Trading Pre-Off Football

Hi all,

I have an idea and just wondered what the community thought about the idea/process. This isn't a trigger request I think I can do that myself.

Here is the process;

• Monitor match odds 24/48 hours before the off
• Over £10,000 matched
• 20/30 markets refreshing at one time
• Remember the prices every 30 seconds
• Leaked teams news or injury will move the market - If all remembered odds are more than 2 ticks different then back/lay
• Trailing stop loss 4/5 ticks out
• Close trade 1 minute before the off

How does that sound, has anyone got experience of doing this or am I wasting my time? I appreciate any comments.

Thanks,

Whitey

Hi
I've been trading pre-off match odds for a few years now slightly differently to your idea. MFP has some very useful variables for this. Markets with a reasonable traded volume, and a good back and lay book %, will already be correctly priced up. So I'm looking to trade in a price range either side of most_traded_price with a small overround, basically market making. The higher volume markets I wait my turn in the unmatched queue, lower volume markets I'm offering prices within the spread. It works, but it's slow. There are other price and volume variables which are also useful for this sort of trading.

I think you should try your idea with small (but not below minimum) stakes and see how it goes.
Tips I can give you:

• There will not be many markets with £10k traded 24hrs before the off except higher profile games and obviously more on weekends and during tournaments
• Given the recent customer purges by Betfair, if you are monitoring markets for long periods you should be looking to put bets into those markets you are monitoring fairly soon after starting refreshing, or they may start with the "commercial data usage"
• You can try waiting for leaked news but from what I've seen the most reliable time for pre-off match odds moves is around team sheet time
• Be careful of "out of place money" e.g. best 3 back prices, lay price and lay price 3 all have unmatched money below £100 but lay price 2 has £2k waiting which is out of place in the context of the market
• Trading over a crossover price will be advantageous. A frequent crossover price in match odds is 4.00 where the ticks increment 0.1 above and 0.05 below