Week 4

Spread Betting - NBA/NCAA/Football

Stakes profit target of bank:

NBA 1 or 2%

NCAA BB 0.5 or 1%

Football 0.5 or 1%

Since last update:

NBA P&L: £23.48 * Current Bank: 153.25%

NCAA BB P&L: -£29.48 * Current Bank: 91.66%

Football P&L: £35.69 * Current Bank: 107.14%

I have now added Football picks to my ever increasing repertoire. This is for the major European leagues where I have decent enough stats to analyse. I have been looking at Football for a while and the draw has always made any edge quite small in the longterm. Placing some filters on price range has helped increase this enough to warrant giving it a go, and for only 5 days it has certainly proved worthwhile already. It's nice to see something new have such a positive start, but of course it is mainly one good weekend that could easily be wiped by an equally poor one. So staking is strict and the discipline to stick to the rules is as ever paramount.

The NCAA BB started off terribly and clawed back a couple of percent in the past few days, overall though it is still underperforming. Plenty of games to go though and I'm confident that it will eventually return an overall profit once the mean is met, or at least break even. 

And of course let's not forget the NBA, which has been my star performer and continues to go from strength to strength. Not the best of weeks but another profitable one is warmly welcomed and has helped push the total in the right direction.

Staking Plan

My staking plan has changed again as predicted. The previous one was causing too many permutations and although it did save me some large losses in the NCAA BB in comparison to a direct martingale approach, just straight bets would have produced similar results.

With some testing of the previous results, surprisingly a straight 3 stage martingale approach (3 bets) or a 3 stage semi-martingale approach (with the liability split equally for the last stage - 4 bets) seem to produce the highest profitability. A fourth stage opens up potential for losses that are unacceptable, so it has to be limted to 3 stages to be effective. At the moment this is the best staking system I can find in relation to my betting style. I think the 3 or 4 bets decision will probably be made when I get to that third stage, and will be based mainly on probabilities. I'll need more results to see which one of these is more profitable in the long term, although I can't see a huge variance as the first two stages are identical, I'm leaning more towards the straight 3 stages at the moment.