Four from Four Homers

7.45pm Maccabi v Genk ROI 35%

9.05pm Colon v All Boys ROI 35%

11.40pm Atletico v Cruziero ROI 39%

1.15am  Racing Club v Godoy ROI 24%

Strike Rate 74%

Homer sweet Homer

I have had a few complaints about the marble effect behind my posts. It should have been a solid blue and has been fine up until recently. So I have now made a few changes to make it more readable. 

My football trading has been going well, particularly the blistering performance of my Homer strategy as you can see below. The great factor in this strat is that the home team doesn't necessarily need to score for a successful trade. Take yesterdays Argentina league game between Atletico and Arsenal. At half time the score was 0-3 and the Homer was already a winner. 

I don't trade Portugal league matches as they tend to be defensive games that are often still 0-0 at HT but even yesterdays game between Leiria v Academica was a winner!

You can follow my picks on Facebook but you will need to be a Trading Football member and then supply me with your chat Alias. Click on the right for a free 14 day trial. If you want access to a detailed document of the strategy then subscribe monthly to Trading Football or a one off payment to  Betting System Notes. Their banners are on the right.

MarketMatcher -A MUST tool for all Football Traders

MarketMatcher is a fantastic tool from the Betting System Notes website that selects games to trade by either using the successful preset strats or by selecting custom price parameters. It used to take me around 20-30 minutes to study a large weekend card but with MarketMatcher it shows you in an instant. 

I was lucky enough to extensively test the tool before it was launched yesterday, particularly the Homer and I have total confidence in it's accuracy.

Even if you just back normally rather than trade, just select liquidity as 1 and select games for the next 24 hours. It will then list all the Betfair inplay games and it will be much easier than the Betfair site to click each game and see the Match Odds, Correct Score, U1.5, U2.5, U3.5, U4.5 all together on one screen. It really is a marvellous tool. 

The Betting System Notes website also has a tool for recording your football strategies so that they can be easily accessed as and when you need them. The tool comes with many strats already set up whether or not you are subscribed to any football service. If that isn't enough there are regular updates of sports trading news, videos and other tools.

There is no monthly subscription. There is just one off single payment of £39.99 to give you access to all the features. There are more tools planned which will be free to all members.

Click the banner on the right or the links in this post to take a look for yourself on what is on offer.

The Family of Homer Strategies

Over the past 4 years I have traded many sports but my primary market has always been pre-race Horse Racing. I have made a profit from the horses but not enough compared to the hours I have put in More recently I have been trading in play which has been successful but to be honest it's too intense to be enjoyable.

I have always traded the Football markets as a secondary sport but I was always useless and losing money on a regulate basis. I used to mainly use the popular Lay the Draw strategy for small stakes but there was never a concrete structure to it to ever contemplate any decent income from it.

Then about a year ago I accidentally came across the Trading Football Markets service run by Adster and Bingo. I decided to join but was sceptical like most noobs would be trying to get on the trading bandwagon. I quickly realised that this was a decent reliable service. They trade games in their chat room but not just for lemmings to follow. They explain why they make their in play decisions and they encourage members to think for themselves.

Bingo and Ads have always been supportive but there were also a couple of others that are sadly are no longer members that used to regularly coach me late at night (when there wasn't the numbers at midnight like there are now) when they weren't trading themselves and often getting me out of a massive hole I had dug for myself. I learnt a lot from them and one year later I am making consistent profits having for the first time last month profited at over £1,000 on just my football trading.

I have developed a family of strategies called Homer listed below

Homer

HomerLow

HomerActive (previously named Homer30)

HomerDog

I tested and tweaked the Homer over a number of weeks which is now regularly played within the TF chat room. It has proved very successful. The full details of the strategy and it's HomerLow variation is posted on two sites. Trading Football and Betting System Notes. Both can be accessed by their banners on the right.

Betting System Notes is a great website which focus's on successful strategies. It includes software where you can access details of proven strategies and add others to it. It is also about to launch a new product that is a must for all football traders. I have been lucky enough to be testing it myself. There is a one time charge to access all their services. Head over to them via the banner on the right to see for yourself.

HomerActive and the brand new HomerDog will be added to the TF and BSN over the next week or so. There will also be videos explaining the strategies.

