New blog post by Ryan Carruthers! Betfair Exchange Trading for Beginners: The Ultimate Guide for Trading On The Betfair Exchange Part 2
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Welcome to part 2 of Betfair Trading Community's Betfair Exchange Trading Guide for Beginners!
In this blog post I will continue where we left off on part one of the Betfair exchange trading guide for beginners and cover: trading strategies, trading plans, mentality, stake management, analysing trades, trading software & finally trading research. Then you will be fully armed to tackle the Betfair exchange.
Trading Strategies
There is hundreds of Betfair trading strategies you can follow, read about, watch on YouTube but my experience is that this is where you need to do a little bit of work to determine the trader you want to be and to be honest every strategy you want to follow can be summed up with my ‘What has to happen philosophy’
Put simply this is whatever market you are thinking of trading, write that at the top of the page then draw a line under it, then put everything that has to happen for that trade to come good.
I will give you some examples of strategies to get started, some of the ones that have been around for a while but are simple and effective - it doesn’t need to be complicated!
Pre-race
Back to lay horses or Lay to back
Dobbing
Lay the Draw
Lay the Draw @ HT
Team trading news
Over/Under 2.5 goals
Lay the first set winner
We have more trading strategies specific to each sport in the individual sports trading guides, to get those guides click here. INSERT link for other guides.
Trading Plan
Let me kick this part of the guide off by stating that this section has come from many years of speaking and trying to help newbie traders or even existing ones who have spotted that their mindset is their biggest weakness.
I use a trading plan and I have a morning routine, without these two things I wouldn’t be as profitable as I am, thats how powerful this is. The benefits of these in place create a relaxed almost robotic version of myself who trades in a stress free zone.
Ryan you keep saying I need a trading plan but what is a trading plan?
It is a road map for your trading day, you will be mapping out potential trades. Creating a scenario in your mind for entry and exit points on certain events if certain triggers are met.
One of the main benefits I have noticed is that it optimises my trading time, every morning I plan out my trades for that day, I then note this down on my plan for the day and have all the relevant information right at hand - yes this takes some time but then I know exactly what trades I am doing and when so I can fit other things in around that. I don’t have to spend all day staring at the markets!
What does that give me?
Well you guessed it! Stress free trading, because of the way I set my day up I am forced to focus in the morning and plan the trades, I am planning way ahead of the event so I don’t have to hurry because the event is in play, I am not trying to quickly jump on something because its just gone in play and then I need to information NOW and then I might miss a goal or a trigger!
This I believe gives me more consistency over my trading, I have a consistent pattern to my trading and I eliminate everything else - when I say everything else I mean trades that are just popping up, chasing losses, trading because somebody else is on that particular trade, ones that don’t match the way I trade etc… I could go on and on with that list!
Because I have my plan it forces me to focus on my own trading, it becomes harder for me to jump on other trades because I have my own trades researched and ready to go, I can’t try and talk myself into another trade because I know my planned trades bring a performance level I am comfortable with and also I have managed the risk element of the trade way before hand.
'Consistent actions bring about consistent results. Keep jumping on trades late or that don’t fit your rules, you’ll consistently lose.'
That statement there is one to think about guys! When you have the plan you can also review the performance, so you can take that statement and then use it, analyse what works and keep that and eliminate what doesn’t.
What does the plan need to look like?
Right guys this is really simple!!
All I do everyday is have a text edit document open on my laptop and I note down the games that fit my criteria (I use the BTC filters to save time and give me a list of qualifiers everyday) I then dig deeper on these games find out who is in the team, is the top scorer playing isn’t he? Etc…
I then put them under their correct heading so if I am backing under 2.5 goals I will put that game under that heading with some notes on things like the AVG goal time, % chance of the score being over 1.5 at HT who is missing from the teams who might be a threat and the time of the game.
I now have built up very quickly a picture of that game and I have the stats to help me analyse I will also add on there what time I need to enter, exit and a stop loss on that trade - which changes per game and per trade.
I then go on to rate these trades as which one I think looks the best in each chosen way of trading so I have a top to bottom view of how confident I am on those events from my research which allows me to plan my day and get the best trades with the least stress and the most profit!
Mentality for Trading on Betfair
In this section I could write for England, I think it will be easier if I just give you a recently created list of videos to watch in order that will help you become a better trader.
