Week 10 – £50 up, the worst week yet

Week 10 Results

It’s been a pretty hectic week and only now getting the chance to sit down and provide Sunday’s result update. A pretty poor week overall, really. Not a loss, but still well off the pace. There again, this is a marathon not a sprint, and I fully expect to have worse weeks than this at some point in the future. Unfortunately, so much of my betting and the tipsters I am subscribed to are still heavily geared towards Bet365 – and I no longer have a usable account with them – so my bet volume is well down, and I ascribe much of this negative variance to this fact. I am slowly moving towards alternative sources, but still not there to my satisfaction yet.

I did have a bet on Trump to take the Presidency, which helped proceedings. Only a small one – I’d expected him to lengthen in the odds off the back of the exit polls and had planned to top up at that point. He did lengthen in the market – touching around 16/1 at one point during the night, I understand. But in the end I went out for beers and duly forgot all about it!

Why did I bet on Trump in the first place? Simple – it met the main criteria of professional betting – the odds were not a fair reflection of the likelihood of the outcome. I did the same for Brexit, as it happens. Personally, I think the parallels between the two phenomena are overdone in the media, but from a betting standpoint, both scenarios were clearly (to me at least) value betting opportunities. How can it be that a decision which is within a reasonable margin for error of being 50:50 can be so one-sidedly  priced in the market? Well, the market follows the money; the money is put up by people; and people are subject to biases.

It was also brought to my attention that, while more money was coming for Hillary in the betting markets and on exchanges, there were actually more bets coming in for Trump. Despite all its flaws, the key thing about democracy is that a rich person’s vote is worth exactly the same as a poor person’s – this was another factor supporting the view that the market was imperfectly priced. The reality is that this happens all the time in sports betting markets – usually to a much lesser extent – and herein lies the opportunity to prosper!