Category: Trading strategies
Tennis – Dominant Sets in ATP Masters Events
A popular form of trading is laying the player a break up – I’ve written a great deal about it before, and the positive aspects of this type of trade is that it’s easily quantifiable (using projected hold and break lead/deficit loss/recovery statistics) and that risk is much more limited than taking a position when the set is on serve.
The worst result for this type of trade is when the player you have opposed turns a single break lead …
May Bank holiday racing
So that’s the Guineas parked for another year. I did OK, but didn’t get as much as I would have liked from the feature races, I just can’t get my orders filled quickly enough. But it was a satisfactory result. Over the two days I produced remarkably similar results. So 10/10 for consistency but maybe a bit less for the overall results.
Another public holidays means a whole bundle of racing on the card, often too much. If you have …
Trading early season flat racing
With Aintree out of the way we are now in the transition to the full flat racing season and evening racing.
The seasonal transition from one code to another can present problems if you bet and trade with the same style throughout the year, so it’s worth exploring what is different about this time of year.
The first thing to note is that the late season jumps racing has been suffering more than normal this year. A dry April and …
The best and worst players from winning positions in the ATP
Further to last week’s article which looked at the application of a blanket strategy, and the usage of WTA stats to illustrate why this is a bad idea, I thought I’d move onto some more detailed applications of statistics in the ATP, which is something I’ve been looking at in great detail lately.
An objective way to categorise front runners has been my major focus, with a particular plan of trying to work out which players are lucrative to …
Tennis Trading – Why a blanket strategy is usually unsuccessful
Frequently I get asked whether a given blanket Tennis trading strategy is a good idea, and almost always my answer is ‘it depends’. This probably frustrates the person posing the question, but it’s a genuine answer – it really does depend on the given situation, and the two players participating in the match.
The simple (and obvious) reason why this is the case is because not all players are created equally. Some players are good at serving, others’ strengths lie …
Court Speed in Tennis Trading
Recently on Twitter, there has been detailed conversation about court speed, and the impact that it has in Tennis.
As a trader, let me make one point abundantly clear here – I don’t care why the conditions at a venue is fast or slow, just that it will be, and that it is possible to ascertain this information in advance. Advance knowledge of conditions will enable me to work out the likelihood of players holding serve, and a fast hard …
Finding value in a football match
Not so long ago I tweeted the following: –
Tonight Bournemouth play Reading away but there is an interesting metric going on tonight. Reading are reasonably, though not entirely clear, of relegation in the Championship. But more importantly they are only 90 minutes away from an FA Cup final.
Bournemouth are in the position of being in complete control of their destiny at the top of the division. If they win every match remaining they will be in the premier …
Tennis trading – Assessing the first break of the match
Laying a player when a break up in the first set is a popular trading entry point, so I thought I’d go through some of the stats from the recent Miami Masters/Premier Mandatory tournament to get some concrete data for several variables for the player leading by the first break in the first set.
These variables were as follows:-
- ‘Train’ percentage – the percentage of the time that the player who took the first break in the set won the
Trading the US Masters Golf
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 …
How to treat teams with nothing to play for
As we approach the business end of the season, with titles being decided, clubs scrambling to achieve European qualification and some fighting for their lives to avoid relegation, in each of Europe’s top leagues there will be a group of teams that don’t fit into any of the aforementioned categories. They are far enough clear of the relegation zone to not be concerned, while the European spots are out of their grasp in the number of games remaining and these …
Creating a Tennis Trading strategy
I’ve had a lot of people ask me about creating a Tennis trading strategy recently, so I thought I’d post an updated version of old article from January 2014 which a lot of people have found useful in the past.
For this article, my plan was to detail how to create and use an effective ‘script’ to trade a tennis match, by means of laying player’s service games and laying the player a break up in a set.
It is …
Assessing Over & Under Performing ATP Players
Having a strong interest in sports analytics, reading this article which focuses on the success of FC Midtjylland and Brentford FC – https://decorrespondent.nl/2607/How-data-not-humans-run-this-Danish-football-club/230219386155-d2948861- naturally piqued my interest. These two clubs – both owned by millionaire hedge fund manager and sports bettor Matthew Benham – use data analytics to assess performance in a number of areas, and one way that they use these analytics is to look for undervalued players in the transfer market.
When I read this article, my first …
Trading Cheltenham
This year I’ve decided to upload a video to narrate some of the stats and detail behind how Cheltenham trades. It seems much easier to express and emphasise points and show a number of things on a video that you can’t do in text. So I’ve created the longest video yet and uploaded it for you!
For those of you that want the text I’ve prepared a long document for you here. It should be of interest one way or …
Saturday Soccer Stats – Do refs affect goals?
With QPR having lost six of their last seven matches things are looking bad for the promoted side, especially as they only have two remaining home games against current bottom-half teams and those are
Analysis of Top WTA Players
Top ten versus top ten is a facet of Tennis that is quite under-researched, and I’ve mentioned previously that generally the ATP elite players in particular have slightly more breaks of serve against each other than the Tour average.
Something I’ve also alluded to is the fact that some players are – to use a cricket phrase – a ‘flat-track bully’. According to dictionary.com, an exact definition is ‘a sportsperson who dominates inferior opposition, but who cannot beat top-level opponents.’ …
The low point
So here we are in mid February, in the depths of winter.
