Football Trading - How to Profit - Honest Betting Reviews

Mastering football trading is one of the hardest skills possible. Most people who try football trading tend to dabble in well-known strategies such as laying the draw or trading the over/under markets and at first it can seem easy, but then the tough reality sets in when results go against them or something unexpected happens and the losses mount up.

To trade the football markets successfully takes a great deal of skill, research and planning. It takes rigid discipline and sticking to a gameplan no matter what and very few do it successfully.

There are some useful tools out there to help with trading football so you don’t have to just “go it alone” and try and figure it all out for yourself. We’ll take a look at some of the tools you can use as well as analyse the pitfalls to avoid and how you can become a profitable football trader.

Football Trading – The Basics

Just like any other form of trading, with football trading you are trying to back high and lay low to guarantee yourself a profit whatever happens. You are not interested in the ultimate result of a match, just the price swings that occur in it.

To trade you will need to join an exchange like Betfair or Smarkets, both of which have a wide variety of markets to trade. Some of the most popular markets to trade include:-

– Match Odds (1×2)
– Over/under 1.5/2.5/3.5 goals
– Correct Score
– Half Time result
– Half Time score
– Both Teams to Score

It is best to concentrate on the markets with most liquidity if you are going to trade because you don’t want to risk your bets not being matched or give up value by taking prices that are worse than the odds should be.

Obviously the factors that most affect the odds during a football match are:-

– Goals
– Red cards
– Time decay

Essentially having so few variables makes football quite a predictable sport to trade. Prices will move in quite a steady way until there is a goal when they will change dramatically.

Knowing how prices will move as a result of a particular event is crucial to your trading. You want to know exactly what the potential profit and loss will be from a particular trade and to work out the risk/reward on that basis.

For example, if you are laying the draw between two fairly evenly-matched teams and the odds of the draw are 3.5 to start off with and there is a goal in the first half, the odds will normally move to around 4.5.

Make sure you study the markets first and understand how prices will move before you start trading the football markets.

Where to Start From – Study the Stats

If you are going to trade football, a good point to start from is to study the stats. Certain leagues and teams have a tendency to follow familiar patterns which can make them good for trading.

Websites such as flashscores and soccerstats have good stats databases for you to use as a basis for your trading.

If you are going to be trading the unders early on in a match for example, it would be a good idea to look at teams who have a record of keeping things tight early on and not seeing too many goals.

Or if you were looking to lay the draw at HT it might be an idea to focus on teams who score a lot their goals in the second half and therefore have a strong chance of breaking the deadlock.

Spending even a short amount of time before a game studying the teams and their recent form can really pay dividends if you are looking to trade on the football.

Best Trading Tools and Software

These days there are a number of top trading tools and packages that can really help with your trading and provide a path to profit. Here are the some of the best we have come across through our extensive testing and reviews:-

Goal Profits – a multi-award winning trading service, Goal Profits combines trading strategies, guides on how to trade, stats, a chat room where you can follow along with professional traders, daily trade selections and top customer support together in one excellent package. It was voted Best Football System by our members in our annual awards and has won numerous other accolades. A hugely popular service and if you are looking to take your football trading seriously then this is a good place to start.
Trade on Sports – run by a team of professional traders, Trade on Sports is a service built on the foundation of a vast stats database that produces alerts you can follow via the messenger app Telegram. There are a few different alerts but the main one we followed in our live trial of the service was their HT Overs Bot, which made over £4,000 in our review. You can also make use of the stats yourself to create your own strategies and there is a lively chat community as well. One of the very best trading services we have come across.
If you don’t have the time to spend hours in front of a screen trading football matches then there is an excellent alternative in the form of Auto Pro Trader. It is a platform that allows you to follow professional traders automatically, with their trades copied onto your Betfair account. So you can go about your day and do other things whilst the pros trade on your behalf, creating a passive income opportunity.

So if you are looking to get into football trading, these are three quite different but equally useful services we have tried and tested ourselves and found to be of considerably benefit.

Some Basic Strategies to Get Going With

If you are looking to “go it alone” however and have a go at trading yourself, here are some basic strategies you could use to get you going:-

Lay the Draw – possibly the best known of all trading strategies, this approach involves laying the draw at the start of a game and trading out at some stage during the match. There are different ways to trade this strategy and we have outlined our own thoughts on it here.

Over/Under trading – another popular trading method involves trading the over/under markets. One way to do this is to back under 2.5 goals before the game and then to trade out after 15-20 mins. If there hasn’t been a goal then you will often get a nice move down in the odds and a good profit. If there is a goal you will need to trade out for a loss, so it is best to focus on teams who don’t tend to score/concede early if following this strategy. Another approach is to hedge with for example laying under 3.5 goals, then if there is an early goal you will be in fairly neutral position but if there isn’t you can trade out the 2.5 position for profit and leave the 3.5 to run.

Lay the Draw at HT – a variant on laying the draw at HT, this strategy involves laying the draw in games that are drawing at half time. It reduces the risk as the draw price will be much lower at HT than at the start and will also provide more profit if there is a goal. You can also hedge to a certain extent by covering the correct score, although generally you will need a late goal to generate a profit if doing so.

Conclusion – Go Against the Crowd to Beat the Market

Winning at football trading is not easy and if you are going to make long-term profits it pays to do your research, use the best tools available and remained disciplined at all times.

It also pays to go against the crowd and develop your own way of trading that not everyone else is doing. Find a niche and work on perfecting it as a good approach to all forms of betting and trading.

Whatever strategies you use, good luck with your trading and please gamble responsibly.