Football Sunday

Have used today to focus on some football tactics I've been developing recently. I've decided to setup a separate £20 bank for the footy and intend to keep it separated from the racing from now on. The staking plan will be increased similar to the racing, although I feel that the footy account will grow faster judging by today’s performance and where I'm at with the racing. It will be interesting for me to see which sport is in the lead in say 6 months and 12 months time having both started on equal banks.

It was a rather odd day as although I profited and did not lose on any match, I did not feel particularly comfortable with some of the risk involved. I recycled my £2 stakes many times and used a combination of prematch and inrunning scalping tactics on all of the matches. I felt like I got the balance of when to be passive and aggressive much better today.

The inrunning stuff, although calculated and well worked, was where I felt most uncomfortable. I was using a lay to back tactic on the winning team trying to catch the resistance, this worked quite well and by offsetting my bets I could even leave the PC at times and come back to find I've been matched. The risk here was minimal and I managed to profit on every match, but the profit was not great. We're talking 1 tick scalps plus the odd time when I did not get filled I scratched or took a 1 tick loss, collectively the green was there but not a great ROT. I liked the scalability aspect as I could of easily used £100s or even £1000s in most of these markets without standing out.

I then experimented with back to lay scalping on the winning team, which was of course more risky and profitable. The market is moving in your direction which is a big appeal, but a goal from the trailing team would knock you back quite significantly so you have to pick your times very carefully. As it turned out my cautious approach paid off and I managed to only get caught out twice, however on both of those matches I found good scalping opportunities later which managed to get me into the green. I'm still undecided on this tactic as if I was using larger stakes I do not feel it would be worth the risk, and on a different day I could have had many more goals causing large dents in my P&L. Do not think this is a trading style I feel will pay off in the long run so I will stick to the lay to back lower risk style for now.

The prematch scalping is where I feel most comfirtable. I can see myself raising stakes here sooner as I now have a larger sample size and it all looks good to me so far. This is the only footy tactic so far I feel I will definitely be sticking with although I am looking at testing out others. I like trading tactics where an opinion on the teams ability is not necessary, although being a big footy fan and knowing a fair bit about most teams I'm trading forming an opinion is almost automatic. I think looking at so many matches and knowing the results later is starting to give me a better idea of whether the prematch odds are value or not. I feel the better I get at this, the more it will benefit the prematch scalping, as I could use this as a factor in determining whether a team's price will come in or not. 

Here is a quick screenshot of the footy trading screen. It is similar to the racing screen but I have replaced the charting with a browser displaying livescores and some other info: