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After an FA Cup weekend I’m always reminded of the importance of researching your selections further before you enter a trade. One of our cornerstone pieces of advice here at BTC is to never follow a selection blindly and to do some investigation before you put your hard earned money down. 

Ok this may sound obvious but I wonder how often you have gone into your football trading with your filtered out selections from the BTC software, and not taken the due diligence to make sure these picks are right for you to enter a trade.

Statistics are the foundation of any trade, however, they are just the starting point.

Why do I ask this?

There are many factors that go into a sporting event that influence whether our football trading will be successful. How do we use those to our advantage? We have to factor them in and work out how they could affect our selection. 

What are they?

What the stats can’t tell you - Biggest outside factors that affect football trading on Betfair (no particular order):

1. Team news - Is this the usual line up and a strong team selection? If not it may be best avoided.

2. Weather - If torrential rain is forecast that will not be good if I want lots of goals in a game.

3. Start/End of season - Some teams are not up to scratch or fully motivated at the start and at the end of the season, be aware how far into the season this match is.

4. Manager change - Has either team had a recent change in manager? This can mean a new style of play and a different effect on form, invalidating the selection.

5. Is there a bigger game on the horizon - or - has one of the teams just played one? An example of why this is a factor to performance is the old adage,  a top team often performs poorly in the Premier League on the weekend after a big Champions League game. 

All of these factors can cause red flags of concern for football traders when trading on Betfair. In-fact most, if not all, of them would probably cause me to leave the trade alone and wait for a better opportunity. 

So how easy is it to find out this information and will you have time to do it?

• If you know the teams/leagues you trade it is fairly quick to see a line up and know if is a weakened one. 

• The same with a manager change, you will know if there has been a change and again this is something you can check very quickly on google etc. 

• With the weather forecast again using your favourite weather service will suffice, sites like Bet365 often show just before kick-off the weather and obviously a live stream will tell you the weather. 

• How far a season is in is easy enough to monitor, check the league tables (on our software for convenience). If unsure just wiki the league and find out how many games they play, again this takes seconds. 

• Regarding the big game on the horizon factor, just check the previous and next fixture, again not info that takes long to find.

I cannot stress the importance of due diligence when trading, put simply, it can be the difference between winning and losing. The simple fact is this - the more components you have on your side when football trading the more confident you will be in your trade. Which also helps keep your mentality strong as you believe in the selection even more.

So let’s get onto our football trading filters -

If you are a member of BTC you would have been receiving my lay the draw at half-time strategy selections via the daily email. I have now tested it for three months and the results are here to see:https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UQYxOh-mUHfAm9OByLhzX0ooiQQUqYsh...

83% of the trades won! Even if you let the trade run after a goal it won 68% of the time! I am very pleased with this. Given that the average odds are around 2.8 to lay the draw at half time you would be looking at a very good profit on these.

Here is a video of the filter:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEDIG93gxcQ&feature=youtu.be

As our members know we are always looking to improve our service here at BTC and continue to make you money! 

So I thought I would update you on a couple of things: 

• We are working hard on the Horse Racing software hoping for a post football season June release!

• We are working on editing the member's filters we share with you all and making sure we have the best ones shared, we also want to add them to the strategy section with explanation videos and the day's selections hosted all together.

That’s all for this week so look out for another post next week!