?You get home from work tired in the evening and have a quick bite to eat before turning on the TV and tuning into Sky Sports. You then decide to log onto the Betfair markets that are related to the events you are about to watch. If you are the type of person who then begins to work out what you are going to trade, then unfortunately you are in the majority ? and are almost destined to fail.?
Pete Nordsted?s accurate yet damning assessment of too many casual traders sheds light on why the very mention of the word Betfair can often send shivers down the spine of any novice trader?s bank manager.
For while the fan to fan exchange offers slightly better odds than the traditional high street bookmaker who factors in a small profit margin into his odds, the ability for the fan to turn bookie by laying prices means a couple of poor trades here and there and the unwitting punter can be hundreds of pounds out of pocket.
Yet in Mastering Betfair, Pete Nordsted not only explains the fundamentals of the betting exchange in a clear and enlightening fashion, he also reveals how any trader can gear himself up towards making consistent and profitable returns whilst never risking the kind of money that the bank manager so dreads.
From the very basics of Betfair, where punters can back and lay, to the intricacies of ticks, where a price might move from 1.4 to 1.9 (four ticks) before the action has even begun, Nordsted is both informative and engaging, and at the risk of sounding like someone with a fetish for numbers and formulas, Mastering Betfair is as close to a page-turner as an analytical betting book can get.
Asides from the actual trading process itself, Nordsted also attributes the success of a trader to subtle lifestyle habits, with the occasional tweak resulting in vastly improved profits. One such recommended tweak is for the trader to spend an entire week buying everything, whether it?s food, clothes, cinema or train tickets, with cash only, for now that we can get pretty much anything we?d ever need without ever having to physically exchange money, traders merely see different sets of numbers moving up and down on a screen and often don?t appreciate the value of the money they are trading.
He also advises against trading events in which the trader has a personal interest in as the emotional attachment to a team or player can often lead to ill-thought out moves. Simple advice it may sound like, but when combined with the more advanced trading tactics highlighted elsewhere in the book, Nordsted is clearly onto a winner.
The development of tried and tested formulas for trading football, tennis and Twenty20 cricket, which Nordsted shares with the reader, are also surprisingly clear to follow and highlight how a well-thought out and analytical strategy, as opposed to the pin-ball machine scatter-gun approach of too many traders, is the only way a winner should bet.
A book solely for beginners, this book certainly is not. A book for traders of all abilities, Mastering Betfair certainly is.
