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Man of Mystery

I opened my Betfair account on 22nd April 2003. I was one of the first subscribers to BetTrader and was a founding partner of JuiceStorm.com on 17th February 2007.

The JuiceStorm team built TradeHost for profitable automated trading and betting on Betfair in the UK, IE, AU and US horse racing markets. TradeHost Lite started in 2013 and is free forever.

Latest posts by Man of Mystery (see all)

• Matchbook And Betfair Risk/Reward Ratios - November 23, 2024
• Emotions And How To Protect You From Yourself - November 23, 2024
• Volatility And 5 Ways to Trade Better On Matchbook Or Betfair - November 23, 2024

• Trading is all about exits.
• Nope. Trading is all about entries.
• Trade with a minimum of 2:1 risk reward ratio.
• Wrong – you’ll never make money if you don’t let your stops be bigger than your profits.
• If you want to make money trading follow your system rules.
• Not for me. Rules are meant to be broken. They’re just guidelines.

Risk And Reward? If you spend an hour researching Betfair trading advice you will easily conclude that this is a schizophrenic business and that few have a clue!

Trading advice may seem contradictory on the surface, but actually, it is not. It’s simply a matter of what trading model people choose to follow.

There are really only two ways to trade on betting exchanges. The lottery model and the insurance model. The lottery model is the traditional approach that looks for 2:1 or greater win ratio, risk and reward, which has very few winners but makes sure that they are large enough to pay for the losers.

The insurance model, on the other hand, does the exact opposite. It tries to make almost every trade a winner and avoid losers as much as possible, but when it does get hit the loss is much larger than the wins. Just like the insurance business, it counts on winners (i.e. premium payments) to offset the rare losers.

Once you begin to view trading advice through the lens of these two models it makes much more sense. If you are following the lottery model and every potential trade could be a huge winner while the risk is generally small then you should follow the rules of your system and take every single trade. Discipline is paramount.

On the other hand, if you are trading the insurance way then passing up a single trade means almost nothing. Actually, it may be a huge advantage to do so, since you may miss a big loser which is the same thing as banking many winners.

Discipline is actually idiotic and discretion is the key to success.

This also goes a long way to explaining why exiting early under the insurance model is actually very smart but under the lottery model can be ruinous. Under the insurance model, you are trying to avoid losses, your wins are practically guaranteed. So an early exit that avoids a major loss is the right move. On the other hand, an early exit from the lottery model can be devastating. It’s the equivalent of losing your ticket before you can cash it.

Lottery model traders should be very promiscuous with their entries (their risk is limited, but their payoff is large) but must be very disciplined with their exits (you need to bank massive wins to pay for a large number of losers.) Insurance model traders are just the opposite. They need to be extremely cautious with entries are but generally free to exit as they choose.

So when you hear two traders yelling at each other, very often they are talking past each other. They are operating under completely different logic regimes. Therefore, before seeking advice or taking anyone’s criticism seriously understand your strategy and trade accordingly.