Trading tends to produce a far higher win rate than traditional betting. This is because the things that need to happen for a winning trade occur much more frequently than a winning bet. Let's examine this by looking at a football match.
To win a match, it is obvious you need to score a goal. If you are betting on the home team to win the match, you are effectively betting on them to score a goal or take the lead at some point. If you trade that, it should occur more frequently than an outright bet.
To check this basic assumption, I looked at data from 3,000 matches to see who scored first on average. The home team scored just over 57% of the time so our assumption was correct. But that means that the away team was still scoring first 43% of the time, which seems quite high. What happens when that goal goes in?
If we look at the home team, the chance of winning the game improves by about 25%, on average, when that first goal goes in. If the match remains at 0-0 from the start, the odds on the home team will drift, get bigger. But if that goal goes in, the market will adjust odds to reflect somewhere between a 70 to 75% chance of winning the match. By backing before the start of the match and trading out when that first goal is scored, you will net roughly a 25% profit.
The figures we just looked at where for the whole match, we can look in more detail at specific points. If the home team score around the 40-minute mark, it will shift their price 23%. If the away team scores first, then the home team's chance of winning the game will decrease by up to 36% inside the first 50 minutes. You can see that there is more profit in opposing the home team, or looking for an opportunity for the away team to score that first goal.
The difference in percentages is a reflection on the supremacy the home team has. This will decline as the match progresses and tend to decline much faster than any disadvantage the away team has. There is quite a complex interplay between the starting price and the chance of winning the match. That is related to the chance of that team scoring the first goal. But it's important to note that the difference between the probability of that first goal going in and the starting price narrows as the odds get shorter. That feels counter-intuitive to most people.
The upshot of this is that the larger the odds on the home team, the more likely it is that they will score the first goal above the rate in which they are expected to win the match. Curiously, the less chance they have of winning the match, the better trading opportunity can be created. As an example, a home team priced at odds of 1.251/4 will win a match 80% of the time and score first at a similar rate. But a team priced at 2.01/1 will win in the long term 50% of the time, but that team's chance of scoring first will be near to 60%. Trading teams at short odds produces less chance of a payoff versus just having a outright punt.
There is also another interesting effect that occurs in a match when the outsider is odds-against, which is even stronger at larger odds. For the duration of the first half, the odds on the outsider will be quite flat or come in slightly if the match remains '0-0'. That can present an interesting opportunity for trading. If you back an outsider at the start of the match, you effectively get an option on the away goal until half-time. If the home team scores then, obviously, you have a good chance of a losing trade. But it's not necessarily the end of that trade depending upon how the match progresses from there. However, if the outsider scores first, then the odds will move significantly and you have a very profitable trade. You mission as a trader, should you choose to accept it, is to locate matches that accentuate this characteristic.
If there is no goal during the first half, it will be very unlikely that you lose money on your trading position on the outsider. At half-time you can decide whether to put that back into the market for no loss. Or whether you want to continue your position into the second half. I prefer to open a position at the beginning of the match, get the chance of a potential profit and exit at a defined point. Half-time is typically a good point to do that.
So rather than having a gamble on a team to win a match, try trading it. You will profit more frequently that you would with gambling and by using a bit of thought you can find some good quality opportunities.
If you are looking for a much deeper insight into a football match then you should look no further than Bet Angel. As we've seen, Bet Angel contains a specialist tool, Soccer Mystic, that allows you to experiment with all the possible scenarios that could occur in the match and project them forward to see how they will impact your bet, trade or Cash Out value.