US PGA Golf
The ‘fourth major’ starts today in the US and should provide some opportunities. That said, I temper my enthusiasm as the Golf season wears on as history has shown that I do worse at each major as the year progresses. I don’t know exactly why that is, but I suspect as form lines get stronger, opportunities weaken.
The US PGA at first tee last year turned over £5m.
Some of the stats I’ve used here have come from the excellent Golf Stats website.
I like competitive golf tournaments where the winner is uncertain and a bit of bad weather thrown in can really mix up the results. You tend to find Golf is a game of confidence and form players tend to head into a tournament as favourites and that is what we see here. It’s notable that Jason Day has been playing down his chances.
Characteristics of a golf market
For all sports people, age eventually becomes the big battle. Most golfers decline into their early forties. Age tends to affect the long game first for golfers, so courses that play longer are harder for aging golfers. Baltusrol is a long course, it measures 7458. That would take me a couple of days to get around! In contrast, younger players can hit long accurate drives and so a course like this will favour them. Senior players generally can’t compete on courses like this.
But let’s put that into perspective. The interesting thing about golf is how little separates players from top to bottom, very few strokes. This presents a range of opportunities. I looked at the recent stroke averages from the top 100 players and the best was only 1.80 strokes per round better than the 100th. Golf is a game of slim margins. According to a site I regularly read, one player gained 1.5 strokes per round just from his ability to drive a long and accurate tee shot last week. That’s a huge margin! But the slims margins that golf inherits also means that a decent round of golf can be undone by a couple of bad shots. You simply can’t afford to have many of those at this level.
How to trade golf
Watch a video on trading golf markets
So how would you trade golf? The top things to look out for on Golf are how the course plays and the weather. Early or late tee times may affect the ability of players to score well, so watching the scores of groups teeing off ahead of the player you are following is a key tactic. The course will have easy and hard holes and this combined with the weather affecting groups at different times of the day will give you an insight into whether players teeing off later have an advantage or not. This gets easier later in the tournament as the leaders always start later on the last two days. So you have the catching group going out first. Once you have figured out what impact that will have you can decide on whether you want to back or lay the leader.
If you are looking to back to lay, finding one player to do that on is hard. Finding one of many, a bit easier. So I’d advise covering a range of selections and trading that.
Bet Angel
Because Golf is a market that is played out over four days, I tend to use the multi-market trading tool Guardian to monitor my over all position on the Golf while trading other markets. Popping that and other markets into a watch list will allow you to skip in and out of the market quickly and with ease, while not getting too distracted by what you are doing in the foreground. Guardian will also automatically cycle and update all the data from the market in the background for you. So it’s the perfect tool for trading and monitoring more than one market.
Enjoy the Golf!
Category: Golf
