Trading : Pick a loser and win
Caan Berry explains...
Sometimes picking the winner of a specific event isn't the easiest route to making a profit. Professional trader Caan Berry explains...
In racing circles, it's common knowledge that certain horses exhibit unique patterns of behaviour - much like humans they know what they do and don't like.
For anyone trading on Betfair, this represents a huge range of opportunities - I'm talking of course about backing to lay.
The best way of approaching backing to lay when it comes to racing is pre-selecting a specific horse who is likely to go off quickly and take a lead, seeing it's starting price fall to a point where you can lay your bet back making an easy profit.
If you've watched racing you'll know this happens on a regular basis every day.
A great example of this was Swaledale Lad at Cartmel this week who I backed pre-off at around 6.0 to then lay back in-running some 30 seconds later for a tidy profit.
The horse led the whole race but was beaten in the last two furlongs trading as low as 1.20 in-running on the Exchange. I fully expect in the future for this pattern to repeat itself with this horse as it has happens more or less every time it runs.
If, for any particular reason, the lead is not taken then we still have the opportunity to limit our losses by laying our initial bet back into the market for a relatively small loss - providing we do it soon enough.
All of this can happen rather quickly so its important to have an idea which horses you are to target well before the race starts. An uncontested lead is preferable as it will provide us with a more extreme movement of odds in our favour so a little homework is needed, however I am no form student and never will be.
There are many useful sites logging running styles of horses although making your own notes when you see a horse run is probably the most useful way to do this.
It;s also quite important to mention to make money consistently from the markets in this manner you need the advantage of speed and 'one click betting' as you may need to change your mind as the event happens.
The full version of this article appears on betting.betfair.com
