Golf Trading
A lot of people right now will thinking "GOLF TRADING?!?"
Yes, golf is a perfect sport to trade on the sporting exchanges. The reason why it's such a good a sport to trade? The events last for 4 days!
With the events lasting 4 days it’s a perfect sport for trading, you can do your research prior to the tournament and take your positions. Then you have 4 days to adjust your positions in-play as you see fit.
There are a few golf markets you can trade on such as Winner, First Round Leader, 2 balls, 3 balls etc. But for this post I will stick to the main two markets that I trade in, Winner & First Round Leader markets.
Winner Market
Simple! You’re backing a player to win the tournament. Now if you were gambling you would pick your selections and leave them. Well I’m afraid to say this is trading not gambling so what we are going to do is BACK to LAY to guarantee profit no matter what the outcome.
Now I won’t go into detail about back to lay as I’m sure everyone will know what I mean (back high, lay low). So once we have our selections we take our positions and what we then need to do is watch how the event plays out – hopefully our selections will have a good start on the first hole and be in contention of the lead.
If this happens you should notice that your back price should have reduced, now what do we do? Well I would suggest removing any liability is my first move, so lay at the current price and remove some liability. This will however reduce your profit also so we don’t want to lose too much profit so be aware of that.
In an ideal world we would lay each selection, remove the liability and still have good greens on each selection.
So with that done we can do a couple of things:
- Let the tournament run and hope one of our selections win as we can’t lose any money
- Monitor the tournament and hope to hedge for an overall profit no matter what the outcome
Now sometimes I do one or two, sometimes I say I’m going to do one and on the 4th day I will change my mind and do two, it’s all up to you really. But this method alone should make you some good green with the right selections.
First Round Leader Market
In this market you're backing a player to win the first round of the event, now this is a hard market to pick as your only trading on the first day but if your selections does well it’s a very lucrative market.
As you can see from the above chart this was George Coetzee recently in the first round leader market. You can see from the graph he started at 25 and traded as low as around 2.50. Now this is a great example of how being involved in the first round leader market can pay off.
I find the best way to pick any golf selections is research, now I have my own little database of notes on players and golf courses which I use to find my selections along with the normal www.pgatour.com/stats.html & www.europeantour.com/europeantour/stats/
I also use twitter to find stat. There are a lot of people on twitter who run their own golf tipping sites etc. It’s always good to cross reference your picks with them as a sort of quality check, but sometimes your stats suggest a player and no one else has tipped him. Don’t worry about this; trust your stats!
One more little trick if you’re only wanting to gain a couple of ticks: If a player is playing well in the current event and you think he may win, look at the next event and back him. If he continues to play well or even wins his price will drop most of the time.
I actually did this with Phil Mickelson. He had a great first round at Houston and I knew his price would drop for the Masters so I backed him at 27 and layed him at 23.
As you can see my above graph, lines are top and bottom of my trade. It’s a good little method for gaining a couple of ticks, try it!