Stake Management
Firstly, thank you for sticking with me I know this is a very long post. The number one thing to remember is to protect the bank, this is the main aim when trading on Betfair.
Over the last 10 years one of the main mistakes I see from traders is using huge portions of their trading bank at one time, they think that this will lead to bigger profits when on a good run - let me tell you this with 100% certainty it will wipe you out when you go on a bad run. There is no hiding it, it will wipe you out.
The best place to start is to look at using a small percentage of your trading bank as your total liability usually between 2-5% is a good place to start. If the worst happens and you don’t trade out, you will not have decimated the bank and will be able to bounce back from this - one note here is to note down a few pointers about that trade after to pull it apart so you can learn from it and build your own set of trading rules.
Please do not fall into the trap of thinking you need bigger stakes to make bigger amounts, if you cannot handle a smaller bank you will never handle a bigger bank on the Betfair exchanges. The aim here is to learn and build up gradually, by have having level consistent stakes using the edge you have built you can gain on the market and will see small incremental and most importantly steady increases in you trading bank.
Analysing Trades
I want you to keep a record of your trades, not to just track your profit and loss but for a couple of other reasons of which I will go into but I was you to track:
Date
Type of trade
Sport
Entry point
Exit point
Profit
Reasoning
Feeling pre trade
Feeling during trade
Feeling post trade
Trading plan rating/execution
The reason I want you guys to start tracking in this format is you are gathering multiple types of data, data which can then be analysed. You can do this on a simple spreadsheet, from here you can then start to look at the types of trade you are doing for example Over 2.5 or LTD. You can them separate these to see how profitable they are and if not then you can start to look at why…
The feeling part is very key, when you note down how you felt during the trade you can look for triggers which lead to reckless trading behaviour so you can nip them in the bud and then stop trading before this happens to save your bank and sanity.
The trading plan rating is one that I want you to focus on because before the trade you will have created the plan for that trade, I want you to rate how well you stuck to the plan - the plan becomes the rules for the trade and you have to stick to the rules. Straying from these and kidding yourself will not work, stick to the plan and document how well you stuck to the plan.
Getting into this habit from the start will help you become a strong trader.
Trading Software
Firstly, trading software for Betfair enables you to speed up your trading and gives you the opportunity to move at speed in the market and beat other users to prices and helps visualise the weight of money in the market to help predict the price movement direction.
The trading software market is crowded there are a lot of different options available to you, my advice here is to try them all and see which fits you and what you want to do on Betfair. They all offer a free trial so you can test them out and frankly the final decision is down to personal preference and what works best for you and your set up.
List of Betfair API Trading Software click here
Research Tools
We are now finally ready to let you into the big bad world of Betfair trading! I hope you are excited, remember this resource is always available for you. In this section I am going to talk about research.
In my view it is very important to research your trades, when you think about ‘What has to happen for my trade to profit?’ You need a place to find out the answers to those questions. There is hundreds of options available to you here, I will give you a few links below in different sports to get you started.
Football:
Soccer Stats - This is a great site which is totally free
Betfair Trading Community - The site you are reading this blog post on, we have our own paid stats software which we have developed and it allows you to save your research so you dont have to spend hours doing it daily. As a gift of reading this whole blog post, drop me and email and I will give you a voucher for 24 hours access on the stats
www.betfairtradingcommunity.com
Tennis:
Tennis Abstract - Free site with a whole host of tennis stats to help you research
Tennis Insight - Paid site with H2H match ups and data on the players in a nice to view side by side layout.
www.tennisinsight.com
Betfair Trading Community - The site you are reading this blog post on, we have our own paid stats software which we have developed and it allows you to save your research so you dont have to spend hours doing it daily. As a gift of reading this whole blog post, drop me and email and I will give you a voucher for 24 hours access on the stats
www.betfairtradingcommunity.com
Horse Racing:
Patternform - Great website which covers a lot of in play horse racing for DOB’s and also B2L, L2B also a good free Facebook group!
Proform - The gold standard of horse racing stats, created by a great guy and covers all the stats you all need but a paid site.
Cricket:
Espn Cricket info - Covers the news and stats on the cricket
https://www.espncricinfo.com
That really is is then! You are now armed with all the tools that you need to be able to trade on the Betfair exchange, it is an amazing skill to learn and one that I hope you get stuck into.
The next steps are to look through the sports guides below and then pick a sport and get cracking!
