Trading – The Simple Approach

There’s no doubt about it that if you’re averse to risk and want to make money from your betting… trading is almost certainly the best route for you to take.

Over the years I’ve read pretty much every guide that’s been released and they all follow similar approaches.

I know some very high-turnover traders who work in different ways to each other from swing trading to scalp trading and even cross-market trading.

But, for the newbie, trading can be incredibly frustrating.

Why?

Because you keep jumping on trades that move the wrong way.

If there’s anything you’re going to need to be a successful trader, it’s patience. And if you have patience and have at least one day a week where you can trade, then… you can learn to be a successful trader.

And I’m going to show you how right now.

The approach I’m about to share is so simple that you’ll find it hard to believe it works. But it does. You don’t need hundreds of graphs and charts and highly complex software. You will need some software in order to place your bets fast enough, but I’m going to show you the principles using the Betfair graphs.

Open up a race at 15 minutes before the off. This is a rule I have in place as some software doesn’t collect data until you’re connected to a race and it makes sure that you’re starting to gather data in time.

You need to follow three very strict rules:

1. Only trade on the favourite
2. Only trade between 10 minutes and 5 minutes before the off
3. Only place one trade per race

These rules are key to making this process work. Scalping, which is the type of trading you’re about to do, requires patience. If you don’t have this then you will place more losing trades than winning trades.

By only allowing yourself to place one trade a race you are forcing yourself to learn patience and discipline.

So you’ve opened up a race which will look like this:

The favourite is the horse with the lowest odds, in this case Cornelius.

Next to the horses name is the icon of a graph…

Click this icon and you’ll be brought up with a chart that looks like this:

This is what we’re going to use to determine the entry and exit points for our trade.

Focus on the Traded column and follow it up and down to see the lowest odds that the horse has been traded at.

It has every odd possible, so you may need to scroll some way before anything starts to appear in the traded column. As you can see below the Traded column started filling in at odds of 2.42.

In this case the lowest odds the horse had traded at was 2.42. Scrolling further down to see the highest odds that the horse had been traded at, you can see that in this case it’s 3.95.

There is a condition. If the horse hasn’t had more than £1000 traded at an odds level, then we don’t consider that odds level as having significant trading and is excluded from our calculations.

That would mean the highest odds the horse had traded at was 3.15. I would still keep the lowest at 2.42 because although it’s less than £1000, it’s only be £25 and the next odds level has over £8000 traded on it.

Doing this you will find two possible situations. Most of the time you will see something that resembles this:

The majority of the money traded on the horse will be at odds in the top middle of the graph. Either side of these odds the amount of money traded gradually decreases.

But sometimes, as in this example, you may see something like this:

Now these are both obviously representative examples, if you made graphs from real figures they wouldn’t be this uniformed.

What has happened here is that there are two odds which have had similar amounts traded in them. This normally occurs when a horse has had a lot of early activity at a certain level and then just before the race starts the market then sits at another level producing two high points.

Races with two clear high points like this should be passed. Focus ONLY on races which have one high point.

What you can see in the example above is that the majority of trading happened between odds of 2.42 and 2.80. There was a bit of a wobble at some point where a small amount was traded between 2.90 and 3.15, but compared to the amount traded between 2.42 and 2.80 this is negligible.

That means for this runner we would be using 2.42 and 2.80 as our low and high points.

Do this between 15 minutes and 10 minutes before the off. By the time it gets to 10 minutes before the off for the favourite horse you should have:

• The lowest traded odds (with at least £1000 traded on it)
• The highest trade odds (with at least £1000 traded on it)

Now we need to wait for the perfect moment to allow us to trade. You are only going to be doing one trade per race, so you need to wait for the right moment.

If the right moment doesn’t appear in a race, that’s no problem. Hold off and wait for the next race. Most importantly…

Never force a trade.

The moment you are waiting for is when the odds drop to the lowest traded odds level or rise to the highest traded odds level.

At this point you very quickly perform a couple of checks:

1. Make sure the odds haven’t ploughed through the previous odds level, it should be hovering at it and bouncing about a bit.
2. Make sure that there is similar money waiting to be matched on either side of the market.

If both of those are true then you can place your trade. If the odds have hit the lowest traded odds level then you want to place:

A lay bet at those odds and look to back the horse one tick higher

If the odds have hit the highest traded odds level then you want to place:

A back bet at those odds and look to lay the horse one tick lower

Now we need to put in our stop-loss. We are only looking to make one tick profit in these trades. But occasionally the market will move in the wrong direction. To prevent us from losing a huge amount we are going to place a stop-loss at 4 ticks.

If you’re using software then it can do this for your automatically.

So we’re after a 1 tick profit or a 4 tick loss.

Using this approach you should be able to get well over 90% of your trades correct and will make a good profit.

If it gets to 5 minutes before the off and there hasn’t been a possibility for a trade, then move on to the next race.

But you must manage your expectations.

• This will ONLY work if you follow all the steps and only place one trade in a race.
• You will ONLY make a small amount of profit when you start to small stakes.
• You will LOSE more than 10% of your trades when you first start.

What you’re doing by following this process is learning the most important market indicators and patience.

Do this for thirty days, it can be one day a week or every day. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is you follow this process for thirty days.

After thirty days you will have the process completely ingrained. At this point you can consider allowing yourself to do two trades per race.

Build up slowly and you will not only learn how the markets move, but you will also make a small profit while doing so and avoid the frustration of always feeling like you’re on a losing trade.