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One book every trader should read

First of all, I hope you are fine. It is a hard time for everyone in the world, especially for those who are not feeling well. COVID19 pandemic will end eventually, for now, the only thing we can do is to stay at home and slow its spreading. Many thanks to the medical services who fight for our health every day and for scientists who conduct research to defeat this virus!

Lockdown that happened in most of the countries forces us to change our daily habits. How to stay proactive in the new situation?

Instead of watching Amazon Prime or Netflix continuously and wasting the day away, do your best to do something useful. There is a lot of online courses that make you engaged, but what if you feel fed up already with whole online activities?

The simple answer is to go back to school and read books, that will have a positive impact on your life and possible future investments.  There is a lot of trading books, that every trader should read in his life in order to improve his mindset, knowledge and to find his edge. Writing this post, I wanted to give you a few titles that might interest you. I decided, however, that I would only provide the one that had the most impact on my trading.

The book is called “The Universal Principles of Successful Trading: Essential Knowledge for All Traders in All Markets”  by Brent Penfold.

A few years ago I have bought and read his book that changed my perception of trading. Brent trades global futures contracts on indexes, currencies, and commodities and also help educate others to trade. More about him you can find at https://indextrader.com.au

You may ask: what does this have to do with sports trading?

The title of the book explains everything, these are universal principles.

The book is full of lots of trading wisdom for both new and experienced traders. It explains the fundamental rules of successful trading. There is statistical ground that supports the mathematical nature of the investment. Regardless of the methodology used it shows you the statistics that maximize your profits and minimize your loss. It also included interviews with a range of successful traders at the end of his book.

If you treat trading seriously I highly recommend reading his book in order to get rid of the illusions about what is crucial in investing. It is important how often you earn, how much you earn and how much you lose. It is important how much you risk and how quickly you can go bankrupt this way.

The book is available on amazon under this link.

“Risk of ruin calculator” was added to his book as a bonus.  If you like to know how I get most of his book and implement it in my trading approach, just please subscribe to my newsletter and I will reveal my secret:

Stay healthy and stay at home!

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What are the reasons why you have to start with pre-match trading?

Pre-match/Pre-race/Pre-play trading is the prediction of exchange rate movements. Based on observations and analyses, you can anticipate market behavior and earn on it. In simple words, you can follow certain triggers that help you to predict where the price is going to be.

If you want to be a successful trader, you have to learn the basics of market observation.

You can immediately get into deep water when you start in-play trading, because these markets are often very volatile and you might easily lose all your assets. It also requires more experience, knowledge of market behavior and composure. Due to its dynamics, it is much more difficult, however, if done properly, you can expect a better payoff compared to pre-match trading.

In the case of pre-match trading, there are not such large fluctuations in exchange rates, thanks to which at the beginning of the journey you have a better chance of avoiding wrong decision with catastrophic magnitude.

You should never focus on money, but on repeating the same patterns.  As a beginner, your aim should be to to gain one tick at the beginning of trading.

Tick is simply the smallest possible value between the odds. It has a different value depends on the price odds. The key price odds on the market are  2, 3, 4, 6, 10, 20, 30, 50, 100.

Incremental change in the price odds of the betting exchange follows this pattern:

Odds between 1.01 and 2.0, tick equal 0.01 (e.g 1.80 & 1.81)

Odds between 2.0 and 3.0, tick equal 0.02 (e.g 2.02 & 2.04)

Odds between 3.0 and 4.0, tick equal 0.05 (e.g 3.05 & 3.10)

Odds between 4.0 and 6.0, tick equal 0.10 (e.g 4.1 & 4.2)

Odds between 6.0 and 10.0, tick equal 0.20 (e.g 6.0 & 6.2)

Odds between 10.0 and 20.0, tick equal 0.50 (e.g 11.0 & 11.5)

Odds between 20.0 and 30.0, tick equal 1.00 (e.g 20.0 & 21)

Odds between 30.0 and 50.0, tick equal 2.00 (e.g 30.0 & 32)

Trading on one tick assumes playing very safe with a minimum earning on the smallest possible exchange rate difference. You aim to be on the exchange as little as possible to make a profit.

