2nd May 2016
Hi ,
There’s nothing new about moving markets. It’s something that’s done by many people a lot of the time, but in terms of sports betting it’s probably most commonly known to take place on Betfair by traders.
When trading on a horse a trader may need the market to move in a particular direction in order to complete their trade. If it looks like it may not or is going to take longer than they want then they put a large sum of money on the other side of the market to force it to move in the direction they want. As soon as they bet they wanted to get placed is taken, they remove their large sum of money and the market moves back.
Doing this is also known as market manipulation and, for new traders, determining when a market move is real or manipulated can be one of the harder areas to learn.
There is pretty much now downside to this technique except needing large sums of money to do it. Moving a horse at the front of the market can take a significant bankroll.
But… at the higher end of the market the opposite is true!
I was meeting a well known trader recently and we got to chatting about market manipulation, and it’s this that brought it back to me.
You see I don’t really trade. I used to, but I make far larger profits with less effort betting. However the risk level associated is much higher than with trading. When I was a trader I was actually happy to trade my entire bankroll every time I went into the market. That’s not something I’d recommend you do when starting out, but if you’re comfortable with your trading it’s certainly something that’s possible.
Anyway, the outsiders on Betfair get very little money matched on them. Which means that you can move their markets with as little as a couple of hundred pounds!
What does that means for you?
It means you can move these markets and make guaranteed trades on them without requiring a huge bankroll.
However you do need to have an understanding of how to trade and I strongly recommend you paper trade this extensively first to gain experience.
What you’re looking to do is very simple. You want to open your trade on higher odds runners where there is disparity between the back and lay price. This means that there is more than a one tick gap between them.
Tick sizes on Betfair differ depending on the odds and the chart below shows you what a tick is at different odds ranges...
Don’t forget we are looking at higher odds ranges. So between odds of 21 and 30 a tick is 1. e.g. 21, 22, 23 etc…
If we have a back price of 25 and a lay price of 29 then there is a difference of more than one tick between the odds, and this is what you are looking for.
Now you open your trade on the right side of the market for the current movement and put your closing trade bet in place.
For example… you open your trade with a lay bet of £5 at odds of 25. Now you want to take odds of 23 to close our trade and so we place our closing back bet at odds of 23. Now we just need to wait for the odds to drop in order for our closing bet to be matched.
The market may move up or down, we don’t know. But… what if we manipulated the market to force the odds down to 23!
On the back side of the market, a few ticks lower than 23, you place a lay bet of £100 or £200. You don’t want this bet to be matched, what you are wanting is the weight of money on the back side of the market to force the odds down until your bet at odds of 23 has been matched. The instant it has you cancel your bet for £200 further down.
A word of warning to using this strategy… you need to be quick (or use automation).
If you’re not using very fast software then don’t even attempt this. In fact I would suggest that you get used to trading the market normally before attempting to manipulate it. But by focusing only on manipulating the selections at higher odds you can make market manipulated trades with a lot more easer and a much lower bankroll than you would need at the front of the market.
Back next Monday.
Michael Wilding
