Sunday 22 January 2017

Missing The Point

Although still falling well short of a logical explanation of how novice tennis traders can overcome the presence of court-siders, Peter Webb does at least finally acknowledge their existence in his latest attempt at luring the less sophisticated into the dangerous waters of in-play trading.

People don’t want to be picked off by people with faster feeds. So the money vanishes as the ball is about to be played. Fire up a market and watch yourself. Nobody plays ball when the ball is being played, which is quite sensible.
Therefore most Tennis traders will trade game to game, break to break or between key points.
Unfortunately what this advice fails to point out is that court-siders will be aware of when a point, game or set is over well ahead of anyone trading from their home. 

Does Peter think that the several seconds advantage, bought at considerable expense, is not going to be utilised? That the playing field suddenly becomes level for all?

To be clear, you will know that a point has ended by looking at the Betfair markets, not when you see it on your TV. The post-point prices available to you are those offered by traders who are ahead of you, and the value is to them, not to you.


As soon as the point is over, they put bids and asks into the market either side of the new "true" price.

Unless you (illogically) think that your skills can somehow be sharper than those of traders who are involved in tennis markets all the time, then if you are trading tennis in-play, whether between points or between games, you are consistently betting with a negative long-term expectancy.

Anyone who implies otherwise is being disingenuous.     

2 comments:

tennis trader said...

so in your belief all inplay sports betting is dead then

James said...

@tennis trader

A sensible trader is a logical trader.

When attacking a trading problem the first thing I think about is market structure; how the exchange, bet type and actors on the exchange behave, so that I can search for edge.

If there are actors who have time advantage over me and are consistently first to market then I am not going to consider fundamental trading in-play because court-siders are getting the fundamentals afore me.

However, if there are a significant number of misinformed and misguided traders who suck it in from the vendors then I might consider a contrarian technical approach that takes advantage of mug punter overreactions.

The perfect market is one where all actors have perfect information and can act on it instantaneously. The result of that is nobody profits apart from the exchange. As far as court-siding is concerned that particular market is considered to be perfect by sensible traders who are not courtside. It is a matter of court-siders competing amongst themselves for mug money until such time that mug punters become better informed, stop trading in-play and the paradox of skill wipes out profitability for court-siders.

In other areas, it is a matter of hoping that enough mug punters armed with simplistic vendor strategies are available to compensate your activities.

You must always assume that the best traders are not stupid and the more of them there are then the less profit there is to share amongst them, which is the nature of a zero-sum (actually, slightly negative-sum) game.

Sports trading differs from financial trading in that sports traders cannot create money from nowhere (How financial traders create money is another story). Sports trading always relies on the misinformed being willing to give away their money to the informed.