One tick trading is the way you have to start to become a successful sports trader.

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What does coronavirus mean to you, as a trader?

Coronavirus affects all sports events. More and more are being postponed or canceled all over the world, and athletes often compete before empty stands. And all of this is happening just a few months before the start of the Olympic Games in Japan and EURO 2020.

In Italy, all sports events were suspended until April 3 so far. This week’s main tennis events were also canceled due to Coronavirus fears.

How you should deal with this situation as a trader when there are little or no events on the market?

First of all, you need to accept this fact in the same way as you accept your losses. It is part of this business to expect the unexpected. When you look at the data and news it seems, that Coronavirus is not yet under control, and more people will be infected.

The sports exchange is and will be as long as people want to bet, so you do not need to worry about it. If we can save lives by postponing all sports events by let’s say for one year it is worth it! It is better to be healthy without money than dead.

As a trader, you have to be patient! Do not force yourself to find any events (if there are any) to bet.

Focus on the learning process, read trading books, improve your mindset, subscribe to my newsletter and find out how to survive on sports exchange.

I believe that soon we will overcome the virus, just like you will succeed in trading!

Stay calm, and I will CU Green again!

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Sports Trading – What is all about?

Sports Trader – a profession that becomes more popular. It is a mix of sports betting and standard financial trading.

Requires knowledge of both stock market realities as financial institutions and knowledge of the sports market. However, it does not require knowledge about sports, or just a little. Much more important is to learn how the market behaves, what has an impact on the price in the events.

Sports trading is in simple words, trading with sports betting odds. The main goal is to place two opposite bets for one event. In sports trading, those bets being called: Back and Lay. You will find It very similar to selling and buying in regular stock trading exchanges.

BACK (will happen) – when you sell such an odd, it means that a given event will find its place in reality.

LAY (will not happen) – when you buy such an odd, that the given result will not happen.

In a nutshell, you make money every time you manage to sell at a higher value.

You can place your bets on betting exchange, which is a platform where an average betting customer can bet against others. Unlike standard sports betting, where you place bets using the odds provided by the bookmaker, sports trading happens between the traders. The betting exchange is simply providing you with the platform and charging a commission on winnings.

The most popular betting exchange platforms are Betfair, Betdaq, Smarkets, Matchbook.

The industry leader – Betfair is the largest, most popular betting exchange. It was formed in 2000 and since that time has the largest number of members, meaning that the liquidity beats that of any other exchange. Betfair was the first betting website that allowed trading and laying.

If you want to learn how the exchange works, I strongly encourage you to subscribe to my newsletter from which you will get practical knowledge about different strategies.

Sports trading has a distinction between Pre-Play and In-Play trading.  The first one means trading and closing the market before the event begins. The latter refers to traders who play on markets during the match.

Let’s make a simple pre-play trade to help you understand the process.

The Back (in favor of) odds for Manchester Utd are 1.58. To make a profit you need to set Lay odds below the mentioned price. In this example I have set it to 1.56:

The Back bet profit would be £58, while the Lay odd liability would be £56 if the Lay bet gets matched, which had happened after some time:

In a scenario where Manchester Utd wins, you can calculate your sports trade profit by subtracting the £56 liability from the £58 Back bet profit and earn low-risk £2 minus 2% commission that gives you 1.96£.

At this stage, you have two possibilities:

1) run it as “free bet” – hoping that Manchester Utd will win the game, but not losing anything if they do not manage.

2) hedging/greening – to spread results to all outcomes, which is your main goal as a trader. You can simply do it through Betfair interface by clicking the Cash Out yellow button, or through dedicated trading software, which I prefer.

Can anyone become a Pro Trader? Yes, but although a lot of people try their hand, few become professionals. Patience, emotionless approach, long-term view of your career path are necessary elements to become a successful trader.

The process of learning the realities of the sports exchange is long and tedious, but I will show you how to shorten it and how to avoid bankruptcy!

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Why you will not make money with surebets!

After an unsuccessful attempt to place bets, I decided to analyze the topic of surebets. What is surebet / arbitrage?