So what's in it for me? Nothing apart from the green that I am steadily building. I genuinely just want to give something back to the TF community and show that there are a very small amount of trading services that really care about it's members and genuinely want them to become successful. If it wasn't for TF I wouldn't be in the position I am.

The proof of such a good service is the fact that most experienced members have never left to continue to trade on our own. As far as I am concerned trading a football game without sharing it in TF is like eating a Big Mac without the meat!

So what has all this got to do with my first paragraph about the horses? Well I have decided to make Football my primary sport for trading. I am going to show my faith in my own strategies by trading the main leagues at much higher stakes and compliment them with the already proven strategies that Bingo, Ads and senior members have introduced with a view to becoming a full time trader.

You can follow my Homer Picks on my Facebook page. I am Handy Andy with a picture of my profile. You must be a TF member so please send me a friend request stating your chat room alias.

There are many football strategy products that are being introduced for the start of the main season but with most you are just given an ebook to get on with it yourself but with TF you are never alone.

Stay green.

8.20 Hamilton - A Real Mystery

I am really scratching my head on this one. As the race entered the final furlong I put in a £100 lay of the current leader Comedy Act at 1.15 which didn't get matched and as the horse was being headed I moved onto the next race.

I am scalping the next race when I notice my bank balance had significantly increased. It was £270 higher than it should be so I examined my P&L and found this.

The above shows that I placed my back for the eventual winner, French Hollow at 20.17 which is before the start time but I never entered the market pre race. Furthermore when I put my lay into the market whilst in play, the grid was empty. Anyone would have noticed £270 on one selection with £100 red on all the others. I have been trading horses for four years so I know when a grid is empty!

In the past four years I have occasionally left back or lays in the market and paid the consequence but have always remembered what stupid mistakes I had done.  However with this race the only time I entered the market was to put in the lay.

To be honest not knowing exactly what happened is really annoying me especially when I could have very easily lost £100. I will take any profit handed out to me from the twists of fate but it is tainted by the fact that it just doesn't make any logical sense.

I have changed my password for peace of mind but know that it couldn't be anybody hacking in unless it was my guardian angel deciding that I deserve a few more pennies in my account.

What will happen to the elite?

I have decided to try to continue to post at least once a week but make the content more than just my P&L performance.

Let's start with the recent Premium Charge rises which will only affect a ‘small’ number of successful customers who have acheived lifetime profits of over £250,000. For customers who were profiting from the very start of Betfairs existence that would mean that to reach today's milestone they only needed to profit at an average of £60 per day. When you look at it from that perspective, the quarter of a million doesn't look that impossible to many people. Us bog standard traders know that it 's far easier said than done. Nevertheless should these elite few be penalised for profiting perhaps as low us £25,000 a year? I am sure they would argue that they have been instrumental in making Betfair what it is today.

I admit that I am not the brightest spark and I apologies in advance if I make naive comments but surely a PC of up to 60% of any profit is going to force the elite to move to Betdaq. What choice do they have? I cannot see how they can accept giving away more profit than they will earn.

I know there is always talk of a mass move and that nothing ever happens but isn’t this going to force the issue or will the loss of the elite make minimal impact to the liquidity. Is this what Betfair want?

I understand that the more a customer trades the more points they get and the less commission Betfair will receive from the constant winners which is disproportionate to the average customer base and that existing losing customers are leave Betfair quicker than expected when they find that they just cannot cut it as a trader but don’t they need to balance that with the risk of assisting other exchanges to grow?

From a selfish point of view, if the Elite do disappear from the scene it may make trading the ladders much easier. I know I find trading the ladders a whole lot easier on Sundays when I am sure that most professional traders take time off with the family. If it puts extra green in my pocket at the expense of the elite then that’s payback for all the times I have been screwed when the ladders go against me for long enough. It will also evolve over time to elevate a new elite group who will have a few years to enjoy the fruits of successful trading before reaching the upper limit.

I would really be interested to read comments from others on this.

Now, from successful traders to one particular person that I cannot get my head around. John from Betafir Profit and Loss. I respect anyone who takes the time to blog and with John you really get the feel of what is going on in his mind and his heart. When you read the comments from many people they may criticise John but it is almost always constructive rather than abusive. He gets criticism quite often in the blogging world too and it is done to genuinely try to help him rather than to kick him when he’s down.

