Are Football Trading Results Just Random

Football, Soccer - whatever you call it. It is the beautiful game.
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Bluesky
Posts: 420
Joined: Mon Sep 19, 2016 9:26 pm

lmf21734 wrote:
Wed Feb 21, 2018 1:24 pm
MESSAGE TO BLUKESKY: Since football markets are so efficient do you think that most football systems being touted are simply selling a dream that doesnt really exist. Most of them never show their equity curves or results and those that do the equity curve growth is far from anything sustainable from a sole income perspective.
Thanks
uktrader
I absolutely agree with you, if anyone finds a really profitable market inefficiency on the pre start soccer markets then the last thing they would do would be to sell that knowledge. The soccer markets for the big leagues are fairly liquid so there would not be a problem putting a lot of money through them. The only time you would consider selling this knowledge was when the inefficiency was no longer present in the market. Most systems don't last forever, and once they become unprofitable that's when they are likely to be sold to the general public.

I agree with the other people in this thread that say you are more likely to find inefficient pricing with the in play markets due to the dynamic nature of them. I know several people who follow psychoff on twitter, and they say he has an uncanny ability to predict when a goal is about to be scored. Now I have no idea if psychoff is profitable or not, but I would imagine his ability to predict goals has a lot to do with his match reading skills. These will have been developed through watching thousands of hours of football matches together with some statistical analysis I am sure. Most of us would not be prepared to put the time and effort involved to get this good at goal prediction, anyone who does deserves to be well rewarded from the markets.
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northbound
Posts: 737
Joined: Mon Mar 20, 2017 11:22 pm

Bluesky wrote:
Thu Feb 22, 2018 9:12 am
Most of us would not be prepared to put the time and effort involved to get this good at goal prediction, anyone who does deserves to be well rewarded from the markets.
Exactly.

I met a guy a couple of years back, he was market making football markets straight after goals are scored.

Asked how long did it take him to become profitable, he replied: the first year I lost money, the second year I lost money, the third year I started being profitable.

Successful people practice until they make it. Unsuccessful ones just want a formula that works right away.
max_usted
Posts: 133
Joined: Tue Feb 14, 2017 6:07 pm

Dear Community

Is there an edge in football trading?

For instance everyone knows that the dutch football leagues are high scoring leagues yet last week there were 4 games over last weekend which ended up 0-0.

Today Celtic drew 0-0 against St Johnstone. Juventus and Napoli the top scorers in Serie A could only win 1-0. Galatasary (usual pace setters in Turkey actually lost 2-1 against Kasimpasa a lower placed team.
Just very quickly, on these results (and I realise it's very easy to make this points in retrospect but anyway):
  • Celtic had a second-string team out with youngsters and random/crap players because they were playing Zenit in the UEFA cup later that week. I lost on this game but, having watched it, the result was not actually wholly unpredictable given the patterns of play in it
  • I very much disagree that Juventus winning 0-1 away to Torino was an unpredictable or surprising result!
  • Galatasaray have a very uneven away record - particularly so, given comparison with their home record - and they were away against Kasimpasa
  • Napoli winning by one goal against Spal was surprising. I managed to avoid loss in this game by watching it - It provoked enough doubt in my mind so that I didn't take a position. This is just to say how important it is to watch games. In my view, patterns of play often provide enough evidence to confound your expectations and this can mean avoiding losses.
Its easy to make a quick buck here and there but when it comes to sustained income as a full time job making £50,000 or more per year from football trading is there anyone in the community who meets this level.
I am 1.4 years in and still using relatively small stakes. I do not make this but I am certain that this is very achievable given the opportunities that exist in the markets. There are an enormous number of opportunities and they occur so regularly - but it took me 11 months of trading before I even started to perceive these.
Just wondering. I know in Tennis and Cricket and Darts there are more swings inplay as the market reacts to what is happening so there are great opportunities to take advantage of the swings but I have found that Football is not like this because unless their is a goal or the lack of a goal then the price just continues to come in or go out.
In my view, the comparative unresponsiveness of the in-play odds is what provides such opportunity. There is a lack of scoring events compared to tennis or other sports. The markets are highly conventional due to their adherence to the principle of time-decay. In my view, the above two factors mean that they are (comparatively/actually) very unresponsive to the nature of the event as it unfolds - for example, they don't swing like tennis odds in line with when one team is massively dominant and creating changes right, left and centre, until the point when that team scores a goal. They can't because they don't have a constantly updating record of the balance of dominance as exists in tennis - that is until the point a goal is scored.
Just keen to hear what the community take is on this because dont understand how one can do some really indepth statistical analysis, do all your homework, Choose 5 matches for the day where you get in as a time that repressents great value and then you end up with either nearly all the trades working against you or you barely get out with very low profit or a scratch.....

Scratching my head sometimes as to the results I sometimes get which sometimes makes you think whether you simply went against your homework and statistical analysis and traded the oppositie way whether you would actually be more profitable.

uktrader
In my view, where possible, the most effective source of (predictive) information for a game or in relation to odds during a game is the nature of that match itself (i.e. the patterns of play). Teams are groups of humans and aggregates of their past behaviour can never be accurately descriptive of their future behaviour during a particular period of time. Napoli just wanted the day off after scoring early against Spal, and this was arguably apparent through watching their on-field behaviour, but could never have been predicted in advance via empirical analysis. Another similar game was Betis vs. Sociedad (finished 0-0) which was unpredictable in advance, but arguably enough evidence during the game itself to avoid loss on this fixture (or even get a big win if you're open-minded enough).
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lmf21734
Posts: 38
Joined: Mon Jan 31, 2011 9:22 pm
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max_usted thanks for your informative reply. Its quite funny because the justifiable information you presented on why specific games didn't meet the expected expectations is then countered by other games I have seen where inexplicably you have 5-7 goals scored in a match between 2 teams who are low scoring teams and whose games normally end up 1-0/0-1/1-1.

The truth is that things for the most part don't go according to plan when we are predicting scores or trying to be overtly precise in how we think a game is going to fare. For instance who would have believed West Ham would have held Chelsea 1-1 at Stamford Bridge or who would have thought the game between Man City and Man Utd would have ended up 2-3 or Ajax only beating Heracles 1-0 on Saturday or Galatasary losing 0-1 to a team ranked in the bottom 3 of the Turkish Super League.

Its an interesting discussion.

Mel (The Scientia Trader)
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