NBA - Week 2

Spread Betting - NBA

Stake: 1 or 2% profit

Session P&L: £65.31

Current Bank %: 141.25%

My second week of the NBA spread betting exercise has gone well. A profit of £65.31 with my bank now standing at 141.25%. I've gotten much more comfortable with each bet as the winners have started rolling in knowing that each one is making it less and less likely for this to go tits up. The statistical analysis shows it will be profitable, over the past 7 NBA seasons, and this is also true for the NFL, but with only 24 bets placed so far since deciding to put money into it, I'm not counting my chickens yet! Ideally I want a large sample size near 1000 bets to analyse but we're talking 14 seasons or so for that, I'd be better off going for a PHD on the subject!

Some observations I have found interesting, not sure why this is and perhaps an experienced bettor could shed some light on this, but most days at about 8pm UK time I was placing my bets. Nothing wrong with that of course, however I found if I took 5 minutes to place them the price and sometimes lines would more often than not shorten in those few minutes. Of course this was a tad frustrating for me knowing that if I was a minute or so faster I would of gotten a better deal. This pattern continued most of last week and yesterday I decided to make some time at 7pm to get my bet on, no problems at that time. I then checked the prices again at about 8pm, and surely enough at 8.03pm Pinnacle's price on my selection shortened from 1.952 to 1.920. Coincidence? I think not, particularly as I've been noticing it all week. The only conclusion I can come to is that someone is lumping serious amounts of cash on the same selections, causing the bookie to manage the liability and shorten the price or adjust the line. A bookie as huge as Pinnacle though, to even cause a dent we must be talking the max stake, which online is indicated on my account as about £8k! With an average of 1.7 selections a day and a price of 1.89, you do the math, someone must be making an absolute mint if this is the case. If this is the cause it does give me more confidence in my relatively tiny stakes!

On the manual trading front, once again disappointingly I have not had time off in the afternoons at all. We are making some changes at work in the next couple of months which will eventually give me more afternoons off. Until then though the horse racing trading is on hold. Football and Tennis look much more likely due to the times they are on, so we'll see how it goes with that.