Tuesday 21 July 2015

Standard deviation

Tuesdays are the busiest days at tennis ladders. The tournaments heat up after a slow start on Monday, where normally only a few matches take place. It's really difficult to keep the overview. Especially at my stage of the trading career. I am still looking for an edge, so it's important to keep an eye on as much as possible matches.

I am thankful to get some extreme scenarios this week so far. Yesterday we had the injury of Anna-Lena Friedsam (she hurted the ankle), today we saw some very one sided first sets (0:6). In this case the favourite (Pironkova) only won six points in the first set! It's good to have matches with standard deviation. So you can see if your system works under windy conditions. In sunshine every strategy brings profit.

I learned today that you have to expect the worst. Your strategy has to be enough robust to pull through extreme scenarios. You can't take the average outcome as a base. I had to make a small adjustment. Probably my hitting rate will be a bit lower in the future (6-0 W-L looks nice indeed!), but on the other side my single profits will be higher. After this change I was able to make my biggest profit so far (2.20 Euro at the match between Giorgi and Cibulkova). To be honest, I was a bit lucky. I couldn't trade out at 1.40 (suddenly the liquidity was gone), so I did it at 1.45. This difference almost doubled the profit.

I am still mainly working on the first set trading (without much compounding). Trading is really complex, so you have to divide the different stages of a tennis match in small (trading) pieces. Right now my focus is on scalping. Caan Berry wrote once again a nice article: Betfair trading strategies
It's about your own behaviour. I found out that for me quick in and out trades suit better than mid- or long term swings. If I can handle the short term trading, I can start to think about compounding. Lay low odds are powerful, every trader knows that. With green books this is the way to go, but I will take step after step.




6 comments:

  1. Are you aware of any good blogs that discuss in play football trading ?

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  2. No, I am not interested (anymore) in football trading. It's a tennis blog here. If you like soccer, there are other places to visit.

    In my opinion soccer is not suitable for trading... at least not for me. You should focus on one sports, even think about a niche market. Some people are better in scalping, other in value trading. There are different ways to Rome, but you have to concentrate on your strenghts and soccer is definitely not one of mine.

    More and more I find my way to trade... I would not overrate the 8-0 (starting) record, but I begin to feel comfortable with this approach. How we know the own behaviour is the base for being profitable.

    In this sense, keep greening (soccer or tennis)!

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  3. cran is good trader but horse and tennis trading is 2 different thinks-tennis trading is much more violate and unpredictable

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    1. Yes, he is a great trader. He scalps mainly horse markets. Like I wrote, you have to focus. In my opinion is almost impossible to trade successful in different markets. Only 2% of Betfair customers are succesful, only 0.1% have the premium charge... so you have to bring all your energy in a specific field. Like Mark with cricket, Caan with horses or Peter Webb with tennis.

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  4. Good to know you are doing fine with your new approach!

    In my opinion, matches like the one you traded, where the injury turned the market upside down are awesome from a trading point of view. If you catch the wave at the right time you can profit a lot in a short time-frame. This injury is a very extreme case, nonetheless events that cause the market to panic happen with relative frequency and with some experience you can take advantage of it. Also, although I don´t claim to be a doctor, in football is possible to have an intuition about the seriousness of an injury. An obvious example is, when Messi gets a knock (very rare as he is quite good at avoiding tackles!), people immediatly panic and money can be made if you know what you´re doing.

    About dividing the different stages of a tennis match and to adequate your strategies to each of them, it´s spot on! In football, the 1st half is very different from the 2nd, trading-wise (the risk/reward ratios are totally different as time advances). In this sense, my approach is very different between them. This also makes sense in tennis, i guess.

    Ps: sorry for speaking about football in your blog, i think it is starting to make sense to have my own blog. I´ve been thinking about it and it may be interesting to blog about game analysis, as there is not a lot of information about it.

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  5. Thank you for the comment. No problem about soccer, I think there are a lot of similarities in the view of trading. I just will not publish any soccer blogs or stories about football.

    Like you mentioned, dividing the trading in different stages is important. I guess in most sports it's the same. You go from the small (for example sccalping) to the big (for example tiebreak trading with high volatility). If you trade in volatile situations you are gambling...

    Yes, the know approach at least suit my personality. I can't tell after just eleven trades if that is the real breakthrough. To be honest, in the past I thought more than once that I made it. Now I am a bit more careful... I am realistic, there are just 2% successful Betfair traders, only 0.1% reach Premium charge. So it's a long way to go and two Euro stakes are not the same like 200 or 2'000!

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