Surebet is a situation when a bettor can make a profit regardless of the outcome by placing one bet per each outcome with different betting companies.
The simplest surebet is called 2-way arbitrage. Only two (opposite) outcomes are participating here. It means, if one bet is lost, the other one certainly wins. The bettor is getting a profit regardless of the game’s result because it earns on the differences in the odds.

Just look at the example below:

On 2.5 Over/Under Goals market, 1xBet bookmaker set out odd 1.57 for expecting more than 2 goals in this match. On the other side, Asianodds & Pinnacle bookmakers set out odd 2.86 for expecting 2 or fewer goals. As the screenshot (taken from https://www.oddsportal.com/ ) shows payout is 101,4%, which means that you can earn 1,4% whatever the outcomes are. The simplest way to make calculations is to use a free online tool, which will do the job for you, like https://en.surebet.com/calculator:


Is it difficult to find surebets? Yes and no. The inconvenience by looking for yourself is that it is time-consuming.

I tested various online tools for this purpose, but I soon realized that there is one tool that has an advantage over the rest -> https://en.surebet.com/ (Note! The link I gave is an affiliate link, which means that if you register through it and buy some paid service, I will get paid as well. The price for you will be the same, but it will help me cover the costs of hosting a blog. I want this blog to be transparent so things, that I recommend here like tools, or sites that have value for me, which I benefited from and thanks to which my current trading is at the higher level. I hope that my advice will also be useful to you 🙂 ). It is the best free tool for searching surebets with an up to 1% profit.

The most important thing is that it presents ongoing/current events, while other tools included a lot of expired thus not valuable at all. Another pro of this tool is the transparent interface, thanks to which you can easily filter the bookmakers with the best odds. If you think 1% is a small ROI then you can buy any of the following plans: https://en.surebet.com/plan/overview. I personally used the Professional option because I was only interested in surebets.

Returning to my adventure, I will tell you how I earned 1500 pounds and I was able to cover the losses resulting from gambling (if you did not read the previous article, here is the link to how I lost money).

The way to earn was simple. I registered with several popular bookmakers which had welcome bonuses. I did it one by one, i.e. when I chose William Hill, I didn’t register anywhere else, because I didn’t want to risk non-fulfillment of bonus conditions criteria adopted by the bookmaker, e.g. 1 month of turnover. Welcome bonuses for recreational players were from 25 to 100 pounds most often. What does recreational mean? Every bookmaker considers their players’ idiots to put it simply! Their policy is that everything is fine when you lose money, but when you win you become a problem for them. Most bookmakers limit their players who, according to them, are professionals. If there is a suspicion that bettor constantly wins or even loses based on the wrongly listed course they mark him or her as a sure bets player. Each bookmaker has its own technical team (including machine learning algorithms) that monitor players. The limit usually lies in the fact that a player cannot bet more than 1 pound on a particular event, which becomes unprofitable when playing sure bets.

In short, I consider bookmakers as a scam that came to me after some time using their services. Despite the fact that I think it is not worth setting up accounts with them, this post gives you a clue, how to be smarter than them and how to beat bookmakers with their money, as well as how to build a larger bank by collecting welcome bonuses if you need them.

On my site, you will not find any affiliate links to sportsbook websites (except for bookmakers being the sports exchange, such as Betfair, Betdaq, Smarkets, Matchbook).

To sort it out which Bookmakers have a good reputation I did research. The most recognizable ranking is created by SBR: https://www.sportsbookreview.com/sportsbook-ratings

The ranking is based on the bookmaker’s solvency, which it offers to its clients. However, there is a lack of information on which bookmakers limit their players! I did another investigation and it resulted that bookmakers who do not limit their players and have a wide range of events are mainly Asian companies like Pinnacle, Sbobet!

