Sports Trading

Sports Trading

Sports trading for me has been an interesting journey so far. One thing that I’ve attempted to do in the last few days or so, is to break the old gambling mindset and to attempt to develop a sports trading mindset instead.

In the olds days before I started trading sports online at Bet Fair, I used to have a punt on any sports match that took my interest – generally these would have been football and/or rugby matches in the UK.

Getting out of the mindset of only concentrating on the end result; instead looking for potential trades in the in-play market has been quite difficult. I still found myself ‘gambling’ on the particular sports trade in question, thinking I could leave my trades ‘open’ for too long, before trading out of them for a profit.

Staying in a open sports trading position for too long opens you up to an increased risk of the trade not working out to your advantage – leave it up to the players on the pitch to come good for us, just doesn’t work!

I have therefore been experimenting with the timings and or profit level of each particular trade, and found that on several ‘losing’ trades, had I had got out of the market at the 5 minute point from start of trade, I would have ‘won’ more sports trading positions than otherwise and would have kept my initial stake, instead of losing it in an open sports trading position that had actually turned into a gamble / punt!

To solve and help me keep focused on this, I have decided to lower my percentage target for each individual trade to 5% of stake. I was originally aiming for 10% of stake and was finding that I was actually trading out at higher than that – thus potentially leaving my sports trade open to fail due to gambling on the position, rather than seeing it as a sports trading opportunity and trading out and moving to the next football trading opportunity that arises.

I’m thinking about keeping a football trading diary on here, as I seem to be updating the site everyday (well almost!) with the day’s current in-play football coupon. Keeping a record of my journey in a diary format, will probably serve as an additional motivation to stick to my new 5% or 5 minutes rule.

Everything I read online about sports trading indicates that the first hurdle each football / sports trader needs to overcome is to break the habit of ‘gambling’ on their sports trades and instead treat it as a ‘risk’ for a set period of time / or set amount of percentage profit. Once either of these are met, then the sports trade should be closed and the profit banked. If you cross the line and leave the sports trade open, you are ‘sports gambling’ not sports trading.

In which case, getting into the mindset of a sports trader instead of a gambler, when sports trading requires each individual to come up with a strategy that they have worked out for when best to make a trade, and then once a sports trade has been opened, they need to have a clearly defined exit strategy for that particular trade in order to make sports trading as successful as possible.

I have therefore decided on my exit strategy from now on;

Get out of the particular sports trade in question once I’ve made 5% profit on my stake, or once 5 minutes time has elapsed.

This rule has been printed off on to an a4 piece of paper and stuck to the wall by my desk. The nag note on it has been shortened to Trade 5% or 5 Mins it has been printed off in large font and bold-ed to remind me of my sports trading strategy that I intend to keep to from now on.

It is of course for the successful sports trading positions that I have open, these rules are not strictly for the times when a particular trade has enjoyed the rub of the green during the period of time I’ve allotted, so not specifically for times the actions of the players on the pitch have done us a favour; or conversly, when lady luck has gone against us and our trade has gone in the red zone. We need at these times to think about exiting the trade and reducing our potential losses.

So basically I’m saying that when sports trading, in the few weeks since I’ve been doing it; I have discovered that unlike the usual method of taking a punt on a team and gambling on the result, we need to have an exit strategy for our sports trades regardless of the result, that will also leave us hopefully in profit regardless of the result.

What methods do you use when developing a strategy for sports trading? Is your sports trading strategy the same or different from mine percentage or time wise? Feel free to comment below with anything that you feel is relevant with regards to sports trading.

Sports Trading

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