Monday, March 26, 2007

Sony Ericsson Open tennis trading

Daily Result: £259.07

Excuse me for being super smug but today was just one of those days where I think how lucky I was to be made redundant just over five years ago and to have been self employed since. If only every day went so smoothly!

Had a lie in before going to the gym for a quick 20 lengths in the pool and 10 minutes in the steam room. Back for an early lunch and then spent a few hours catching up on some job-related paperwork and invoices before tuning into the Sony Ericsson open. Cleared around £200 in a couple of hours and had the dinner on and the wine chilled before Emma got back from work. A quick look in at the tennis again later in the evening netted another £50 or so before a browse through some honeymoon brochures. It has it's downs but life can be good sometimes! :-)

The tennis itself was pretty interesting. Was trading to half stakes as I haven't been trading the sport much recently. I didn't manage to do a complete match but ended up looking in on 6 matches in total. Some for substantial parts of the game. Others for just a few points. I traded off both Sky Sports pictures and non-televised games via a scoreboard.

The most profitable games were the ones where the favourite got turned over and my biggest winner was the Davydenko v Delic match. Looking back through my trades I actually backed Davydenko at 1.05 and layed him at 1.03. Not sure if he got any shorter than that but towards the end of the first set he just seemed to lose the plot. Seeded four and number four in the world he crashed out to Delic, who had to win two qualifiers just to take part in the tournament before prgoressing through the rounds to set up today's match. Either way there was some desperate stuff from Davydenko, Delic was brilliant in the second set and tennis saw yet another short priced favourite get gubbed.

Tempted to do the tennis again tomorrow but think I'll concentrate on the West Indies v Australia Super 8s match. It could be a great match to trade so can hopefully save a few more pennies for the big day.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great stuff,

I see you've turned a slow start to the month into a pretty good monthly total up to now. 4 trading days to go til month end going at a similar rate will mean a great month. Is it purely down to the cricket world cup or do you think it is owing to the new money management you have implemented?

Incidently I dipped in and out of the tennis over the last few days too but I only traded with small amounts as I really know nothing about tennis. I just used a real time scoreboard I found on the web but it seemed to be well behind the realtime action. I could predict what it was going to do just by watching the price move.

Took some consistent profit early on in the matches though by using the theory that the first 4-5 games are won by the server, however get on the wrong side of a break and you are into serious red!

It surprised me though how much liquidity there was in the market. There is a serious amount of money being traded on the tennis.

Jonny

The Betfair Trader said...

Hi Jonny,

Thanks for the comment. Yes it was a slow start to the month. In fact I didn't start trading until March 13th and that resulted in a £222 loss! So am quite happy to have to turned it round to the current position.

The profit has mainly come from the cricket world cup yes. And it's simply down to the number of games. My results on the blog have historically been the best (last summer) when there is regular cricket and that's what we have now. As for the new money management system I've barely implemented it yet. Was tempted to today and was trading in slightly larger chunks than normal for part of the Aussie innings. That said I have been placing trades of more than £1k once the prices have got short so that has helped. Now we're in to the Super 8s I will start trading in the larger amounts. Feel comfortable with the cricket again after the lay off so it's just a question of choosing a suitable match to start properly. There's still a lot of matches to go and there was no real need to rush in on some of the smaller games.

I'd be wary of the online tennis scoreboards as as you noticed they're not exactly live. Some are better than others but none will obviously beat the people at the events or the terrestrial viewers. Most don't even bet satellite pics. Yes, there is huge liquidity. But then for those who know the result ahead of the majority there is a lot of cash to be made. To be fair the 5 second delay on Betfair stops most pick offs but it still helps to be in the market quicker and there's always some slow fingers about. Still very possible to be profitable from just a scoreboard of course. Just a question of thinking about how you trade and what prices you leave up. I'm always worried there might be an injury or something I don't know about though so tend to be very wary without pics.