Matched betting vs Trading
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Hi all, first post on here so be gentle!
I found this site a few weeks ago and have been following it since with steady results thanks very much. I had no idea there were so many offers from the bookies that could keep you going. I assumed it was just the registration bonus and then nothing else!
I stumbled across matched betting after doing some bonus bagging to build up my Betfair account. I’ve been dabbling with pre-race horse trading for about a year with mixed results, as per most newbies I guess. I just wondered how other people have ended up doing all this matched betting. Are you aspiring traders, failed traders, punters who also do matched betting etc etc?
My feelings are that although this matched betting is great, it’s quite effort intensive for sometimes only a few quid. If I could get the hang of trading that’s where I see a real life changing second income. Am I wrong?
I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
+0February 15, 2016 at 1:26 pm
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New to matched betting?
My Matched Betting Academy is the best place to get started. Learning the fundamentals takes 10-15 minutes and you’ll make £15 in the process.
Learning the fundamentals takes 10-15 minutes and you’ll make £15 in the process.
@TheExPresident: “The good news is that my strike rate in terms of winning bets sits around 80%, the bad news is you need to be thinking 5% to 10% profit on winning bets”.
This would make you a net loser? A strategy with a strike rate of 80% has to return >25% on winning trades to be profitable.
Agree with your sentiment. The only route to becoming a profitable trader is hard work (you also need a mathematical background and psychological skill-set).
I disagree with previous posts about the idea that you won’t be profitable from the outset, however. I mean, experience will obviously improve your execution in the market, but it’s not the defining factor. If you do the research and backtest, there’s no reason why you can’t be successful from the beginning.
+0Hi Mark,
Sorry for late reply, work took over this week.
No – because I set a ‘stop loss’ on Bet Angel so the full stake is never at risk. That can be a good thing and a bad thing – a good thing if your selection turns out to be a real mule and you get out of the trade with a controlled loss. A bad thing if you don’t get the start you’d hoped for, the price drops down a few ‘clicks’ and you get traded off and then the thing picks up a bit and the odds come in to where you would have traded for a profit.
I’ve found that trading is about ‘bank preservation’ – I know that some bets will lose, I just need to make sure it’s only a percentage of my stake and not all of it. If I were to bet £50 on a selection then I’d set the stop loss at maybe £5 and the lay to make £10 (I’m plucking figures out of the air here, not to be secretive but it’s been a long day and I’ve had a couple beers and chilling down).
The bookie offers make things better though. When you get a few ‘free bets’ and the potential loss is zero – you can back a selection and set the lay without worrying about the stop loss – the worse case scenario is your free bet loses and your lay bet doesn’t get matched, so no damage. These are the ones I look for the ‘bigger’ odds – if you can pick up a few free £5 free bets and lay them off in running and things go well it it’s OK.
But…..no overnight retirement, hence having to be at work today.
Steve
+0Hello
Just joined the forum on back of reading this thread – nice to see some level headed conversation on the web.
I thought I’d share my experiences with you.
I did some matched betting back in 2014 and found the whole process quite stressful – the biggest issue was having accounts limited.
In March 2015, I decided to “have a go” at trading. Unsurprisingly things didn’t go well – whilst I didn’t lose a lot of money, I didn’t make any money.
Towards the middle of this year (2016) I thought that I’d give it another go but rather than just leap in and start trading, I was going to absorb as much information as possible.
I’ve not been on any courses yet but have spent a lot of time doing the following:
1) Reading posts from notable traders on the BA Forums
2) Watched most of the videos on Steve Howe’s and Peter Webb’s youtube channel
3) Traded whenever I can – I work from home so I can generally a decent number of races a day.Straight off the bat, I am not at a stage where I am making a living from this but, working with a £50 bank and using small stakes, I am making some profits.
What I’ve learnt:
1) You really need to give it time and remember, that at some point, every professional trader was at the stage where they knew nothing.
2) Forget about making money to start with. Instead, focus on trying not to lose money. This is hard when you start out.
3) Accept the fact that you need to go through a lot of market cycles before it sinks in. I reckon that I’ve probably traded nearly 600 races this year. I’m now at a stage where I know that X type of race will trade differently from Y type of race.
4) Practice mode is okay to a point, but the real knowledge and experience will come from putting money in the markets. What people don;t realise, is that practice mode behaves very differently from real mode so, you may find that you can make X profit in practice mode and then lose money in real mode (Myself included) which can be disheartening. My advice would be to load £20 into Betfair and limit yourself to £2 stakes with a 10% stop of that i.e. once you are losing .20p – cut the trade.
5) Even with small stakes DO NOT TAKE TRADES INPLAY. I’ve capitalised this because it’s the road to ruin for a lot of new traders. If you do this, it’s gambling and will lead to a lot of unnecessary pain.
