Andy Murray continued his run to the Gentlemen's Singles final with an easy win this evening, but my pre-tournament back at 4.2 hasn't exactly paid off yet, although I can lay at 4.1. I'll wait another round before deciding whether to lay off as planned or not.
I caught the Tommy Haas / Maric Cilic match which saw both players traded at 1.09. Nicked a few quid, and made some money on Gilles Simon who easily beat Victor Hanescu.
Since it's a quiet time of year for investing, I've been putting some time into developing my football ratings for next season. Betfair has some season long match bet markets, e.g. Chelsea v Liverpool, which would be interesting, or at least would be if the bets were available on BETDAQ.
As someone eloquently stated on the Betfair forum the other day
"When your account qualifies for the Premium Charge it becomes useless for everything apart from trading”Why would you bet at £100 to win £300 on Betfair when you will actually win only £240, whereas with a traditional bookmaker, you could bet at 5-2 and win £250?
Indeed. There is a school of thought that these side bets help to offset the Premium Charge, but I don't go to that school any more. The problem is that whereas I will happily put four figures on an in-play NBA game when I have value, I can't bring myself to put anything like that amount on a pre-game punt where the 'value' is so much harder to find and any edge much smaller. So even if the punts net out at zero, the benefit to the Premium Charge is minimal since the commission is peanuts.
My lay the 'big' home team in baseball system continues to help the bottom line this month. The Mets, White Sox and Angels are all at 50%, with the other selections not playing more than one game each yet.
A few weeks after the PC was brought in I went back to a football bet I knew had a small edge but wasn't worth doing until the PC gave it a boost. Once I reached the end of the season, I'd bet about 150k on it, made about a 1% edge and created about 3k in implied commission, so I made about 4-5k on it. Not terrible but once I took into account the Sat/Sun afternoons/evening set aside to it, I couldn't help thinking it wasn't worth it, especially as small edges can be vunerable (although I suppose a small negative edge could pay off the PC).
ReplyDeleteIt does open your eyes to the fallacy that this targets traders as my run of the mill stuff tends toward gambling over trading (albeit a decent edge) yet even with the football stuff I was still paying the PC.
Nick