Trading World Cup football
What an exciting start to the world cup so far! I was discounting a drab, dull and tight affair; but it’s not been too bad to be honest and the Spain / Netherlands match was amazing. What a special goal from Van Persie. Big winner from that match may actually turn out to be Man Utd I suspect!
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 two world cups have been ‘tradeable’ before on the exchanges, 2010 and 2006. In 2004 the exchanges were still quite immature, to the point where I don’t have enough data to comment on that tournament. So I’ve just gently prodded the markets so far and will get more and more aggressive as the tournament progresses.
Even on small stakes though you can back a decent result. I traded a separate account on the first match to show this, these results were achieved with just £100 stakes: –
£32.14 return on £100 stakes is pretty useful and all you need is some time (and patience) to sit down in front of your screen BEFORE the match starts. If you are interested in exactly how I achieved this I will be giving a detailed explanation at the next course I’m running. My focus is always on achieving the best possible result at the lowest possible risk.
Early part of tournament
I’m spending 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’. 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 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. Twitter followers will know that I did this on the Brazil vs Croatia match to good effect by backing Croatia at 14’s and trading out at 4’s, then I reused the money all over again. It’s amazing how doing this can lead to quite big returns for relatively small risk. Even if you didn’t back Croatia, the early goal from the outsiders would have also given you an opportunity.
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!
Category: Football trading strategies
