Monday 9 May 2011

Carry on, more of the same please

A good night's trading - depsite the Blues capitulating their title aspirations at Old Trafford. I'd backed 0-0 in the Dutch cup match between Twente and Ajax last night and managed to get just over £30 matched at 15.5. On returning home and firing up the pc I was able to green this out for an overall profit of £4.51 - I've got to try to work out how to get more of money matched - does it mean staggering my backs over several prices maybe? If I'd got the full £80 odd matched I would obviously have nearly trebled my profit...

A successful couple of correct score trades including the above game, Zaragosa v Osasuna, Genoa v Sampdoria and Lyons v Marseilles. Am tired and need to hit the sack so no more detailed analysis tonight i'm afraid!

Saturday 7 May 2011

Better...

A small profit today - backed 0-0 Roma v AC Milan last night at 14. £35 matched allowing a hedge at 13.5 for a modest profit, over my daily target. I'm working tomorrow and we don't shut until 4 so I daren't risk a 0-0 trade on the big prem game tomorrow so will try for a 0-0 move on the Dutch game between Twente and Ajax and keep my fingers crossed that I'm home by five!

Tuned into the Spurs Blackpool game tonight at half time and was amazed to see it was still 0-0. With a golden opportunity having been gifted to Spurs by City's slip up earlier I did a half time scatter gun on the game with £6 total stakes. I also drip laid U2.5 down to 1.1. A converted Blackpool penalty gave me the trader's twitch... should I take the £10 or so green on 1-1 or hold my horses and hope for the equaliser? Working on the basis that Spurs would now have little choice but to go for it I stayed in. The equaliser came along at I think about 87 minutes and and my £6 bet was transformed into a £33 green with over £70 on 1-2 and 2-1. I was also able to green U2.5 for about 3 quid. It remained 1-1 so a nice result and a pointer that sometimes the best trades lurk in seemingly going nowhere games.

Friday 6 May 2011

Why take one step forward, when you can take eighteen back?

Perhaps this post should be subtitled 'Why I really MUST give up smoking!' or 'Why WRITE something simple, and DO something else?' You can probably sense there's been a major bollocks up, so I might as well get it over and done with, take the medicine, and move on!

0-0 Admira Wacka - 20 minutes to go - trading at 27. Got about £9 matched, price plummeted to 22 so greened up for more than my day's target. Got greedy, went back in at 25, price moved away... back to square one or slightly worse. It was getting toward kick off, and someone nibbled a bit at my lay. Then I went for a smoke....

Mrs Gun doesn't allow me to smoke indoors so I was pacing the back garden in the sunshine when a neighbour engaged me in conversation. Ever the polite person I was bought up to be, and mindful that she had almost certainly never heard of Admia Wacker, I humoured her for what seemed like ages. When I got back upstairs ... you can guess... the game had kicked off and it was 1-0......

To recap ... I went from a green of nearly twice my £1 target for the day to -£18... all by a) being greedy and b) being stupid

WHEN WILL I EVER LEARN????

Trading pre-match

Some people reportedly do all their trading at low risk times, either pre-match or at half time. By low risk I mean  trading when there is no opportunity for a goal to wreck your carefully laid plans! Notice I've called it 'low risk' rather than 'no risk' - an important distinction. I can afford to use large stakes trading like this, and if it should go against me I've got to be disciplined enough to red up - I can't afford to go in-play with my entire bank exposed on 0-0 for example! Hence low risk, not no risk!

As you can read on the 'What's going on here?' panel I have decided to try this avenue to compound the last £100 needed to make my mate's £300 back. I have set a very modest target of 1% of that £100 bank per day, and as the spreadsheet demonstrates this will take me from today until 14th July (Bastille Day, I do believe!) to achieve with an on target performance.


Hit the target on Bastille Day!!
The reason I've decided to try this approach is twofold... firstly I wanted a new challenge to encourage me back to blogging on a regular basis, I was getting rather bogged down in the lack of variety to my normal trading - it was becoming harder to write anything worthwhile. Secondly, I have been using this technique a fair bit recently to get cover on some markets to enable a low risk trade in-play. Knowing that some people exclusively trade pre match, and some apparently do it for a living, made me think that there is gold in them thar hills!

So, where to go prospecting for that gold? And, going forward, how can I use it to my advantage in other trades?

The honest answer to the 'where' part of that equation is that I'm not really sure, yet! I've had moderate success playing the 0-0 and U1.5 goals markets in the late Latin American matches and this is what sparked my interest. I've been backing and laying to the same stakes to give green on one side of the market in order to eliminate those outcomes from a more considered in-play trade. In order for this to work I've got to do one of two things...

Option one is to go for a green screen pre-match. The second option is to take a one sided green in play looking to green up all round as play progresses.

Let's look at 0-0 first. Typically this is priced at around 12's in an evenly matched game so I'll use that price as a benchmark. If I back at 12 and am able to lay at 11.5 I can either green all round for £4.34 or take a £50 green on 0-0 in-play to lay off at lower odds. Great. If the odds go the other way I'm effectively in the reverse situation - can I can risk taking  a £50 red on 0-0 in-play? In fact I can to an extent - the price of 0-0 in a tightly contested game tends to 'hang' for the first few minutes as backers and layers enter and leave the market trying to nick the odd tick or two here or there... I'd probably leave my £50 loss at the mercy of the game before accepting a pre-set red figure if no early goal results.

The under 1.5 goals market, and indeed the other goals markets, also offer pre-match opportunites.  Because the odds are substantially lower the rewards are also lower, but the similar trade to the 0-0 can be attempted.

Going forward it's my intention to investigate other markets - match odds for example - and to look for angles that this kind of trade might give in relation to a scatter gun for example.

Let's see what transpires...

Monday 2 May 2011

A decent trade soured and a 'set and forget' night......

Having worked all day yesterday and then gone to a social at a friend's house I got home rather late so missed all the excitement of Arsenal levering the Premier League door open a chink for the blues!

Fired up the pc and had a look at a Colombian game ... there'd just been a red card for the away team, and u2.5 was trading at 1.1 with a pre match starting price of about 2.4!! The score was 0-0. So I laid £100 at 1.06. By 80 minutes it was still 0-0 ... but by 85 it was 1-1! I backed u2.5 to give a £15 profit there leaving £70 odd on overs. With the clock ticking the 'Suspended' sign came up - 'appy days I thought! But it stayed up ... for ages....then I flicked over to flashscores to see 'match abandoned'.....According to the betfair forum the crowd had erupted after a disputed penalty and the referee was escorted from the pitch under the cover of police riot shields! These Latin games can get a tad bad tempered, but thanks to that mini riot the bloody game was called off in something like the 89th minute and all bets were voided!

The other game that caught my eye was the match between Dallas and LA Galaxy. Starting far too late to stay up for I was able to do a scatter gun with £9 stakes fully covered by a £9 green on both sides of that market with pre-match scalping. The match finished 2-1 to the home team so I opened my betfair account today to find myself over £30 to the good with absolutely no down side. Fantastic.