My strategy was to minimize the risk I played 2-way surebets. On one side the bookmaker I wanted to beat, on the other Pinnacle, or Sbobet or Betfair. For filtering events, as I mentioned before, I used surebet.com, and this is an example screen:

Usually, I was looking for high odds for the bookmaker I wanted to beat, so that the money from the win was on the bookmaker’s account with high limits, like Pinnacle. As I was lucky for the first time, the loss of the welcome bonus was favorably seen at the bookmaker which the bonus it admitted, because it often happened that over time this bookmaker spammed me with emails encouraging me to return to the game for another bonus, but this time smaller. This happened to me with Bet365. Thanks to this my bankroll were building. Playing surebets is always a risk, that for a specific event, such as less popular, the bookmaker will set a bet limit, e.g. 100 pounds, so I always tried to accept bets from those less trusted, because I on Pinnacle or Betfair I knew this limit before I bet (it was visible in the interface). Thanks to this strategy, I avoided the situation that half of the bet was accepted and unnecessary stress, that I have to play the opposite event somewhere else in order to be breakeven, or with a small loss. I had several such situations, but it is better to go out at -1% than to lose your bank! Remember, the most important thing is to protect the bank and have a backup plan if something goes wrong. As you can see in the print screen, earnings of 0.59% are not something that would satisfy any investor, where you can get more on your bank deposit. Of course, it is fine when the goal is to trade bonuses, but there is almost a finite number of bookmakers with whom you can turn over the bonuses. This prompted me to buy this version of the professional at surebet.com. Thanks to that I used better ROI usually at 2-4%. Of course, there were events where the ROI could be 10% and more. However, due to the fact that I was afraid that the bookmaker would limit my account, I did not play them. As I mentioned earlier, they monitor players and their incorrectly listed odds. What’s more, I think sometimes they especially set overvalued odds to catch such players and ban their accounts. Playing this way I beat such well-known bookmakers as William Hill, Bet365 (reload bonuses), Bet-at-home, Bwin, Unibet, Betsson, Marathon, SportingBet, Tipico, TonyBet and so on. The initial bank that I allocated for surebets was 100 pounds and in half a year increased 10 times! In this way, I collected a bank for about 1500 pounds. I often played surebets for around 1000 pounds, which with a monthly subscription at surebet.com (25 euros) paid me back on the first day I earned between 20-40 pounds, depending on the event.

Another risk to watch out for when playing surebets is an issue settling events, such as in a tennis match. There is often retirement in tennis, i.e. one player interrupts the game, e.g. due to injury. Now different bookmakers settle such a match. Some make returns of the stake per match, others include 1 set as the result of the match. It is very important to be sure how bets are settled because you would not want to lose half or more of your stake because of your ignorance.

After almost a year I had stopped using surebets. Why did I give up if it was going so well?

Well, as you probably guessed, most of the bookmakers at which I turned all the bonuses and kept playing with them, trying to earn this 3 % on average began to limit me, and when I already had a Betfair account I started to get interested in trading and I was thinking about how to get additional money playing like a bookmaker, i.e. set the odds, which the stock market allowed.

To sum up, thanks to surebets I built a solid bank. However, in the long term, I was not able to enlarge it.

If you are not bored yet and still interested in my adventure, which really has started since investing money on the sports exchange, I encourage you to subscribe to the newsletter. Let me remind you that as a bonus I put there a free eBook and spreadsheets, which will help you manage your bank and avoid the mistakes that I made along the way.

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Why gambling episode was not bad eventually.

As I mentioned on my about page, my adventure began in the Citizens match in September 2012. It was the day when the first Champions League round was played (I do not mention here the youth adventure from school times where the bets were placed on accumulator (i.e. bet that combines few selections on one coupon) putting the value of 1 pound and thinking about winning 400 or more). I and my work colleagues were interested in football, like most people nowadays. We talked about these events during coffee breaks and we expected an open game at the beginning of the games. Someone stated that the bookmakers put a tempting course on the City. Each of us did a quick analysis and agreed with the preface. At the same time, it was decided that we had to play against Real because the easy money lies on the street. 🙂

I said that I could sign up for a bookmaker account. It fell on bet365 because it was known as stable and had good bonuses to start. After a few minutes, it was ready and I put our money there (for which we did a local collection). Due to the fact that there was this bonus from bet365, we decided that 80% will go to Citizens, and 20% to cover losses if City does not win. The odds for the event were: 1.57 Real, 4.00 Draw, 6.00 City. A colleague from work, who heard our conversation in the kitchen, did not take part in our money collection, but as it turned out he has a lot of knowledge about gambling and surebets. He stated that when we win he will help us to make a bonus turnover with the help of surebets. At first glance, I did not know what he was talking about, but I did not think about it somehow since I thought that the problem of wealth would be solved only in the evening after the match. And you know what? The match was very interesting, a lot of action on both sides. I can say that in my opinion, it was very well balanced. In 85 min Citizens scored a goal at 1: 2 and I have already started analyzing how much we have bet and how much we will win. Screen below shows how the following match has ended:

You have to imagine my exaggeration as Benzma scored, but on the other hand as a sports fan, I accepted the result because I stated that the draw is fair. Unfortunately, a few minutes later C. Ronaldo scored the goal in injury time, which has upset me totally. Since then, I don’t like him very much, even though he is one of the best players in recent years. 🙂 However, one character trait impresses me, Ronaldo has been working hard to achieve success.

The match and the bet were lost, but the light came on that I could make a gamble if the system was chosen properly and I started searching. It was a period when my wife was pregnant and we expected our first child to be born. I thought it was a good time to increase the home budget a little. I focused on individual events, which must have a course greater than 2, which in my opinion pays off. I reviewed various forums, football statistics, gambling models and tested. I remember the most from this period that I tried a flat stake. The effectiveness of my bets was poor, somewhere around 30% -40%, and I was generally in minus or around 0. On the other hand, I decided that since I have 30% effectiveness I will try Martingale strategy (it is about doubling your bet size when you lose) on draws in football matches based on stats. The draw odds are around 3, usually, so it seemed right at the time. The downside was that I relied on league statistics and usually had to wait until the weekend for the next matches. I decided to move to tennis, which I also liked to watch from time to time (mainly Grand Slam tournaments). The strategy was simple -> I bet on break in each subsequent game. If you don’t know anything about tennis and would like to learn more about this game, please write to me or comment on the blog below. In the future when I post about tennis trading, I will explain the basics of this game. Why I choose tennis because tournaments are every day around the world, except maybe one month, December. Practically every day there is a breakpoint (at least I thought so). I started betting and it was going pretty good at first. There was a break in every match. Unfortunately, I came across a match where there were 2 good servers, I don’t remember who played that match anymore, but one of the players was John Isner. There was no break in this match and the match ended with a 7: 6 7: 6 result. I do not have to add that after several unsuccessful attempts my amount increased to a very large amount. My bankroll decreased about 400-500 pounds and I decided to stop betting in this form. It was a time when my beloved daughter was born and I can say that instead of spending it on a baby car I gave the money to bookmakers. You can only imagine what my wife’s reaction looked like.

If you read this post and have been or are in a similar situation, you need to know that gamble in the form that I described is evil and if you can’t deal with it, there are foundations that can help you to deal with it, like https://www.begambleaware.org

Do not blame yourself. Everyone makes mistakes, it is human nature. Keep calm and back on track.

On the one hand, you can point out what I did wrong, i.e. wrong betting, lack of money management, bad strategies, etc.

You may be asking yourself, what made me quit betting, but I’m still in the industry, kind of?

I will give an example that shows my character. Once working full-time at an IT company, I was responsible for the physical migration of large infrastructure to the new datacentre. I was one of the two architects of highly available systems consisting of about 70 physical servers (200 virtual, including SAN, Firewalls, etc.). I was at work at 8 am and we planned migrations from 5 pm to midnight. Without going too much into technical details, we had a problem to launch about 30% of our production servers in the new location. We managed to restore 99% of all environments by 7 am and most importantly, we avoided inconvenient calls from the board and clients. I stayed in the office until 13, only because of this 1% of servers which services we were not able to restore. It did not give me peace, the fact that not everything works. I spent almost 30 hours in the office, not only because there was a problem, but because I was motivated to solve this problem right away. Maybe you have it too? It seems to me that there are people who can’t sleep peacefully until they come up with the solution to the puzzle that troubles them, and so in my case was about gambling.

I chillily analyzed what I was doing wrong and remembered a friend’s words about turning bonuses at bookmakers with the help of surebets. I decided to go into detail about this topic. If you are interested in what surebets are, and how I made up for the losses I made on gambling, just sign up for the newsletter and wait to receive a notification about a new article.