If you have been trading on Betfair for any length of time now you should have begun developing your own strategies. Buying strategy packages and courses is all well and good but most of the time you will be adapting them slightly anyway.

Usually the way to finding a hugely profitable strategy is to work on something yourself that no one else might have come up with it. However, devising your own strategies is easier said then done. I have seen an endless amount of traders come up with an idea that sounds good in theory but bombs in practice.

Here are a few reasons that your Betfair strategies suck and will continue to do so until you address these issues.

Poor Risk-Reward Ratio

This is usually the killer factor when it comes to a strategy that fails in the long term. You might have a strategy that wins 9 times out of 10 and this sounds good on paper. However, if that 1 loss out of 10 wipes out all your wins then you have a strategy that is very, very stressful to play with. You could go weeks with lots of wins then have a bad weekend and see it all wiped out. Usually if this ever happens it is so disheartening you will probably give up and never use the strategy again. Especially, if you end up in a deficit knowing you need to win your next 10 trades just to break even. Nervous times indeed!

No Back testing

It does surprise me that people will come up with a strategy plan and then only think it is best to test it going forwards. The best way to get an idea of how profitable it might be is to look to previous data and what has happened previously. You do not even need to trawl through thousands of hours of data either. Sometimes you can see if a strategy has something in it just by looking over 100 sets of data. If it looks good at that point you can keep the research going. The obvious drawback about back testing is that it is no guarantee of the future. However, it is definitely worth investigating as it could save you a lot testing time in the future.

Poor Filtering Process

A mistake I see many newbies make when devising a Betfair strategy is that they often do not have much of a filtering process if at all. Some traders are constantly looking for a strategy that they can use on ALL football matches or other events. In reality, every event is different and often requires a different approach. Just filtering into odds ranges is not enough either as you should always be taking each team or players form into account in each situation along with what is actually happening live and in-play.

Too Mechanical

Recent products such as Dynamic Football Trading have definitely confirmed something I have been suspecting for years. If you do want to make long term profits you need to be dynamic and treat every live match as an individual event. You need to be able to watch the events live and react to what you are seeing rather then expecting you can have a strategy that will work in all situations. Many newbie traders want mechanical strategies that are “do this, do that” and profit when in reality that is just not possible anymore. The days when it was easy to find soft spots in the market that you could profit from mechanically are long gone. If you want to make money from Betfair trading in-play these days you will need to be able to watch the event live or have a strong knowledge of the sport.