Hello and welcome,

I've had a few people asking me for advice recently about trading, and I must confess, that as a relative novice, despite being well-read, and researching my trades and punts thoroughly (usually), I cannot with any specified probability offer advice at this point in time. What I will  do is share some of my trading and fixed odds strategies with you in the course of this blog, some of my "tricks", and the noted pitfalls that I have encountered. What I cannot vouch for is their effectiveness over the long run. My record has not been subjected to statistical proofing, which is a necessary condition of confident investment. Also, my stakes are small, although the trading principles are in principle similar to those with larger stakes.

For people who are interested in tips for fixed odds sports betting, the best place that I have personally found is http://www.sports-punter.com/ . There you will find numerous tipsters, and one appealing aspect of that site  is that there is data which supports their tipsters long terms records. I haven't verified the accuracy of that data, and cannot vouch 100% for it's validity, but I can see from the site that there are some people there who live and breath fixed odds sports betting, including some amazing folk who seem to have an encyclopedic knowledge of "form" in various domains (predominantly horses and football).  You can even be notified of tips by email from the most successful tipsters. I have not followed these tips myself, as I like to have specific knowledge of what I'm staking on, but there is good reason to believe that this is an excellent service. It's basically a tipster service, but with no charge, and with tips that could, in principle, be empirically tested.

With that out of the way, my topic for today is chasing losses, and putting all your eggs in one basket.

Someone on http://www.punterslounge.com/ the other day said that they were going to put all they had on France beating Scotland at the weekend. It was a done deal, a foregone conclusion that France would win. They lost 1-0 after a great Scottish performance, and that person took a bit of a ribbing. Hopefully that bloke was just displaying a bit of bravado, but if he wasn't and did what he said he was going to do, he'd have lost all his financial resources. The moral of the tale being not to stake more than you can afford to lose. That is not clever.

Another thing that has much in common with the last point is chasing losses. This applies to trading just as much as to regular fixed odds betting. Say you've got £1 on Reading  to beat Chelsea at 13.0, so you stand to win £12 minus commission if all goes to plan. Then Chelsea, who were already strong pre-match favourites,  score a goal. You then think "well I'm going to lose my pound unless I back Chelsea now. So you back Chelsea, but they are now 1.05 to win after scoring their goal. This means that to recoup your pound and to get a 25p profit you need to stake £25. So you do it, you put on £25. And then Reading equalise, and then quickly follow up with another goal to go ahead in the game. Now all of a sudden Reading are odds on to win the game, and to get back on top you need to stake hundreds of pounds. The point of this, and I know I haven't exactly made it crystal clear in the above example, is that often it is better to take a loss and live to fight another day than to chase the game and lose your bank, as things can get out of hand if you do that. I heard this loss chasing strategy recently called "Chasing the dragon". I had I thought that only applied to herion addiction, but apparently some people also apply the term to trading / gambling.

Quite often, in trading, it is possible to get out of a market, sustaining a loss, but retaining some of your original stake. This to me is one of the main advantages of trading over out and out fixed odds gambling. You often get the chance to recoup some of your stake when events go against your original position. Often it's a hard call to make, and it feels pretty bad psychologically to do it, but for the sake of your bank, often it's the preferable option, rather than losing your whole stake hoping that there will be a turn in fortunes. Far better to identify a new prospect in my view. I do this often. For example I had backed Liverpool to be a top 3 side this season in the Premiership Betfair top 3 market, but with Arsenal putting in some excellent performances, and Liverpool dropping quite a lot of points, I decided that I would get out of the market, as I lacked confidence on the basis of results so far, that Liverpool would prevail and finish top 3. This was a right pain, as it was one of the few bets where I'd placed a relatively high proportion of my bank. Whether I'm right or wrong time will tell, but the way results have been going I think that from the point of view of my bank, it made sense to do that. Post ante betting markets can suck you in and spit you out. More about that another day.

regards,

FT

Todays result : (I said it was low stakes!). This was won by placing a bet to win on Brazil after they had gone 1-0 down against Ecuador. However, the Betfair video feed  showed Brazil to be playing really well, and Ecuador also had a man sent off not long after they scored. A Brazil win therefore seemed likely despite being one down.  Once Brazil had equalised I got out of the market with a Hoof bet (at this point if the match had ended a draw or an Ecuador win it would have been no profit and no loss on the night). Later when Brazil took the lead their odds went down so low that laying Brazil for a liability of a few pence guaranteed a profit however the game finished.

Soccer: GBP2.88  Total P&L: GBP2.88
 
Soccer     Showing 1 - 1 of 1 markets
Market     Open date     Profit/loss (GBP)
Soccer / Brazil v Ecuador : Match Odds     10-Oct-06 19:00     2.88
Profit and Loss is shown net of commission.
All times are UKT      
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    unless otherwise stated.