John was very successful up to the end of September 2010 and showed his P&L for the previous 3 months at around £12k but since then things have gone downhill quite rapidly. In the last few months John has been sending the same message again and again. He says he is continuing to lose as he simply doesn’t have the large bank he needs to profit. This is simply not true and he has been told that more times than I can remember. If he has an edge to a winning strategy it doesn’t matter if he puts £2 or £200 on it as the end result is a win. His £12k profit he made between June and September 2010 may result in £600 this time round if he adopts the same strategy. Then he has a decent bank to move forward. In the last three months that he has been moaning about his bank he would have recovered his position to at least have more resources to step up. While John continues to take the view that a small bank will not work for him he will continue to lose. Psychology is all part of the trading game. If you are not in the right mindset you cannot possibly be successful in the dog eat dog trading world where there is such a fine line between success and failure. In his last couple of posts he is complaining about his small loss in the last three months but he fails to comment that in his last week of the three months he has won £226. He must stop his negative thoughts of how things used to be in the past and concentrate on being positive and moving forward. John doesn’t have any other income so he is under even more pressure to succeed which can also lead to unreasonable and rash trading decisions.

I and many others want to see him turn things around. Firstly he needs to be positive. Review his historical P&L for one last time and understand what went wrong then reduce his sport portfolio to concentrate on his strongest markets. He then needs to draw a line and start with a fresh page forgetting the past. I don’t want to read anything referring to how things were good last year. He needs to have a clear strategy on each market and keep to it. If he was successful in 2010 through strategy rather than being lucky then he will continue to profit. Bank size is totally irrelevant as he can reduce his stakes to scale but if he wants to start with a higher bank then the harsh reality is to find a job however junior it may be.

Us occasional bloggers are not all losing money!

I have been spurred on to add to my blog by a few factors. The biggest one is by Cassini at Green all Over and his extended post this morning celebrating his 250,000 hit.  It is a big acheivement to keep blogging to the extent that he has over the past three years but I take umbrage to his sweeping statement that bloggers who have not lasted the course are losing money. He may have the time to devote many hours to blogging but some of us make lifestyle changes that make it very difficult to continue.

The other factors which I have been surprised at include the many messages asking me to come back and the fact that despite not posting for two months, I still receive thirty separate hits a day.

Whilst I was blogging I wasn't able to devote my time to really knuckle down on the football trading. I used to be in the TF chat room a couple of nights a week but now I am logged in on most days after the evenings racing has ended. I have developed my own successful Homer strategy which I log on my new facebook page and compliment this with some of the TF's established strategies. I cannot tell you how TF has totally changed how I trade football games and they are the best service by far if you want to get into football trading.  Both my Horse Racing and Football trading has improved greatly and my profits are now consistent which I have been trying to reach unsuccessully over the last four years.

Blogging was an important part of my daily life whilst I was struggling trading but I have reached the point where the hour or two spent posting is better spent sharpening my trading skills. If I continue posting showing profits I am only going to be accused of showing off anyway and that has never been my intention so I am seriously considering calling it a day blogging.

I have said recently that I now trade inplay on races that are over 1m 4f which has really worked well and the reason is a bizarre but simple one. I never watch the race. I just react to the price movements. If I watch the race I am seeing and reacting to events that I am well behind on so there is no way I can ever maintain any kind of profit. Not watching changes things for me. I cannot describe what these price movements are but when it is about to drop down it reacts in a certain way and I am right most of the time and when I am wrong I set myself a price to get out. I have been caught out a few times but not so much as to wipe out a large portion of my profits.

One other thing. As I have been using Geek for a long time, I decided to take a free trial out with Fairbot and Gruss just to see what the competition is like. I have even traded a whole evenings card using the two trialists and I was back using Geek as they don't come close. Bet Angel is as good but I can't use it as it is too slow.

....oh and if anyone decides to make stupid comments, sign in with your name or don't bother!

Making Progress

Apart from the small football loss in the early hours of Monday, I had a rest from trading. It was an emotional rollercoaster at QPR and I didn't feel like doing much when I got home other than chill.

