One of your Betfair football trading strategies should be to trade football odds pre-game. Although odds don’t usually move that much before the kick-off compared to fluctuations during live betting, there are still football games that attract a lot of attention due to their odds trading range. In order to make money in Betfair trading, odds have to move substantially unless you are scalping, otherwise the volatility isn’t enough to make a profit. As long as odds climb or fall before the kick-off, traders can apply technical analysis at Betfair graphs and improve their strategies.

I’m going to use today’s football game between Vardar Skopje and BATE Borisov as an example. The teams may not be so popular as Barcelona or Manchester United, but liquidity was sufficient enough to allow trading during the summer since most leagues haven’t started yet. Before we dig into the Betfair graphs and explain how basic stuff of technical analysis can benefit Betfair traders, I need to mention that this game was an actual tip of mine in my Greek betting blog. An online translator is required if you want to understand the whole text. However the most interesting detail of that post is the included graphs, as I mostly describe the reasons of odds shortening or drifting.

Let’s take a quick look at the Betfair graphs. These show the odds for home (Vardar) and away win (BATE Borisov) and their movement before kick-off. For the time being disregard the added annotations.

betfair-football-trading-strategies-pre-game-graphs

Home team’s odds began dropping right from the start and eventually shortened down from 5.0 to 3.30. In the meantime away win’s odds were drifting from 2.0 to 2.50 when backers – that is people actually betting on an away win – took control of the market and pushed the price lower. That kind of odds movement is a perfect example of a pre-game tradable Betfair football market. Most often you’ll wait for hours until odds move a couple of ticks. In this game though there were quite a few opportunities for football trading.

First we will discuss trading on the away win, which was the favorite outcome of the football game. Assuming we would have noticed the developing uptrend like I explained in my Greek post mentioned earlier, laying at 2.00 should have been the entry point of the trade. One of the technical analysis’ reversal sings is the double top formation and it’s the one that signaled the exit point of the trade at 2.50. Football traders knowing of that reversal pattern would trade out and secure the profit shown in the image below.

betfair-football-trading-strategies-pre-game

Although it seems Betfair traders stand to lose a thousand euros, the risk is significantly smaller due to stop loss orders. I recommend setting a mental stop loss at all times when trading at Betfair. The stop loss here should be set at 1.75, which would result to about 150 euros loss. Remember to always use a stop loss in your Betfair trading strategies.

Moving on to trading the home win, traders trusting the developing downtrend would have exited again at another reversal sign of technical analysis, called double bottom. The formation is exactly the opposite of the double top pattern and in both situations the meaning is that the market cannot overcome the previous high or low respectively. That leads buyers (or sellers) to lose confidence and abandon their positions, while sellers (or buyers) kick in and reverse the trend. Risking once more a thousand euros, traders would back at 4.50 and lay at 3.30 ideally. Their Betfair football trading strategy would lead to the profit shown in the image below.

betfair-football-trading-strategies-pre-game-underdog

Comparing the two figures we see that trading home team’s odds would result to increased profit. The risk would also be smaller, due to setting a tighter stop loss at 5.5 for about €100 loss. Therefore in this example we’d better trade the long odds, although that’s not necessarily the rule of Betfair football trading. In other words backing the underdog may have had a better result than laying the favorite’s odds in this example, but there’re will be times when the opposite is true. In general, we should look to trade the setup that will lead to the best risk-to-reward ratio possible. Combined with correctly setting a stop loss and applying technical analysis, your pre-game Betfair football trading strategies will certainly improve their efficiency. For the record, both teams failed to score, resulting to a draw.