Australian Open tennis has just finished, Cheltenham isn’t too far away but for now the immediate outlook is a little weak for me. We have the champions league, but that’s only two matches on a Tuesday and Wednesday. Europa league looks a bit more interesting, though less volume. There is World cup cricket, but in a different time zone. So there are opportunities around but in general things …
Luck of the draw
The FA Cup fifth round is upon us and unlike previous years the competition has been very interesting so far.
A raft of premiership clubs have already been dumped out of the competition and that’s changed the shape a bit. In the fifth round this year the premier league clubs account for 96% of the market. This is lower than previous years which have been 98.76%, 98.36% and 99.30%.
So for the first time in a few years that percentage …
Why Tiger isn’t roaring anymore
You must have noticed the news this morning that Tiger Woods is taking an indefinite break from Golf to rebuild his game. He had better hurry as he is now 39 and as in other sports age is an important factor in Golf.
Typically you have to look at a sport along two lines to determine where a player is in there career. One is age, as this is defining characteristic of strength and agility. The other experience, this tells …
Testing times? Profit from them
Trading on Formula One racing may seem unusual and starting to trade even before the season has even started even more unusual, but it can often present some really good opportunities.
At the start of each year after a winter break, I watch preparations for the new Formula 1 season with interest. The various teams are testing new cars and configurations and it generally leads to a mixed bunch of results. But typically that’s what testing is all about. It’s …
Profit graphs – Visualising data on Bet Angel
One ‘trick’ I use with Bet Angel uses two ‘hidden’ features. It has help me improve my trading no end, especially on unfamiliar sports.
The two features I use are the Excel link and the automation. They both work in the background for me while I trade, or even on another machine to collect data on a market I may or may not be trading.
What they are doing is pulling in data from the market I am trading which …
Trading Relegation markets
I recently did a piece of relegation markets, concerning manager sackings which often occur at Christmas and new player arrivals / departures in the new year.
I have written a short piece for Betfair and a longer one for Racing Ahead magazine, but I think the video I did on You Tube is probably the best overall summary. You can view it here, or I have embedded it at the end of this video.
To supplement this video you may …
Bleak Mid winter?
So here we are in the bleak mid-winter, but you perhaps may not know it but for one sport it always feels that way.
For racing, this is a time of year when things are a little quiet. It gets worse next month traditionally, but so far we haven’t lost that many meetings to the weather. So its an opportunity to analyse, prepare and research. Cheltenham is just around the corner so that’s always at the front of my mind.…
How to lose £30m in seconds
Over the last year I’ve been speaking to a lot of organisations, in sports and non sports markets, that hedge or don’t hedge their positions.
I think I can do a job for people who don’t hedge, but curiously, the general message that’s been coming back is that there is no need to hedge. Margin is lost by hedging and gained by decent management of positions. I think that the prevailing view, despite losing margin in the process, is that …
Regulator gets tough on Spoofing
It would be nice if this were a statement related to Betfair, but hey, such is life.
This actually is a statement from regulators in financial markets. Spoofing there is consider a form of market manipulation and therefore is illegal. The deal in financial markets is if you manipulate a market to profit it’s wrong. The rationale behind this is that you are tricking people out of their money. This doesn’t add any value to the market and is a …
Carling cup quarter-finals
I put this video up on You Tube yesterday and thought it was worth documenting on the blog as well for people that haven’t seen it. But basically there are a couple of nice set-ups in the quarter finals.
Is NBA the new WTA?
During my recent travels in the US I sat down at a bar one evening and watched some Basketball. It was an entertaining experience. Fellow bar attendees proffered their opinion and curiosity overwhelmed me, so I reached into my pocket fired up the Betfair app and had a look at the market.
Here is something you may not know. You CAN’T actually log in and place a bet from the US, but you CAN actively look up a market and …
Incentive to score
Incentive to score is a key element of a football match.
This can be present in any football match, but is typically dominant in knockout tournament or where a particular result is required. So it could also apply to matches where a result is needed be to avoid relegation, to reach fourth spot in the league or qualify for the next round of a tournament or something similar.
Some teams will have a big incentive to score, others to not …
How Betfair’s new API is an opportunity
Nobody seems to like change, but I’ve learnt over many years that change tends to bring opportunity along with it. Change is a fact of life and therefore opportunity is too!
API NG
Just over a year ago Betfair announced the cut off date for API 6 and the switch over took place in early November this year. When Bet Angel was first developed there wasn’t even an API, the fact the old API was called API 6 tells you …
Kaizen
Nobody is perfect
You know what, nobody is perfect. We all get emotional, we all defend our views and our patch of turf vigorous and sometimes errantly. But when I started 20 years ago I wanted to achieve something really special. So each morning I wake up, that’s my objective. I think about what I can do today to nudge my activity to a new level. I think hard about what I, not others, are doing and how I can …
How extrapolation trips people up when trading
A trend is your friend, until the end.
One of the most common mistakes I see in newbies is trend following. Trend following is when you latch on to a pattern and extrapolate it. It could be a horse that is heavily drifting or coming in, perhaps a football team on a great run or form, or a poor one. Perhaps a team has had 20 games under 2.5 goals. Is there a trend, why, or this a natural aberration?…
Connect
Connect with us on the following social media platforms.