Betfair Trading For Beginners
Trading on Betfair can be a very exciting prospect and there are new people coming to sports trading on a daily basis.
Here are six Betfair trading tips to help you get started on your trading journey
Trading Psychology – Manage Your Expectations
A question that a lot of people ask when first starting to trade on Betfair is “How much can I make?”
This is a question that can’t be answered. Some people may go on to make large sums of money. Whilst others struggle to make any.
If you focus on the money but ignore the process you will struggle. The main question to focus on when you start trading is “how can I make money?”
Where is the opportunity?
How do the markets functions?
Why would this be a profitable strategy?
Becoming a profitable sports trader may take some time. It is important to manage your expectations and not expect too much too soon.
Your trading psychology is likely going to one of the main factors in whether or not you become a profitable trader.
Focus On One Sport
There are so many options to look at when trading on Betfair. There is in-play trading or pre-event trading for a start. Then numerous sports to trade football, tennis, cricket, horse racing, basketball, darts etc.
It can be quite tough to know where to start.
Initially you might want to look at the different sports and how the markets react. Once you have found the sport that suits your trading style its time to focus on that one.
You can see that many of the best sports traders around specialize in one sport.
Be Patient
Good trading is often about waiting for the best opportunities to present themselves. You need patience in order to gain the experience to spot these opportunities. Then you need patience to be able to wait for them to appear before executing your trades.
When I was starting out on my trading journey a full time trader told me “You can’t create good trades out of thin air.” “They are either there or they are not, just try to make the most of them when they appear.”
This sounded a little funny to me at first. But the more I learnt about trading the more this type of mindset makes sense.
You can’t force a good trade. Just because you lost your last trade doesn’t mean that laying the score in an Egyptian second division game for twice your usual stake is suddenly a good idea.
Keep Learning
After a while you will start to notice recurring themes in the markets that you are trading. Reactions to certain news, over reactions in some scenario’s, under reactions in others. The sports trading markets are constantly reacting to different bits of information and you can always learn from this.
Keep records of your own trading and note the instances that move the odds.
Do these instances create opportunity?
Are they likely to occur again?
Why did they happen?
Persistence Pays Off
There are going to be times when you make a mistake, where you lose money.
When I started sports trading and betting I thought I would be successful pretty quickly. I was wrong it took me a few years before I really understood how to make money from football trading.
It was from trial and error, reading lots of blogs, recording my trades, recording odds movement and chatting on forums. Eventually I started to see repeatable patterns which were profitable and I was only able to do this through persistence.
Manage Your Bankroll
When things are going well and every trade is a green one. It can be easy to get carried away and starting betting much larger amounts then you should be.
Over the long term things are always going to go perfectly. They will be losing trades, losing days, perhaps even losing months depending on your trading strategy and variance.
Making sure you keep your bankroll in tact is another huge factor in whether or not your going to make money in the long term.
Are you currently trading on Betfair, Betdaq or Smarkets?
Have any advice for new traders?
Comment below.