We were nine minutes from being champions when Hull decided to spoil the show with their only shot on target. However when our game finished we were promoted so long as Norwich didn't get a very late goal. Of course we all know what happened in the sixth minute of injury time which put a dampener on the afternoon. Pundits have been saying how we are as good a promoted but I don't agree. We are six points ahead of Cardiff with a 13 goal difference which could reasonably be overturned. We never beat Watford at Vicarage Road which if other results don't go our way will leave a rather nervy last game at home to Leeds.

The small break must have done me some good as I has a marvellous Tuesday evenings trading. I was juggling between the horses and a couple of early snooker frames of the evening session. I also traded a successful Homer in the Stoke game and put a lay on the draw in the Man.U game just as they scored and was disappointed that it wasn't matched.

I broke all the rules by laying a greyhound to win £25 or lose quite a bit more. But it was no ordinary greyhound. This one was called Miss Betfair and it came last.

Homing In On Profit

Another horse huff and puff session with lots of effort without reward. You can see from the image below that I lost close to £70 on the closing races. I seem to regularly have a good start only for it to be undone towards that end. It must be due to fatigue that results in loss of concentration.

Most of the snooker profit was gained yesterday when Higgins was playing Mcloed. Higgin's price at the start of each frame was an incredibly low 1.45 so there was plenty of room to manoeuvre thoughout each frame.

The football was an experience as I successfully led the Trading Football community through trading an Argentinian game between Arsenal and Gimnasia using the Homer strategy. The winning result showed a 32% roi. It really was a responsible and pressured experience until the first goal, as it was not just my cash at risk. I also led an unsuccesful trade at 12.15 in the morning where there were about 30 others burning the midnight oil. The exit was at half time and meant a small loss of £10 but any players that decided to stick it out were rewarded as the final score of 2-1 meant that one part of the strategy which was the  U2.5 lay at 1.68 came home.

The TF community has really grown over the past couple of months with some great characters old and new. It's such a pleasure entering into discussions with other members without any fear of abuse. Everyone supports each other and we are a close bunch which is suprising in such a virtual world. 

So £32 has been gained over the past couple of days. Not alot but at least it's in the right direction.

Off to QPR soon for the game with Hull. A win will guarantee promotion and the championship so will be an emotional afternoon if all goes to plane. Just hope we don't get bitten in the bum by losing points after the hearing next week.

Who Needs The Horses

A day when everything goes to plan is very rare but I acheived it without any horse racing and finished the day with a satisfying £123.

I wasn't even trading all day. The morning was spent trading a handful of snooker frames, earning £53 followed by an afternoon out with the family. I traded two football games using my newly named Homer. This is the strategy backing 1-0 1-1 2-0 and laying u2.5. The main criteria is to find a game with a fairly strong home team with a low u2.5 price. I sometimes take a risk and place the back bets while waiting for the u2.5 to drop to at least 1.80. I make sure that I pick a game that will reach 1.80 within 5 minutes of the start. It is a guaranteed winning strategy if the home team scores at any time.

I chose the Nottingham Forest v Leicester game as they both needed to push for the win. I layed u.5 6 minutes into the game and a few minutes later Homer was landed as Forest took the lead. With ten minutes to go and the scores at 1-1 I layed the current score to win an extra £15. 

My other game was Sligo v Bohemians. I recommended this game in the Footbal Trading chatroom but I don't think anyone else traded this game. U2.5 was a staggering 1.46 pregame and absolutely perfect for the Homer. Sligo scored early in the first half and the job was done. Better still, the game ended 1-2. I layed 1-2 with 15 minutes to go but there were no more goals. I should really accept my win and not be greedy to try and make extra gains.

Generally I put at risk about £70 to win £30. I will look to increase the risk over the next few weeks.

Hearts v Motherwell looks great for Homer. U2.5 is currently 1.73 on Betfair. Hearts are out on their own in 3rd place and I am hoping for a typical relaxed end of season game where goals will easily arrive. After note: I have noticed that this is not in play.

Good luck to QPR as they take on Cardiff live on BBC1 later today. I never trade a QPR game but I am expecting goals in the is one.

There is plenty of racing today but I won't be trading them intensively. I will just dip in and out.