Lee & Jay – How To Trade Football As a TEAM!

This is a really special edition of Trader Talk as I speak with TWO traders at the same time who trade together as a team. Meet Lee and Jay!

Lee and Jay split the cost to join Ultimate Football Trading last year and now make on average 2-3k per month from football trading.

In all my time in this industry I have never heard about traders partnering up to trade together and so this was something I simply had to hear more about.

Overall, this was a great talk to hear about their journey especially when they were frank enough to admit that even though they were making good money at one point the staking plan wasn’t right and could have been dangerous in the long term.

Anyway, I will let them tell you more about it.

Grab a nice cup of tea, coffee or an ice cold beer and let’s get into it!

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Hey, Lee and Jay, many thanks for sitting down for this interview for the Sports Trading Life readers.

So today you are averaging around 2-3k per month with your best month so far being 6.5k, and you are doing this alongside a day job. But firstly, tell us a bit about what you were both doing before football trading came along?

Thanks Ben, glad to be here.

So we were both fresh out of Uni, I fell into recruitment and Jay started work as a personal trainer. We had always been interested in football and betting and it kind of grew from there!

Cool! How did you discover the world of football trading?

We both watched so much football, but never really translated into ‘in-play’ betting / trading.

Previously we would put on accumulators, play online roulette and poker, to varied success but mainly losing money with it.

I would say it was around 2 years ago that we found football trading.

This was mainly through following traders on twitter, all the usual suspects: Yourself, Caan Berry, Joe Symons & I think the one everyone knows or gets exposure to which is Psychoff. This led to the discovery of the Exchange and the ‘trading’ aspect of football betting.

The thing is we both always knew about the ‘cash out’ options on main betting sites, but we couldn’t understand all of the green screens, the lay principle and general idea of moving money around in the market – as it is happening.

We would see all of the trader screens with £100 on all outcomes or taking liability out of trades for free bets and just got hooked. We would reach out to a few Traders on twitter via direct message to understand the trades and how / what they had done to get into certain positions and pretty much worked out that everyone was focused on in-play and games they could watch.

Once we got the fundamentals and basic understanding of how to execute trades, we never looked back. Example a DM with Joe Symons back in 2018.

Ah OK Makes sense and nice of Joe to help you out.

So, most people do this for themselves. How did it come about that you guys decided to work together on this?

We have known each other for a while before trading, and we loved to have a bet together before we learned about football trading.

The reason why we trade together is so we can seek more opportunities and watch different games closely at the same given time. We live in the same apartment block but we don’t usually trade together in person. We have a dedicated trading WhatsApp group where no other conversation happens but that of potential trades.

We do not need one another’s confirmation to pull the trigger on a trade, it’s more of an informative conversation just to let the other party know a trade is happening. We have set some guidelines with the staking plan, through trial and error. This is because it was chaos in the beginning and our staking plan was our biggest weakness.

For example, I remember I was at work and not trading, at this point we had more bank that what we could ever imagine consistently closing each day with £500 sometimes even reaching 4 figures. So, I have finished work to open a WhatsApp of a screenshot of £850 liability at an average odd of 3s on Dortmund over 1.5 first half goals.

Yes, this one hit for £2.5k which is good but there was no staking plan whatsoever… Just chaos.

Nice profit but yes sounds like maybe you got away with one there if you were staking more than normal. So tell me a bit more about the process behind each trade.

As previously mentioned, we have a private WhatsApp group called ‘Trading only’ where we only discuss trades.

This is typically pre match selections,  research on games we fancy to be unders / overs based on research of the last 5-10 games but also H2H. We have different trading styles, I typically like goals markets FH & SH, whereas Jay typically likes to work unders.

We find working as a pair gives us much better market coverage, if I’m out at work and can’t trade, Jay could work the account and vice versa. This means we can pretty much trade most games throughout the day & week. The advantage of working as a team also allows us to cover and learn more leagues. We both had good knowledge of Premier League, Italian, German and Spain but, Jay quickly spotted a few good leagues for unders – Greece, Cyprus & Russia so he likes to trade them, whereas my preferred system of late goals leads me to Turkey, Australian & Dutch games.

Overall, it works well for us!

So, there must be times when you disagree on a trade? How would you deal with a disagreement?

Honestly speaking, we have never disagreed on a trade that the other person has then put on.

99% of the time we are confident with each other’s knowledge of football and trading that we let each other do their thing. There have been a few hairy moments on the size of a trade, but actually pulling the trigger and getting in the market has never been an issue. We just kind of agreed at the start that we are going to lose bets, have losing days and it is what it is if someone’s bet loses. We both know that one of us hasn’t put a bet on to deliberately lose money so we just have to move on.

Now we have a tweaked staking plan as well that’s calmed a lot of potential disagreement!

Around which point in your journey did you join Ultimate Football Trading and in which ways did that help you?

I would say about 6 months into trading I came across the UFT. After reading a few books, jumping on forums & watching YouTube videos I knew UFT was a course worth getting to enhance and develop football trading.

At this point we knew the basics of how to trade, but the level of detail in the course really opened our eyes on where we could take it. We gained good knowledge on drip laying which wasn’t something we had really seen or practiced before. The course helped us develop techniques of maximizing profits and minimizing risk and learning to trade more than one market. Previously we traded as more of a glorified standard bet e.g., Arsenal to win. We never really looked at all the different markets as an opportunity and how to ‘trade them’.

 Another key aspect the UFT course helped us understand is Value!

Which we now realize is probably the most important aspect of trading. UFT certainly made us more well-rounded traders!

Definitely glad to hear that mate! How does a typical trading day look for the both of you?

