenario. Broadening it changes the fundamental question you are asking and also will yield a higher expectancy of a positive return.
Use Bet Angel’s Guardian tool to trade (or bet) on multiple markets simultaneously.
Category: Football trading strategies, Trading strategies
