Category: Trading strategies
Hope the Cheltenham trials are rubbish :)
Sorry for the provocative headline, but I’m not able to trade today. It will be the first time in over a decade that I will miss the highlight of January. So I hope it’s rubbish 😉
If you are trading however, good quality racing will great you today at Cheltenham, Doncaster and Fairyhouse; it should be a good day.
I’ve traditionally done well on this day and would hope that it lives up to expectations. I’ll be keeping in touch …
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.…
Can Leicester qualify for the champions league?
Did you know, Leicester have been here before? Read on….
Analytics
The thing I love about the modern football analytics movement is there are increasing amounts of, free, data out there that will help you make good, sensible, rational decisions. Far more than I could have ever imagined.
It’s a long way from when I wrote to a magazine in the 80’s about in-play football and the editors response was that he couldn’t see how it would interest anybody.
Quite …
FA Cup third round shocks
Ah, the romance of the FA Cup
The romance bit comes from a non league team coming up against a major club and beating them. But the evidence for regular giant killings is getting a little thin on the ground. But the third round and confidence can make a huge difference.
Small teams and progression
In 2014 we had Sheffield United getting all the way to the semi finals and of course in 2013 Wigan ensured the demise of Mancini’s …
Boxing day markets
So we are at Christmas and everything, apart from your wallet probably, took a break. Now it’s back with a bang on Boxing day.
Putting aside the cricket and the packed football fixture list, there are eleven race meetings today with 769 runners.
The problem you have on days like this is that the races fall all over each other and before one has finished another has already started. They are also generally lower quality and less interesting as betting …
Christmas week and trading (or lack thereof)
I noticed that Ayr has been abandoned today and that makes a bit of a mess of the card. So I think that’s me done till Boxing day on the racing.
It’s usually pretty quiet in the run up to Christmas day in the UK and this week is no exception. Because the holidays shift from year to year, this year Boxing day has fallen on a Saturday. That should be an interesting day! So I’m saving my gunpowder till …
SPOTY
Trading BBC sports personality of the year
Finding value in Football matches
Yesterday I posted the following:-
There were a number of reasons I said I was looking for some upsets, far too complex for one blog post. But one of the things was confidence. Not confidence in my ability, that’s not a problem :), but more confidence within the teams playing each other. It looked fairly ripe for an upset or two. Therefore I was looking to lay (and / or trade) with that in mind. I was opposing the …
Tingle Creek meeting
For some reason, I know it’s named after a horse, the Tingle Creek meeting at Sandown sounds Christmassy to me, but for sure is an early highpoint in December .
The meeting is joined by Aintree and the Welsh Grand National trial on Saturday to make a decent card. It should make up for the dross we have had during the week!
At this time of the year it’s easy to slip into some gloom. Like the weather, the markets …
Why trading horse racing works so well!
We had a glorious example earlier this week as to why trading is definitely a better way to earn money on Racing than traditional punting! The great thing about this trade, is that I did it office when we had somebody in for training; so it was great to pull of such a trade while they were here.
If somebody from a traditional punting background doesn’t understand why they should trade, show them this post!
The set up
We have …
Why trading works so well – On football
With the champions league football starting up again, I thought I’d take a look at football at a simple level and explain why trading works so well, using football as an example.
First off a simple maths lesson.
Finding value
When you look at odds on Betfair, they refer to the implied chance of that event occurring. If we saw Manchester United priced at 2.00, we simply divide one by those odds and it produces the implied probability of that …
Dustin Johnson is most likely a lay
First off here are the positive movers from yesterday’s play at the US PGA golf championship, the “fourth” major. Returns from trading £10 level stakes.
Jason Day – 14 to 7 : £10.00
Rory McIlroy – 13.5 to 10.5 : £2.86
Dustin Johnson – 17.5 to 5.7 : £20.70
Justin Rose – 22 to 14.5 : £5.17
Matt Kuchar – 70 to 25 : £18.00
Martin Kaymer – 85 to 65 : £3.08
Paul Casey – 100 to 80 : …
Liquidity at the Open Golf
The Open is almost upon us and while I realise it’s not a burning question on everybody’s mind, I thought I’d help you find the best time to take a position the market before it starts.
One of the problems with Golf is that early start in the morning. It will be around 06:30 for the Open. That prevents most people getting up early to stick a position on. That more or less includes me. I wasn’t sure though if …
Assessing ATP players in late games of sets
Something that is frequently discussed on social media is a player’s ability at the start of the set, or at the end of the set. Last week we looked at the ability of servers in this respect, but today I want to take the opportunity to look at strong and weak returners at the beginning or close of sets.
As mentioned last week, it is possible using point by point data to look at start and end of set statistics, …
The trading dead zone
It doesn’t happen often, but now and again all things conspire to produce a dead zone in the markets. Some are worse than others, but we are in a dead zone at the moment.
First off, this relates to the racing markets. Racing markets are seasonal and peak and trough around major meetings. The last was, obviously, Ascot. So you can get a trough before a major meeting, but you almost certainly get one after it.
Summer racing can be …
Tennis trading primer
Just a quick video as we have had a lot of people asking how you trade Tennis. So we have produce just a short primer giving you some ideas and a short discussion on Tennis, we hope it’s useful.
Today could be your independence day
Happy 4th of July to our American users. Hold on we don’t have any (yet)!
