Category: Featured
Aintree Festival and the Grand National
Cheltenham is behind us, and the flat season is officially underway and this weekend we have the last major jumps meeting of the year which is, of course, nations favourite race – The Grand National.
While Cheltenham attracts the more serious and seasoned punter the Grand National is undoubtedly the race that everybody knows and anyone usually has a punt or gets involved in some form or another. That usually throws up some great trading opportunities.
Aintree Festival
The Aintree …
Australian Open 2018
This week sees the first major sporting event of 2018 and the opening grand slam of the tennis calendar as the Australian Open gets underway.
Live scores at the Aussie Open
Some of you may remember, that last year for the first time Betfair where unable to provide the live scores via their API (which is where Bet Angel gets them from). Unfortunately, Betfair has confirmed they will not be providing them again this year. I’m not sure of the …
Trading Football on Betfair – Trading under 2.5 goals
The Soccer Mystic profiling tool is a way to help identify opportunities and give you that all important edge when trading soccer matches – it’s packed with a number of features to assist you when trading any of the Match odds, Over/Under or Correct Score markets and will help you pin point what times to get into and out of positions for the most value.
If you prefer the Over/Under markets then Soccer Mystic can offer you some invaluable help, …
The British Grand Prix
After a successful week, I’m ducking out of trading seriously today to watch some sport and do a few other things.
British Grand Prix stats
The British GP is curious in that, for a non-street circuit, the average outcome is quite variable from Grid to Finish. It’s the least certain race outside the street circuits. 71% of poles end up on the podium and it’s 50/50 whether second or third on the grid will end up on the there also. …
Punting on Politics – General election turnout
I did a little piece on the General election recently for Betfair. Underlying it was some work I’d looked at recently on turnout for elections.
Apathy
When the election was called the markets shifted significantly anticipating a Conservative landslide. I immediately wondered if there would be a correlation between certainty and turnout. But first I had to work out what a ‘normal’ turnout would look like.
I looked back at elections since the second world and munched through some …
French Open Tennis – Roland Garros
Today see’s the start of the 4th Round of the Roland Garros and its certainly been an eventful first week to say the least.
On day one the women’s world number 1 Angelique Kerber was dumped out 6-2, 6-2 making her the only number one seed ever to be eliminated in the first round of the French Open – there has only ever been four number ones who have gone out in the first round across all Grand Slams.…
Are Arsenal getting better or worse?
Arsenal to finish fourth and win the FA Cup? Maybe not this year then, so it’s Wenger out?
Financial fair play?
I look at many different aspects of football aside from the general market pricing. Being able to read a financial report, a club’s financials can be quite useful for predicting long-term performance. Clubs that carry a lot of debt expense will see their ability to finance the purchase of new players squeezed. Clubs that are flush with finance can …
The London Marathon – When I became a QPR fan
If you are running the London marathon today then, I’m jealous! But I’d like to wish you the best of luck and hope you have a really good run. Good luck to all those running or watching the London Marathon today.
I still harbour ambitions to do one more marathon, but for the moment I will remain on the side of the road encouraging support. I’ve been really good this year and gradually built up my distance again, but once …
The Bet Angel trading forum & community
As regular Bet Angel forum users will be aware last month the forum was upgraded and moved to a better, faster server. The simple reason for this – to handle the increased flow of traffic which has been steadily building for some time now.
Philosophy
We have a simple philosophy for the forum, that has helped it grow steadily over time. It’s viewed very much as a collective effort, the sum of all participants, not just Bet Angel users, and …
There is Light at the End of the Tunnel!
We are now in the middle of February which is historically the poorest and hardest trading month of the year on the pre-race horse racing markets, typically there will only be around £450m traded this month which is around 40% less than the amounts expected as we hit peak season where the monthly volume will of increased to around £750m.
How does this effect thing from a trading perspective?
When trading any market liquidity is key none more so than …
Bet Angel user guide, upgraded!
As regular users will know Bet Angel has continued to grow year after year with new features continually being added, often at the request of our users. This has inevitably resulted in an ever-expanding and extensive online user guide.
Quick links
We have therefore noticed that sometimes finding the information you’re looking for may have become quite time-consuming. For this reason, we have added in a new tab ‘Quick Links’ which we hope will make the online user guide more …
Starting out as a sports trader – Scaling up
I was back on my small account on Monday. I was recording a few videos at low stakes (I posted one last week) and also giving instruction to my daughter; she is progressing nicely.
I’m also teaching a new recruit to the team. It’s interesting to watch and learn from newbies and how they look at the market. I feel like It’s a microcosm of the entire market. I ‘feel’ this in the market every day, but experiencing first hand …
Be Prepared – Always Have a Back Up Plan
How many times have you had an open trade only for an unforeseen incident out of your control too suddenly occur resulting in you not being able to close your position and possibly leaving you staring at a hefty loss – especially if it’s an open lay position.
If this is something that your fortunate not to have experienced yet then it’s worth reading on if you want to keep it that way, for those unfortunate to have already been …
Gone To The Dogs
So if this is your first years trading then the last few weeks may have been a bit of a shock for you following the hectic summer period.
You go from being spoilt for choice over which markets to trade just a few weeks ago, to suddenly having very few markets to look at. The ones which are available will have a very different feel to what you have become accustomed to – however this is perfectly normal for this …
Manual or automated?
It was with interest this week that somebody pointed me to a blog post debating, or should I say justifying a stance on automated trading vs manual trading. Here is my angle on it: –
Financial markets
If you look to financial markets you have many aspects to it. High-frequency traders, slamming in positions in and out of the market to scrape a few cents per trade in as large a block as they can get through. A very specialist …
Curtain comes Down on Rio 2016 Olympic Games
That’s it for another 4 years having been glued to my TV for last 16 days flicking from one sport to another next week I can begin to get back to some normality and trading – for the next few weeks at least!
