A couple of comments on recent posts, with James first confirming that:
Caan has most certainly been a sales director.
However, selling PDFs as non-returnable digital media on PayPal has proven more lucrative than selling solar panels with their annoying money-back guarantees.James is correct, as usual. Caan Berry lasted just shy of 9 months in 2015 (January to October) as a Sales Director before focusing on his "Retail sale via mail order houses or via Internet" company called Sports Investments (UK) Ltd.
Tennis Trader had a comment on my post pointing out that the huge advantage for court-siders does not stop between points:
so in your belief all inplay sports betting is dead thenThat statement represents quite a leap, and with a few problems - asserting a claim I have never made, and without a definition of what 'dead' means in this context.
Despite the absence of a question mark, I suspect the statement is intended as an interrogative one, but I can't speak to "all" in-play sports betting because I am not familiar with all of them.
What I can say is that over the years, in-play betting has become 'dead' (very little activity) in some sports, for example ice hockey, College Football and baseball, and 'dead to me' (the presence of court-siders meaning I would be trading with a long-term negative expectancy) in sports such as golf, NBA and the NFL.
Football continues to attract lots of in-play money, as the 'active management' feature makes this this a unique sport on the exchanges. Here the challenge for the novice is not (usually) the presence of pitch-siders, but the standard of competition and expertise that you are up against.
What the situation is for the many sports of which I have no experience, e.g. Aussie Rules, athletics, bowls, boxing etc., I have no idea, but any sport with enough liquidity will sooner or later become a target of court-siding syndicates.
And at that point the smart trader will walk away. There will always be the more vulnerable and naïve who continue to unrealistically think they can compete with court-siders, but as I have explained in recent posts, this is an irrational belief, and it is irresponsible for anyone to claim otherwise.
Would you bet on the colour of the next car to pass your front door against someone positioned 300 yards up the road?
Of course you wouldn't, no one wants "to be picked off", even if there's encouragement to do so because it can be lucrative "...if you only bet between speed bumps". That the encouragement comes from the hot dog seller parked outside your house who used to sell to you should be a red flag.
5 comments:
Have to say the recent blog posts regarding the world class sports traders (Sir's Webb & Berry) have made for cracking reading but I do worry that you may be "due a visit" soon.
I do wonder why you have them on your blog roll though & I find the temptation to click on their links often too hard to resist.
Only yesterday I was seduced (nay-hypnotised) by Sir Caan's WOM headline and the next thing I know WOM makes perfect sense, my ebook was delivered in the blink of an eye and I'm awake at 2:00AM trading the AUS open- it's so easy. All this court-siding nonsense of which you speak I never even noticed. Unfortunately I don't think I'm allowed to forward on the ebook to you but not to worry I plan on delivering an online tennis trading masterclass before Wimbledon starts- it'll be called Sultan2 😃Anyway keep up the great blog- it's better than ever and I've been following for a good few years.
I'm a little unclear what the claim is with regarding to court-siding and the lack of an edge.
Betting on tennis, your edge can presumably come from the following factors:
a) Better understanding of the relative strength of the players. (This is where you admit there can be an edge).
b) Better understanding of (a) with respect to given situations. I.E. How likely is Wawrinka (or a generic player) to make a comeback two sets down vs Federer (or a generic player). I'm not sure whether or not you think there can be an edge here.
c) Better knowledge of what is actually going on. (This is court-siding). AKA average mug thinks score is 30-40 or 40-30, courtsider knows it's 30-40 and is betting accordingly.
I am extremely unclear on why
a) The courtsiders edge persists during a changeover when everyone knows the score.
and
b) Why you are absolutely positive that a court-siders temporary information advantage is so strong to nullify all analytical edge anyone might have.
I am not saying it can't be. I'm just saying I don't see where you have made this case clearly. Your analogy is betting on the colour of the next car against a guy 100 yards ahead of you on the road. My question is if you'r betting on "more black cars than blue in the next 1000" why would a guy ahead on the road have such a huge edge compared to someone who's studied traffic distribution patterns?
@Prabhat - You might be confusing betting and trading. I apologise, if you are not.
You can analyse an up-coming match and place a bet on it but all the data is public so there is probably not going to be any edge.
When trading in-play new information is being created all the time and you need to be the first to get that information to trade it with an edge.
Yes, at the changeover, the playing-field is level but then you are back to the betting problem and all information being public.
There will be the ill-informed who are wading into the market with daft ideas and you need to be fast to grab their volume before the professional set-ups.
I shall discuss some of this in my next article.
So are you saying that other than the information edge from knowing the game state earlier, there is no edge at all in sports betting?
Apologies if I'm getting you wrong, but from what you said that necessarily follows, since all the data is visible in pretty much every major sport.
Not agreeing or disagreeing for the moment, just trying to establish whether that's what you think.
As Cassini said more recently, it depends on the sport and the level of competition. You would think that Slams and high ranking point ATP/WTA tournaments are very closely watched by those in the know.
As I say, in another publication (available from independetly reviewed booksellers), there are those who specialise at trading the lower level tennis tournaments and soccer leagues. However, they must also factor in match fixing, which can eat into any informational edge they may have.
You could trade players outside of the top 100 in Challenger and Futures tennis tournaments but it only takes one or two bad eggs to throw matches and put a spanner in the works.
Personally, I am not a fundamental trader, just a technical trader. I have considered setting up a syndicate but it would need muscle as much as brains to run it. I know, from other income streams, that when you start to drain someone else's income stream they tend to plug the hole by putting a hole in you.
I was approached by someone wanting to set up a tennis trading syndicate. I did some research on him and discovered he was a convicted pimp. That's the sort of people you are dealing with. No thank you.
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