Trading is preferred by many serious bettors because it gives you more room for manoeuvre than outright straight betting. With the traditional type of bet once you have placed it you can do nothing more than hope and pray that it comes in! Trading, however, takes advantage of moving odds in a sport and can be applied to many, including football, horse racing, tennis, and boxing for example. As a trader you are looking to lay low on a betting exchange and back high. The order in which you place your bets depends on the situation, but there is usually the option of cancelling with little or no loss if the odds start to move against you unexpectedly. It is one of the great advantages of a sports betting exchanges that you can bet in play with both back and lay bets and this is essential to the essence of trading.
| Rank | Name | Notation | Details | Discover |
 |
The number one Betting Exchange. 5% fees on winning trades. The highest liquidity. | Visit | ||
 |
Access to Betfair liquidity with a 3% fees on winning trades. Not all markets. | Visit |
As previously mentioned trading allows you to profit by backing at higher odds than you lay on the same contender. You do not necessarily have to know the eventual outcome but can lock in a profit before the end of the match whichever side wins! Thus you simply need to place two opposing bets on the same selection, but at the right odds. The trick, of course is to know which way the odds are likely to move in any given situation, and fortunately there are ways to get some good indications.
An exchange collects real-time information from sports events such as tennis and football which are taking place right across the world, and displays them as odds using amazing technology. There is a delay of only seconds between a goal being scored in a football match and the market reacting by being suspended, and then, a short time later the market opens again at adjusted figures taking into account the new situation. Horse race odds also change very fast during a race and these can be seen updated continuously and almost immediately if you have a special betting app that connects with exchange own API.
Betfair holds money staked on an event like an escrow, and then pays out on winning bets, deducting the money from losers, so as a bettor you are not betting against the house here but rather against other punters. Betfair takes a 5% commission for providing the service but they do give better odds than the bookmakers and they do not penalize consistent winners unlike most bookies.
Let us now look at some common examples of sports trades.
One way to trade football has been well known for many years, and it involves laying the draw. The background to this is that statistically apparently only about one in twelve football matches across the world end as a draw. So if you lay the draw then you already have a 1/12 chance of winning. But by selecting your matches carefully you can do much better than this because after laying the draw before the start of a match you then watch until a goal is scored, hopefully by the favourite team, because then the odds for a draw rise significantly allowing you to place that back bet at better odds than your lay, and so securing a profit.
Another example is to back under 2.5 goals in a game where you think it will be low scoring and then watching the match whilst the odds for this bet will gradually fall as long as no goal is scored. Usually after ten to fifteen minutes the odds will have dropped sufficiently for you to place a lay under 2.5 bet and hence green up, i.e. achieve a profit whatever should subsequently happen.
There are many variations of this type of bet. You can, for example, lay over 2.5 immediately after a goal is scored if you believe further goals are unlikely in the short term. After ten minutes you place the opposite bet in order to profit once again.
In the case of horse racing there are bettors who try to identify those horses which will be likely to shorten in odds since here again you could profit by backing early in the day and then laying back that bet later on when the odds for your chosen horse have shortened. Another way is to find horses that are known to be front runners and back before the race followed by a lay bet in running as the odds drop. You really need a special betting app like Fairbot for this though, because it works faster than the standard Betfair interface.
When starting out trading on an exchange it is advisable to first study all the markets thoroughly and then concentrate on one type of trade to begin with in order to get really efficient at spotting odds movement and profiting. It is best to go for small movements in the market at the beginning, say two or three ticks in the displayed figures, since if you should make a mistake then the damage is small. This is called scalping and some traders rely on this heavily, arguing that many small scalps are much easier, and that the profits mount up quite surprisingly well.
It is certainly worth your while as a trader to invest in some good software which gives you an edge in the markets by being faster to update odds than the standard Betfair interface, and also enabling fast one click bets. Usually you get in addition in- depth market displays and the option of a ladder interface which some traders prefer. There are good betting software apps like Fairbot, Gruss, Geeks Toy, Cymatic, and others available for an annual subscription.
As well as being able to see the odds changes faster than on the Betfair website with a good app you have a big advantage with the one click bet placement facility.
Without this feature you would need to click on the odds, type in your stake amount, click bet and confirm, all of which could take too long resulting in missing a bet at good odds. The time you save can make the difference between missing a big swing and catching it at the perfect moment.
Trading is a skill which can be learned from tutorials and then honed by means of practice, starting out small and increasing stakes with growing experience.
| Rank | Name | Notation | Details | Discover |
|
The number one Betting Exchange. 5% fees on winning trades. The highest liquidity. | Visit | ||
|
Access to Betfair liquidity with a 3% fees on winning trades. Not all markets. | Visit |
If you have more questions, contact me [email protected]
