Betfair Trading

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Despite our disclaimer in the previous tutorial, it is likely that many of you will want to have a go at trading on Betfair anyway. It will become even more enticing once you start to get restricted by some bookies.

If trading is something that you decide you want to try, our main piece of advice is this: don’t try to reinvent the wheel.

Over the years, thousands of traders have tried tens of thousands of strategies. By doing so they have gained experience and learned lessons about what works and what doesn’t. They have also lost huge sums of money by making mistakes.

Make sure you don’t make the same mistakes by learning from the pros.

At bonusbank, our focus is purely on matched betting. We have a little bit of trading experience, but we would never claim to be experts. Instead, we recommend that you look elsewhere for trading advice.

Where to look depends on which sport you are interested in trading. The top four sports for trading are Horse Racing, Soccer, Tennis, & Cricket. Here’s a quick look at each of them…

Horse Racing

Racing is probably the most traded sport of them all. Races take place all over the world, at every hour of the day. The biggest markets for trading are the UK and Australia.

Trading on horses falls into two categories – Pre-Race & In-Play.

• Pre-race trading relies largely on technical analysis of the market. You don’t need to know much about horses to apply this approach (although it helps if you do).
• In-play trading strategies, like Back-To-Lay or Lay-To-Back, require more information about the running style of each horse.

For more information and advice about trading horses, we recommend Caan Berry. Caan is the most well known name in Betfair trading. His site includes loads of great, free tutorials, videos and articles. He also has a few e-books available for purchase and an advanced video course for those who want to get really serious.

In addition to horse racing, he also has some information about all of the other major trading sports.

Soccer

Soccer trading is huge, and there are multiple sites that offer advice on how to make a profit. The biggest and most comprehensive of these is TradingFootball.eu, along with it’s subsidiaries PreMatchTrading.com and InPlayTrading.com.

These three sites cover every aspect of soccer trading:

• TradingFootball uses tried and tested strategies to profit from matches. They study statistics to decide which strategy is the most appropriate for each game.
• PreMatchTrading uses a one-of-a-kind software to identify opportunities before a match has started. By comparing the Match Odds and Total Goals Odds, their algorithm can predict movements in the Correct Score market. PMT is ideal for Australian traders as it doesn’t require a VPN for in-play bets.
• If you do have a VPN you might be interested in InPlayTrading. They have a stats scanner which sends alerts whenever a match meets certain criteria, letting you know that it is a good time to enter a trade.

Tennis

Tennis is another sport which is year-round and has multiple games every day of the week. This should make it ideal for trading.

However, there is a major obstacle that makes things a lot more difficult – Court-Siders.

When any sport is broadcast live there is always a few seconds delay before the ‘live’ pictures reach the viewer. This means that a trader who is actually at the match has a huge advantage over one watching from home.

Due to the fast-moving nature of tennis matches, this court-side advantage has been exploited by huge betting rings. Technically it is illegal, and you will be thrown out if caught doing it, but people always find a way.

Going up against these court-side traders is like going into a boxing match with one hand tied behind your back. Some people do it anyway, though, and they still make money.

The most well-known tennis trader is Paul Shires at TradeShark. We don’t have any personal experience of his service but, if reputation and longevity are anything to go by, he seems to be the best around.

Cricket

The rise of 20:20 has lead to a huge increase in the number of cricket traders over the last few years. However, there still aren’t many established sites offering advice on strategies etc.

The most recognised cricket trader is Mark Iverson. He doesn’t have any ebooks or services to sell, but he is active on Twitter. Following him there is probably a good place to start.

No matter which sport you decide to trade, the most important thing to be aware of is that it is not risk-free. Only ever trade with what you can afford to lose, and make sure you have a staking strategy in place to ensure that you don’t get wiped out in the first week.

Trading isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. It is a grind, and it requires a large time commitment to first learn the strategies, and then study each match/race.