Wednesday 17 July 2013

Looks Good On Paper

Sports Trading Life had a recent post on paper trading, and anyone heeding the advice given in my last post on the Bundeslayga System may be considering this option.

In my view, since the cost of entry is so low, there is very little to be gained from paper trading. Officially the minimum stakes on Betfair and BETDAQ are £2 and £1 respectively, but the workaround to reduce this is well known, and so you can reduce your risk literally to a few pennies even if your brilliant system looks to lay 10.0 chances.

Someone once said that paper trading isn’t worth the paper it’s written on, and to a certain extent this is very true. In my experience, paper trading (i.e. everything is purely theoretical) doesn’t give you the whole story. The world is not perfect, and when you ‘go live’ with a system, it’s surprising how often you come across issues that, on paper, could never happen!

Prices and stakes available on paper aren’t achievable perhaps, or the selection criteria that seemed so clear on paper now throws up two or more selections because the numbers keep changing. That lay of 1.06 you saw and wrote down on paper vanishes from the screen before the countdown clock reaches 2. That kind of thing.

Paper trading can give you a rough idea, and for a trading activity with a higher cost of entry, options trading perhaps, paper trading first is an excellent idea, but for betting on sports?

Just play with £1 or £2 stakes, and get some real-life experience, but don’t expect your stakes to be scalable.

The worst that can happen is you lose a little money learning that your idea doesn’t work so well. Or you might happen to win a little money while learning that your idea has some merit.

Specific to the Bundeslayga, your risk is already lower than the ‘minimum’ because laying at say 1.5 means you are risking only half of the entered amount.

Anyway, if you can’t afford to lose a pound or two, then you should probably be focusing your time on something else anyway.

No comments: