Getting started/ Football Trading

[Euler]

I was wondering, those who trade pre match, what resources ye use for team news, injuries etc in the run up to a match ?
I know there are various methods to work out what the odds for a given match might be, but to factor in variables such as injury or absence of key players are perhaps harder to model, to find value...although i have no doubt the market is quite efficient

I have a twitter list dedicated to injury and team news so I can browse it regularly and see what is going on. Difficult to put into a model unless you model everything from individual players up, but it's possible.

West Ham example is a good one of why you often don't need to do this.

I tend to be a market watcher however so people always act on information so you can pick up on it that way. Even if you don't immediately know the reason.

[Kai]

Difficult to put into a model unless you model everything from individual players up, but it's possible.

Speaking of individual players, another recent example was the Community Shield match between Chelsea and Arsenal the other day. If I remember correctly the market took about 2 minutes after teamnews to react to the fact that Diego Costa was injured and not starting, Chelsea spiked upwards a good number of ticks.

I use Twitter as well to know the exact time when teamnews is out, to not get blindsided on the market more than anything else. I used to trade teamnews directly but I've since dropped that model.

[Archangel]

It's a good example of how the market can be a bit "naive" at times, because it already knew that Hammers are going to field a very weak squad, and yet it didn't react properly until it saw the teamnews.
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Thats interesting. One would think of the market as being always one step ahead of you but clearly not in these cases !

[Archangel]

I had some success already with the pre match stuff today as some late money arrived for Man U. I am still quite unsure about the in-play stuff..... I need to strategise it so as not to fall into the gambling trap

[LinusP]

There are some good apps for twitter (tweetdeck) that will play a noise/notify you if someone tweets, handy for team news. Don't rely on the website as they way they push data isn't consistent due to the way they store it (NoSQL)

[Archangel]

For those who trade the longer term football markets such as winner, top 4, relegation.... is there much to be gained from looking at the fixture list and prempting some likely scenarios. Eg: Team A have 3 tough games in a row followed by some easier fixtures so a sort of lay to back straegy would apply ?

[Euler]

For those who trade the longer term football markets such as winner, top 4, relegation.... is there much to be gained from looking at the fixture list and prempting some likely scenarios. Eg: Team A have 3 tough games in a row followed by some easier fixtures so a sort of lay to back straegy would apply ?

Y, I map out the fixtures so that I can see when tough or weak periods are.

[Archangel]

As a point of interest I noticed that Man United drifted out a bit inside the hour before the game at Villa. Would this be due to team news ?

[Elcapitan10]

It probably wasn't, as the only surprise in the starting lineups was Januzaj replacing Young.

I'm probably a bit late, but I'll give you me view as a football trader:

Like in other sports trading, there are two parts of the equation: football and markets knowledge. Although it's possible to achieve some level of success mastering only one of these two parts, in order to maximize your potential as a trade you should be able to integrate both of them. If asked each part of the equation is more important, I would answer: market knowledge. The reasoning behind it includes the fact that football knowledge can be obtained even if you've never heard of trading, while nobody understands the markets before starting to trade. Also, this is one of the reasons why you won't get your answers about the market on the internet, most of the information available concerns the macro level. But, as usual the devil is in the details and you'll have to figure it out by yourself.

That said my advice would be to try to understand the market dynamics first and only then start to integrate your football views slowly. Of course, easier said than done