Q: from a reader...

Got a question from Ste:

"Hi Sammy, I have been reading your blog on tennis trading. I am a student and have recently started to look towards trading, mainly horseracing as I have a greater knowledge about that. Yet I see more and more trading on tennis, would you be able to give me a few beginner pointers? If you can that would be great, if not then its not problem. Thanks!"

Hey Ste!

So this is a super broad question cause there is many aspects that you have to learn. But key in all sports trading is learning to read the markets.

You have to know from with in 1-2% margin where a odds will be if X or Y happens. If not its very hard to make any assumptions on what your liability or profit will be for the specific trade / strategy you are looking at.

How to do this is pretty straightforward. You just watch alot of matches and see how the market moves each ball / game / set. This might seem abit overwhelming at first cause odds seem to move a bit random. But eventually after alot of practice you can start to see patterns on what is normal and not and after that spot value (when market is out of line)

It took me about 3 months of pretty much watching every tennis match during that time in 2012. I dont know if that is fast or slow. You could probably learn it much quicker but. The first month I pretty much didnt trade i just focused on following the markets movement in relation to what happened in the match.

What else...

Bankroll management, there is loads of information out there on this topic. If you have a small bankroll that you can easily replace. Then you can risk a much higher proportion of your bankroll. If its something that you need to be able to work and make a living. Then you have to take really good care of it. Otherwise you wont make any more money if you blow it all. Its like being a carpenter and not taking care of your tools. You will be out of a job -> no food on the table.

Note worthy is, depending on your margins you have on each trade. If you have small margins = higher variance which then you should use a smaller porportion of your bankroll. The bigger the margin the bigger amount you can risk.

Ok thats all I had time for today. I hope you can take something with you from all of this anyways! I think learning how the markets behave for the different sports is for me the most important thing.

Stay Sharp!

/Sammy

Friday: Something wierd happened

This is a screenshot from Stephens-Peng yesterday. After Peng won the matchpoint. There was these huge amounts of free money still laying around until Betfair closed the market which lasted for atleast 30 seconds. I wasn't really sure what was going on. I thought about backing my whole exposure limit 20k but with no stream and not knowing what was really going on i couldnt stomach it. For me after first set market was really wierd. But I had some losses to recoupe which was nice.

I wasnt gonna do any predictions today but here is some..

Bouchard to beat Cornet, Kanepi to beat Lepchenko, Oprandi to beat Peng, Sijsling to beat Jarkko. Thats about it.. other than that odds looks pretty decent. Ohh almost forgot Vasselin to beat Montanes...

GL @ the markets

/Sammy