But the independence I am talking about takes a slightly different slant anyhow.
When we first designed Bet Angel it was a very simple one click interface. As time evolved we branched the product out to include more and more features, it was a reflection of our journey through the markets.
One of the early features we put into Bet Angel was the link to …
Using stats to generate entry points in Tennis
Something that is frequently discussed on social media is a player’s ability at the start of the set, or at the end of the set. This tends to be an imperfect subjective judgement which may or may not have sound statistical merit, but typically this doesn’t concern the average Twitter user!
It is possible using point by point data to look at start and end of set statistics, and to work out both whether there are different dynamics during these …
It’s not just about the big stuff
As Ascot fades into the distance you could be forgiven for waiting for the next big meeting, but it’s a fact that big meetings are the icing on the cake on the racing calendar, rather than the meat and potatoes.
Around 75% of racing doesn’t not fall in the ‘quality’ category so in fact a lot of the time a professional trader is simply trying to get something out of the market from whatever is around at that moment. In …
Tennis trading – Trading the Tiebreak
Many Thanks to Dan Weston who was the guest poster for this article, visit Dan’s excellent Tennis ratings site for lots of useful Tennis stats.
One area of trading which many Tennis traders seem unsure of, and some that I’ve spoken to even steer clear of completely, is tiebreak trading.
Tiebreaks are one of the most volatile parts of a Tennis match and due to this, it is possible for traders to have the ability to win and lose …
Punters ask for Moore
We are all familiar with a gambled horse.
It starts when a horse in a race receives particular attention. Seeing that horse is being backed, other people back it feeling they may be missing out on something. You find that often sets off a gamble as people discount a lot into the movement of the price of the horse as a ‘sign’, usually without any regard for the underlying rationale.
The Partnership gambler
Yesterday, we were treated to a different …
ATP In-Game Tennis Trading
Many Thanks to Dan Weston who was the guest poster for this article, visit Dan’s excellent Tennis ratings site for lots of useful Tennis stats.
Several weeks ago, we discussed point by point trading in the WTA, primarily looking at laying the player a break up and taking money out during a service game. As mentioned before, this allows more risk-averse traders to clear some or all liability at various in-game scorelines, and these were grouped into two brackets:-…
Apophenia
Apophenia is defined as, the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness”. For the full definition visit the wiki entry: –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
Apophenia has come to imply a universal human tendency to seek patterns in random information, such as gambling or charts. It’s a flaw that afflicts many.
Apophenia and Gambling
Probably the best known appearance of this in gambling markets is the gamblers fallacy. This is when a long run of results lead …
Let’s hope the Derby is this exciting
I’ve taken a diversion from just just posting an image of a result to putting some detail into events at the Oaks today. It was such a fascinating market from beginning to end.
The first thing that happened was ‘Legatissimo’ contracted quite heavily, but the pictures showed that it wasn’t enjoying it’s journey to post, so it looked a obvious lay. Slowly but surely the market reacted to it’s behaviour. This generally got worse till the horse cleared the main …
Two card Tuesdays
We have reached the time of year when Monday and Tuesday UK racing drops to two cards in the afternoon. It’s an important time of year, as this changes the characteristic of these cards to the negative, but also it allows you to do a few other things and skip these cards if needed.
Impact on racing
Racing tends to be lower quality on a Monday and Tuesday and that combined with the 15 minute gaps in-between the cards leads …
French Open Tennis – When it’s good to see red!
We are currently embedded into the first week of the French Open. It’s a tournament that is played on distinctive red clay, and if you want to bet or trade on this seriously, then it’s important to understand the significance of the surface at this venue.
Research by the ATP showed that the average length of a point on the grass of Wimbledon was just 2.7 seconds versus 8.2 seconds on Clay. To understand why this is the case, …
One Bank Holiday you may want to trade
Bank holidays can be a bit of mare. Four billions horses, racing over a thousand meetings.
OK, A slight exaggeration there, but you get the picture. Too much racing, too many courses, not enough quality and everything falling over itself.
But today that actually isn’t the case for once. We have 392 runners and they are spread of 42 races, but remarkably the card is lined up perfectly. That means, even allowing for later starts, it’s unlikely that any races …
In-game Tennis Trading
One of the beauties of Tennis trading is that there are many possible approaches which can all be successful, with some traders preferring to be exposed to risk, with others keener to take a more risk averse approach.
When laying a server, or the player a break up, we have previously discussed trading out if and when the break occurs. However for the purpose of this article, I want to look at taking money out during a service game.
To …
Laying the Set One Winner
It doesn’t need much explaining that in a best of three set Tennis match, players need to win two sets to win, and once they have won the first set, they are 50% of the way towards the number of sets they need to claim to win the match.
Due to this, a player’s price will be significantly shorter than starting price when they win the first set, which is a lay entry point that many traders like.
Personally I …
York Dante Metting
After a successful Chester meeting we roll onto York for the Dante meeting this week.
The York card looks OK but the other stuff on the card today looks a little ‘testing’. For a direct comparison look at the prize money. Bath has a grand total of £19.5k, York £185k. I’ll be cautious and use small stakes at Kempton as a result,
As we move through the early part of the flat turf season, the early part of the week …
Connect
Connect with us on the following social media platforms.