Betfair Trading Strategies

This strategy involves identifying teams who regularly pick up bookings and laying them in the ‘under 5 points’ booking markets (as long as the game has more than two yellow cards, you win the lay as a yellow card is equal to 2 points.

This is a short series of profitable trading strategies. Completely different to the analytical approach of assessing weight of money and studying price/volume charts (not that there is anything wrong with this method at all). I will cover several methods, all of which I’ve used, although there are many other strategies out there involving everything ranging from horse racing to cricket and even Big Brother!

Like my Cheltenham case study, this analysis should help to give you some trading ideas for your future trading. I didn't trade these horses myself in this instance, but made notes of potential trades, and illustrated some price anomalies, and how you could have profited from them.

If you want to trade on the betting exchanges in the football markets then knowledge can go an awful long way just like it can with any market. But the best knowledge of all is knowledge that few others possess. Knowing that a certain key team member is unfit to play for instance would fall into the category of valuable information or perhaps the tactics or formation that a team may be using for a particular match could prove more than useful to the punter.

Raj Patel's new betting exchange system, 'The Racing Cash Machine, has just been launched and is focused on making profits on Betfair's "betting in running" horse racing markets. That is to say it's a method of using betting exchanges to back horses whilst the race is in progress. It isn't rocket science. In fact you could understand it all in less than half an hour. Then a few days of practice and you'll be an expert. To use the RCM method you need to have the time to actually watch the races on the specialist TV channels "At The Races" and "Racing UK".  View the Video's

The thing is, a market manipulator will enter an amount in one of the outside columns, but will not intend to get matched. We don't trade off the back of these guys. We want to trade when a single punter is chasing the price down to get matched - in other words, you see a big amount come in one side, and the start to get swallowed up. Then the price moves and he changes his price so he is the first in the queue again. If this happens, and you can see there is one big punter forcing the momentum in one direction, take advantage of it fast. Smart Money Trading.

Many punters go about attacking the betting exchanges in different ways. Some trade or attempt to trade in running, some trade price movements prior to the off. Others try and find value with the higher priced horses which are substantially higher on the exchanges while others look to lay horses that they think will lose.

The benefits of an exchange are best displayed in a live sporting event. The chances of a team's ebb and flow during play enabling traders to constantly revise and improve their position.

A strategy I used in the 2006 World Cup was to lay what I thought was an underpriced team, in Holland. That might sound like gambling and not trading, but by backing them to qualify from their group, then each of their second round games, using a progressive staking plan, I would have, at very worst, had a small loss if they went on to win the cup (but this would probably have been a profit as they were clearly underpriced in the outright market) and would have guaranteed a profit if they didn't win (which they didn't).

There were a few reasonable trading opportunities in the 2.35 race. Firstly, Black Jack Ketchum (where do they get these names from?) was quoted at between 1.91 and 2.1 with the bookies listed on oddschecker, yet was available at 2.3 earlier. It now stands at 2.18 to lay, but at one point it did drop to 2.1, so this could potentially have been a very lucrative trade.