As a big cycling fan it was great although no huge surprise to see the GB track cycling team perform so well at Rio 2016 and bring the largest haul of medals home – with the same …
How evening racing is different
We have now started the evening racing in earnest and it won’t stop till the end of August. So you have four months to make hay while the sun shines, not forgetting we are in the England, so it won’t shine much.
However, there are at least four different states that you see in racing during this period.
(1) Afternoon racing
This tends to me higher quality than the evening racing and will therefore trade differently.
(2) Evening racing
There …
US Masters – Trading Golf markets
I like the US Masters, mainly because it’s the only major played on the same course each year. This means you can collect a ton of stats on how the course plays. This gives me a good guide as to when to trade in and out of a position. You can do this on most courses, but because the Masters is at the same location every year it is much more predictable.
If you are a golf player, when …
Cheltenham day one preview
Willie do it again?
As I wrote last year, Willie Mullins is once again looking likely to dominate the first day of the 2016 Cheltenham Festival. It does seem, according to some that he simply has to turn up on Day 1 of this year’s equine Olympics and leaves everyone quaking in their boots; especially the bookmakers! I have to say that Willie may not have it all his own way as his horses do not, in my humble opinion, …
Echo’s of 77
Leicesters heroics this season echo me back to a period in English football when the impossible happened. The 1977/78 season.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977%E2%80%9378_Football_League
Liverpool were the dominant team and had been for some time. Then out of nowhere popped Brian Clough and Nottingham Forest to storm to the title.
Of course back then things were a bit different and teams didn’t have £1bn to spend on a squad. So success now would be even more remarkable.
More remarkable about that period was …
My trading journey
February can be a bit quiet and with a lack of high profile events in some key markets can be a bit depressing. So how about some inspiration for you?
I grew up in the middle of nowhere into a family of not much. I didn’t arrive in the world with massively high expectations lets say. I left school with not much of a leg up into the world, as my favourite subject was playing sport, so I couldn’t hang …
Option to profit
Been nosing at the Derby vs. Man Utd FA Cup this evening with interest.
Man United are about evens for the match and playing away. This struck a chord with me.
First off, everybody knows how bad Man Utd have been recently. Their last 11 home games at half time have been 0-0,0-0,0-0,0-0,0-0,0-0,0-1,0-0,0-0,0-0,0-0. OK they are away and at a team a division lower, but confidence is obviously fragile. If Derby want to make things difficult, especially tactically, they can.…
Help me, help you
Over the last 15 years I’ve researched roughly a million markets, traded somewhere approaching 175,000 and recorded thousands of videos. I often record myself trading so I can look back and understand how I could do better, I’d recommend it!
The problem
It would be nice to publish a lot of those videos, unfortunately I don’t tend to have the time to do that. We keep a small team here and there are only 24 hours in a day! That’s …
ATP World tour finals
The ATP World tour finals have already started, in case you hadn’t noticed, and tonight we were treated to a Djokovic vs Federer rematch. Today Murray vs Nadal.
I like this tournament. I’ve been a couple of times now and it’s such a different feel from the slightly stuffy and exclusive Wimbledon. It was great to hear that London will continue to host this series until at least 2018. It’s much more vibrant than Wimbledon and you WILL get …
An elegantly timed Betfair outage
Ok, so no Betfair outage is elegantly timed in reality, but as you may have noticed, I’ve been quite this week. That’s because I find myself in San Francisco at the moment. So the outage was ‘handy’ as I wasn’t going to be trading this morning, but also the ‘why’ bit of my location explains why the outage came at a good time.
Silicon Valley
I’m always interested in tech startups and of course Silicon Valley is home to an …
US Open Tennis – Scoreline statistics
US Open Tennis – The statistics behind the scorelines
Advice from Dan from tennisratings.co.uk .…
I thought I’d look at the US Open on a historical basis and look at the statistics behind the scorelines. An angle I wanted to look at for this blog post was laying players in-play when either a set up, or two sets up. As an introduction, the table below shows the percentages each correct scoreline occurred in Grand Slams since 2011:-
| Scoreline | 2011 |
Knee jerk reaction to new football season
Not a trick question, but how many games are there in the season?
Well there are 38 in the premier league and 46 in the other three tiers. So if you win the first match of the season what impact would that have on your chances? Not much you would think. Three points divided by 38 isn’t exactly a large number, but last weekend we saw quite a large reaction to some mundane first day results.
Chelsea’s difficulty in breaking …
How to win the league
As the new season is upon us all football fans up and down the country will no doubt have fresh hopes about what the season will bring. Transfers have been done and hopes raised. But what is it that makes a team successful? What is the most defining characteristic?
The defining characteristic
As is well known, a lot of club revenue gets spent on wages to attract top players. This is in the hope that buying talent buys performances. Quite …
Life on the trading desk of a big bookmaker – Pt. 2
The day came to start my new role as an ‘in-play sports trader’……
Inside the offices
The department was massive, large TV screens covered the walls, there were rows of desks with multiple screen set-ups. It looked fantastic, I knew I had made the right decision to apply for this job, I felt a buzz just from being there.
I pictured it to be like the trading floor of a stock broker’s with everyone rushing …
7/7 – Why I never turn my phone off, ever….
Most people know the significance of this date, but for a small group of traders this date has even more significance.
Our story of this day
It started the same as any other day. I was scheduled to do a talk in central London on guess what, trading on betting exchanges. I took the train in central London, as did my delegates and after switching from overground to underground I remember clearly looking at the clock on the exit at …
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