A typical trading day consists of scrolling through Flashscore / Betfair to see what opportunities are available when we are available to trade. We have an idea of leagues we like to trade and ones that are on Betfair or TV. We then have a quick look at stats on Flashscore & Soccerway to get a general idea if we expect goals or how we think we should look to trade the game. We look out for goals (obviously), form, league position, Home vs Away etc.

Since COVID this has become a bit tougher as stats seem a bit more scrambled and not as relevant.

But we’ll then crack on really, keeping WhatsApp open, watching as many games as possible. We’ll keep an idea of stats and how the games playing out, with the knowledge and a bit of luck we start getting in the markets.

The in-play action being the most important.

Do you have anymore info on the strategies and markets you trade the most?

Yes so the main two markets we trade are Under x.5 goals or late First Half/ late Second Half goals typically.

We have adapted these as we have gained more experience. For “Unders” games, we used to do a pre-match entry, then slowly drip out as the game went on. If a goal did hit, we would re-back ½ stake to try and run the price down. We found that if a goal did go in inside the first 10/15 minutes this left us ages to chase the price back down.

 So, we have tweaked it, if our pre match selection is pointing to an unders game, conversely we hope for a goal inside the first 10/15 minutes and then get on the 1.5,2.5 & 3.5 markets, this has been working much better for us.

A recent example was a match with Northampton vs Accrington. We liked it for unders.

A goal was scored in the 2^nd minute and stayed 1-0!

Late FH & SH is more about the in-play stats and watching the games. We tend to drip in starting from 3.0 up to 10.0 in some games to try and extract as much value as possible. 

There are leagues we discovered love late goals even if teams are 3 or 4 nil up both teams will press, keepers don’t slow the game down or take it to corners etc. We have had joy on going 2+ goals late but this is very low risk high reward. We have had a lot of success backing Fav’s who go 1 or 2 nil down but that’s more just knowing good teams really and getting in. All the standard teams P.S.G, Man City, Barcelona, Juventus, Bayern.

If these teams go a goal down, it’s usually a license to print money.

Nice work. You mentioned also doing golf trading and horse racing. How is that going?

Regarding golf and horse racing, we bet on these more as fans, then as a money-making exercise to make the big events more exciting. This isn’t part of the trading and I guess this is the gambling side coming out!

I would like to get better on horse racing as I have an idea what to look out for and experimented with Racing Trader but I don’t have the correct set up and the time currently to properly try and develop it as a skill.

Football is working well so I guess if it isn’t broke don’t fix it…just yet!

Many readers are probably interested to know what a typical return on your bank you get per month?

As a general rule, we try to make between £2k-4k per month. We started by putting £500 in each and worked a 1k bank. We track it using the below spreadsheet and try and make 6% per day. We reset each month to £1k and whatever profit we make we withdraw, based on the compound interest system.

You can see below how our best ever month played out.

We then started trading with £4k banks, £5k banks and found we started to get really wreckless. We thought if we could make £6k off £1k then would could make £30k off £5k bank etc.

But it wasn’t so simple and for whatever reason it just didn’t work out. It’s definitely not been all plain sailing I would say we have bust like 3 or 4 of the £1k banks and re-loaded money we had taken out as profit. I think psychologically trading bigger banks meant we didn’t trade games based on systems and panicked if bets went against us or got out of markets too quickly, etc. This led us to strip it back to £1k bank. Overall, this has led to much more consistency over the last 4 months.

Looking back, we flew out of the blocks once we started properly trading, got too confident, overtraded, ignored staking plans and lost sight of value. It’s taken us the best part of two years to really fall in control of the trading, but touch wood we have found a nice formula that works.

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What has been your most memorable football match to trade?

One of the craziest games I remember trading was when PSG went 3-0 down to Amiens. You know what we said about printing money, well we re-backed PSG 3 times they then went 4-3 up in the space of about 15 minutes, it was crazy. I remember PSG for about a 10-week period, all of their games were basically cricket scores and the goal markets were so good to trade.

Crazy match. Hoping you had a lay on PSG late on too in that one!

Tell us about your WORST day as a football trader.

I think it’s important to discuss the low days as well, so good question! A lot of traders & tipsters will only post green screens and winners (I’m 100% guilty of doing that). But we have had some really bad days when we started trading a bigger bank. Just looking back now I can see some crazy bets with £1000’s riding on one goal on unders markets and match markets!

It’s not an excuse, but this was money we could “afford to lose” or was profit we had made. It’s not nice losing money and we fully understood it was part of trading but for us we could see it getting too much which is why we have scaled it back and trade much more sensibly now!

I can’t pinpoint any exact one trade or day that stick out but don’t get me wrong we have lost over £1000 in single trades before at one point.

Well, I am glad to hear that you were not risking money you couldn’t afford to lose and that you learned from these things. I am assuming you took it on the chin too and didn’t try to blame others for it which is always the best way to approach these things.

Finally, what are the future plans? Do you see yourself doing this full time?

I think the ultimate goal is to go full time, I think that’s everyone’s dream is when they start out. Currently we both have full-time jobs and we do treat it as part-time income and almost like a business. For the first 6 months it was all new, the next year we saw the potential and profits, the following 6 months we lost our heads a little, but since then it has been consistent.

Sounds very interesting, thanks for telling us a bit more about your journey/journies!

Ben, I would just like to say thanks to you for the platform and opportunity to tell you our story. I think we have covered everything we wanted to cover. I know our set-up may be different to others who trade, but it seems to work. I would say to anyone new wanting to learn trading it’s all about staking plan and value! We are two normal lads aged 28 & 30 who love footy and have turned it into a way of making money.

We are more than happy to offer any advice to people who want to reach out. You can follow us on Twitter, @TradingPost_UK

Many thanks for taking the time!

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