Mastering Betfair: How to make serious money trading betting exchanges

291 Pages·2009·4.31 MB·English

by  Pete Nordsted

Copyright
HARRIMAN HOUSE LTD
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First edition published in Great Britain in 2009 by Harriman House.
Copyright © Harriman House Ltd
The right of Pete Nordsted to be identified as the author has been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
ISBN: 978-1-906659-76-9
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book can be obtained
from the British Library.
All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
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which it is published without the prior written consent of the Publisher.
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employer of the Author.
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Preface
What this book covers
This book explains my approach to trading on the Betfair markets and includes
many of the strategies I regularly use in the sporting markets.
It covers the disciplined process that I go through before placing any trade. You
will find highlighted throughout the book a set of trading rules (which are
summarised at the end of the book).
Although this book does not cover horse racing it does cover many low-risk,
high-return strategies for all the other major sporting markets available to trade
on Betfair.
Who this book is for
This book is not intended to be an introductory guide to Betfair for beginners.
The book does cover briefly some introductory concepts, but if you are new to
Betfair then you should refer first to the excellent online help pages provided on
Betfair’s own website.
This book is written for the sports trader who is at the stage where he would like
to take his trading to the next level.
It is also hoped that traders with a financial background may also, through
reading this book, become aware of the many unique and profitable
opportunities that trading the Betfair markets has to offer.
The book is written in plain English and I have attempted to get straight to the
point of the matter while avoiding any confusing jargon. Throughout the book I
relate my own personal experiences, either from my own trading or the training
of my clients.
How the book is structured
The book has six main parts:
Part One – Getting Started
The first section of the book begins with what you need to know to put on a
basic trade and highlights some of the disciplines you will need to acquire before
you start trading seriously. There is also a section on the software and hardware
requirements that need to be considered. This part of the book is very much
aimed at the novice trader.
Part Two – The Trading Process
This section takes you through the process of deciding what trading systems and
plans you are going to employ in your trading, and also discusses the advantages
of back-testing. This section also deals with overtrading – a major error of
inexperienced traders.
Part Three – Money Management and Risk
This covers the much neglected subject of money management and deals with
subjects such as how much money a trader should be risking on an individual
trade, and how to protect and preserve hard-earned capital.
Part Four – Trading Psychology
The fourth part of the book highlights various psychological issues such as
learning to deal with losses, thinking outside the box and finding your own time
frame as well as dealing with issues such as keeping yourself in the right
physical shape to trade.
Part Five – Strategies
In the fifth part I share some of the strategies that I am currently using in the
market. This includes sections on football, cricket, golf and tennis.
Part Six – The Rules for Mastering Betfair
As previously explained, throughout the book I highlight a series of essential
rules to follow, these are summarised in this final part.
Charts
Throughout the book there are charts of betting prices. For more information on
these charts please see the Appendix.
Introduction
How I got started with Betfair
I was first introduced to Betfair whilst serving in Afghanistan in 2003. One of
my colleagues asked me if I had heard about the betting exchanges and what I
thought of his system. I had heard of the term betting exchange through
watching At The Races on Channel 4, but I didn’t have a clue what they were or
how they operated.
My friend explained to me that you can lay horses in a race. In other words you
could bet against the horse winning – basically, he was looking to be the
bookmaker.
I can remember logging on that first time in Kandahar and thinking that this did
look interesting; but the internet connection was so poor we could not take it any
further. However, it caught my imagination enough for me to explore the Betfair
site upon returning home a week or so later. I was not new to gambling as in the
early 1980s I had worked in a bookmakers taking and settling bets, but since
leaving there had not been an active better. I had seen too many people gamble
away their incomes and I believed there were more profitable places to put my
hard-earned money.
On my return to the UK I immediately went about opening a Betfair account and
started playing around by laying a few horses at minimum stakes. I believe after
a few days of laying up to three horses a race I had roughly broken even.
However, whilst playing around with the site I found I was becoming very
interested in how the prices on the sporting markets moved whilst an event was
still playing.
My first real trade came in a football match between Sunderland and Reading. I
was just experimenting. Sunderland were 1-0 up in the game and I put £10 on
them to win at something like 1.59 (I’ll explain these prices later). As the game
progressed and the minutes ticked by, I noticed that the Sunderland price was
falling. It was at this moment my wife announced that she was ready to go out!
Sunderland’s price was now around 1.45. I didn’t know what to do, but decided
to lay them at 1.46. After doing this I realised that I was going to win £1.30 if
Sunderland won, and lose nothing if it ended a draw or a Reading win. This got
me very interested. Needless to say, that afternoon my mind was not on the
shopping but on how I could get what I had found to work for me.
Green up
After doing some further research I then discovered that you can green up, which
means you can show a profit no matter what the result. It was then that my
trading increased and I would trade on anything at anytime. I would search the
internet looking for radio coverage of sports such as Australian rules football. I
was depositing £20 and by trading a few markets was hoping to turn it into £40.
I really enjoyed my initiation on Betfair, and after further research into various
sports I was becoming fairly successful, with both my staking and my
confidence growing in tandem.
The shock of a large loss
Then all of a sudden I suffered a large loss in a Carling Cup tie between Crewe
and Manchester United (the grisly details are explained later in the book). This
had a big impact on my confidence and took the wind out of my sails. Previous
to this setback I regarded Betfair as almost a licence to print money!
After suffering this loss I realised that up to then I had been lucky and in all truth
was undisciplined in my trading. It was at this time that I decided to step back,
take stock, and learn how to trade properly. I can remember reading on the
Betfair forums ‘Troy McClure’, a successful Betfair trader, replying to a posting
that posed the question,
“How do you win on Betfair?”
and Troy replied
“Just study and learn the markets for 12 months then act on what you find, that
was the key to my success.”
Just reading this posting on the Betfair forum altered my outlook completely, and
I decided to change my approach.