6) Record your trading. There are a number of free recording programmes on the web and it’s useful to record each market you trade. Whether the trade is good or bad, it allows you to watch it back and get some good feedback.
7) Less is actually more. When you start out trading, I think you need to observe every race just to get a feel for how the markets perform but, as you gain more experience, you can then cherry pick them.
8) Have a plan and stick to it. Okay, so for me, my first goal is to become profecient at pre-race trading. Once I’m profitable at doing that, I’ll look at In Running trading. Once I’ve done that, I’ll look at the Aussie / American markets. Eventually, I will look at automating my trading.
The reason I say this, is that there is a chap on youtube who is posting about his trading journey and he started off as pre-racing, then switched to in-running and is now onto automation.
9) Trading is a mental game. Even with my limited experience, I can tell you that if you spend enough times watching the markets, you will pick it up. It’s actually not complicated or difficult. The difficult bit is the stuff between your ears!
There are some good books out there – Trading In The Zone by Mark Douglas being a popular choice.
Coming back to the mental game, never, ever trade if you are:
a) Tired
b) Hungover
c) Have had a row with the missus, the husband, etc
d) Needing to make money urgentlyI’ve just worked out that since June 2016, I’ve spent at least 3 or 4 hours per day thinking about, reading about or physically trading and that’s 7 days per week.
So, the final piece of advice, is to be really focused on this – live and breathe it and eventually you will crack it.
As I said at the start of my post, I’m not a pro trader but I know that having done the above, I’ve given myself a really good chance of making it.
Good luck.
+0Wow fantastic post urbanhermit, everything in it was excellent advice. I did Steve Howes course about a month ago. I started trading with practise money but after receiving advice from several people decided to switch to real money after a couple of days, mainly for the reasons given in your post.
I am using minimum stakes so can only win or lose pennies at a time. I have traded exactly 100 races so far and am exactly 60 pence in profit lol. Still that’s better than being in the red. However I have been hovering around BE since I started, so next time I trade I could be back to scratch or in the red.
I think I have made a bit of progress from when I started but being a fairly slow learner I know its going to take me a long time before I will have some confidence in being able to read the markets. At the moment I still think most of the time I am just lucky if I get a good trade, and I just get out if things start to look bad.
I have gone in play a couple of times but this was down to ATR being a few seconds behind the actual race off time. I always have that take SP button at the bottom of the BA screen ticked, this is not ideal but I think I made a bit on one of the trades and lost a bit on the other.
I think the take SP facility is not guaranteed to work unless £10 stakes are used, but on both occasions it worked fine for me with only the minimum stakes used.
These two trades were in the first couple of dozen of my first ones and I have not been in play since. I now am aware of the delay with the ATR feed, I find Racing UK is usually only a second or so behind.
My plan is to carry on using minimum stakes, and not worry about making money but instead try and improve my market reading skills. If I do improve and start to make pennies consistently then I shall start to up my stakes. I’m sure the if any of the guys making hundreds a week match betting are reading this they will be thinking why on earth would I bother. The thing is though, if you crack trading then it can become life changing, whereas match betting for most people has limited potential once you start to lose your accounts.
I’ve tried a little bit of scaling in and scaling out of positions (Steve Howe does a lot of this as you can see from his videos), but I have decided to switch back to just using the one stake for now and try and focus more on reading the markets.
If you are making consistent profits now then you probably wouldn’t get a great deal from any of the various sports trading courses.
There is probably a call for someone to offer an advanced course this would be for people who have a year or twos profitable trading under their belts but have not gone on to make big returns.
+0Hi Dave
THanks for your kind words.
Firstly, well done on the fact you have got a profit – at this stage, it’s irrelevant that it’s only 60p – I remember reading a post Steve Howe wrote on the BA Forums that basically said if you can trade with £5, you can trade with £10 etc.
When I think back to June this year, I was in a similar position – getting involved for no real reason other than to get some money in the market – utter madness!
Now, I’m a different person – I look at the graphs, I look at the volume, I look at the ranges, any trends etc before I even think about adding a position. You will find that if you stick at this, you will crack it.
I know what you mean about making pennies 🙂 My missus and friends were bemused by that but who cares – if I’m winning pennies, great but more critically, if I lose, I’m only losing pennies.
The beauty of trading, is that risk can be calculated before hand and as long as you are strict and accept the 20p loss, then you wont go far wrong.
Also, the more time you spend in the markets, you’ll realise that certain races will be more volatile and if a price goes against you, you’ll know that there is a decent chance it will come back – obviously this doesn’t work all the time so be careful.
Best of luck on your journey, Dave.
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