Opportunities where you might not have looked...

The Scatter Gun trade continues to provide me with the vast majority of my soccer trading profits, although it has to be said the Premier League has been disappointing thus far with lots of wins to nil. Wins to nil are, of course, of limited value using this strategy as the lynchpin of the whole trade is the 1-1 scoreline.

To avoid creating a mind numbingly boring post of screen shots of the various leagues that I trade I have posted just two. I was surprised by the frequency of SG scores in the two leagues pictured below. Intuitively, and from experience of trading them, I'd certainly not have had the 1-1 and 2-1 frequency in either as high as they actually are!

SWEDEN 1

NORWAY 1
 

Even if your detailed knowledge of these two leagues is, like mine, sketchy at best you can see from the percentages that both these leagues present massive opportunities for this trade. When you take into account the number of 2-2, 3-1 1-3 etc it is clear that profits are there for the taking even if the end result isn't one of the standard scorelines.

Ligue 2 in France, Serie B in Italy, Segunda in Spain, our own Championship and League 2 and the leagues in Argentina and Brazil (if you've the lifestyle and stamina to trade in the early hours!) have consistently been happy hunting grounds for me.

The Latin American leagues also seem to throw up many more situations where  the underdog takes the lead than happens in Europe- ideal for the SG - and I'm in the process of looking at that in more detail to maybe throw up another trading angle involving laying an odds on favourites.


If you would like to have a look at the figures for other leagues get over to www.soccerstats.com. choose the league you are interested in and select 'Trends'. It's a mine of information and completely, utterly, free of charge.

Speaking of free of charge, the ever optimistic Cassini says he's waiting for referral commissions as his blog has to date driven more people to my blog than any other source bar google. Whether he is waiting for that to come out of my pocket or direct from Blogger isn't really clear...but I will propose to him the following....as I regard my trading profits as being essentially 'free' money I currently donate 10% of my winnings to a local charity that I support. If he's happy for me to continue to do that I'll put the referral commission in a pot and pay him in a lump sum once I start paying SPC (minus the amount he owes me for the masses of page views generated for Green All Over from here, of course!) As I believe Cassini to be, like me, a half centarian (at least) I wouldn't advise that he incorporates any referral commission in his net worth spreadsheets just yet. If at all. :-)

A milestone reached, and missed

After an unusually busy period at work, with many late nights and early mornings means that I haven't posted or checked my blog 'dashboard' for a while. In that period of time my pageview stats have tipped the 100,000 mark.

On delving a bit deeper into the stats I was surprised to see that the country with the third highest page views is the USA. This surprises me because I am under the impression that in-play betting / trading is not possible Stateside. Perhaps they know something that I don't? The only other non European nation in the top ten page view stats, surprisingly to me, is New Zealand. Wherever you are in the world, thanks for looking at my little corner of the net, and I hope you continue to do so.

Moving on to referring sites, top of the tree, no surprises here, is Google. Cassini's Green All Over is top of the blogs for referring, by some margin but A Football Trader's Path, Centre Court Trading and my old muckers over at www.tradingfootball.eu are all worthy of a mention in dispatches. There are many sports trading blogs out, and a lot of the 'challenge' style seem to come in a blast of newly found enthusiasm only to splutter and die. The three mentioned, along with most of the rest of my blog roll are very definitely worth reading if you are serious about sports trading, and the authors have all helped me find and refine my trading over time. Perosnally I wish Lamb would blog again, I can't believe he's completely hung his trading mouse up now he's back with his limbs embracing the greasy pole!

Anyone reading this who trades  as a hobby should consider blogging. It's fun, therapeutic and interesting - give it a go! It might even help your discipline!

I still find it amazing that so many people have found their way here. This exercise started out as little more than a means to try to help with  the thorny issue of discipline, and I little imagined back in 2010 that I'd still be around writing the occasional missive two years later.

In that time I think it's fair to say that I have learnt a lot from other bloggers and commentators, even if I still struggle with certain aspects of, if you like to put it this way, the 'intellectual' side of trading. As you know I'm no mathematician and certainly the idea of compiling and updating football statistics holds little or no appeal to me. Fortunately the world wide web is full of people who thrive on this kind of thing and most of whom are prepared to share the fruits of their labour for free.

One thing I do now do, religiously, is to keep detailed records of my trading. This is probably the single most important step forward that I have taken since starting blogging. I always 'felt' that I knew what worked for me and what didn't, but being able to see it in black and white (or, perhaps more pertinently, in red and green!) has enabled me to focus on the good areas and either improve or discard the bad areas.

Discipline, however, remains my Achilles heel. Only yesterday I three away a three figure sum in the belief (and that's all it was - that old 'gut feeling' that so many have castigated me for!) that the Gooners couldn't possibly go two consecutive Premier League games with no goals for or against. I was doing that kind of thing in 2010 so it is more than a bit disappointing to note that I still, occasionally, tread the same slippery slope despite receiving many warnings and lessons along the way.

It seems, therefore, that I am destined to continue blogging, as the original raison d'etre of the blog still persists. So, you're stuck with me. I missed this landmark by a few hundred page views. I will try not to miss the next one - 250,000 - but I suspect that's more than a few months away!

All that effort designing a new page....

..and on the second really big afternoon of the new season for soccer trading it all goes up the swanny! Football matches were left high and dry from just before 4pm until about 5 pm by a massive server failure.

Many people were left with big trading exposures on the City game, and probably other games as well. I'm sure some turned out well, and others lost. But the whole point of BF, for me anyway, is that it is supposed to allow the trader to adjust positions in play. I really can't understand how such a company continually gets away with this kind of user experience. Well, I can. They have no real competition. The forum is full, on these occasions, with people threatening to take their banks over to the 'Purple Place' but few do so.

For the past few weeks I've been having to change from the wonderful new BF footie page to the old one. Cookies don't seem to work! I don't want or need them to change it! I never trade from BF anyway, so all I ask is that the entire In Play coupon for that particular day is available for me to scroll down. I don't want to have to look at 2 or 3 different pages thank you BF! My little voice won't change that but I do find it irksome that they spend all that time, money and effort fixing something that wasn't really broken and yet still suffer a massive server failure and have no Plan B.

I suppose the best we can hope for is that one of the big sports books buys BetDaq and puts some money into marketing it so that it can become a proper exchange alternative for us all. Then that might galvanise BF into correcting their mistakes.

Speaking of mistakes, X-Factor springs to mind. I have no time for it personally, but Mrs Gun loves it for some reason. I know some people make a lot of money trading such things but I've a word of caution for you if you do this time round...

On my way through the living room last evening, coming back from a smoke break, I saw one of the Spice Girls on the judges panel. She was telling contestants that they couldn't sing. The mind boggles.

Well, it would have been a winner!

Unfortunately Mrs Gun had me busy doing something as the 3pm games kicked off. Nothing exciting, you understand, just something I'd rather not have been doing.

As a result I managed to miss East Stirling's three minute penalty against Rangers, and therefore missed the opportunity to green my bet off at 1.2 ish.

Such is life, but I've told her the beer's are on her next week as I now can't afford to buy any myself.