When is the most profitable time to trade?

One of the key things you must learn to make money trading football on the exchanges is to minimise the risk and maximise the profit. It sounds obvious but how do you do it?

One way is to work out when the most profitable periods of the game is for certain markets and it's important to study past game scenarios to understand when these occur.

I've taken the English Premiership game that occurred just over a week ago as an example between Swansea and Wigan. The game was evenly priced and not one that I would normally get involve in, particularly early on. The home win price at kick-off was 2.06 with prices of 3.6 and 4.3 for the draw and away win respectively.




I will normally trade the unders and match odds markets and have included the above chart depicting the draw price, the under 2.5 price and also the correct score 0-0 price.

I don't normally trade the correct score but I know that some people use this market as a hedge when laying the draw. This is the subject of a future post but I've included it here as I think it's worth studying as part of this exercise.

The first obvious thing to note is that the price decay is most significant for the correct score market, followed by the draw and finally the under 2.5 goals.

If we study the price decline each minute for the preceding 10 minutes we can work out when the most profitable part of the game is for each market. The results of this analysis are shown in the table below:

Market	Start Time	Start Price	End Time	End Price
0-0	15	9.0	24	6.2
Draw	66	2.18	75	1.76
Under 2.5	16	1.65	25	1.42

From the above table we can see that the most profitable time to enter the draw or under 2.5 market is around the 15 mark and not until the 66th minute for the 0-0 correct score market.

If you were to have placed a back bet for £10 at the indicated times and greened up after 10 minutes you would have made a £4.52 profit for the draw, a £2.39 profit for the draw and a £1.62 profit for the under 2.5 market.

Obviously the correct score market is the most risky because if a goal is scored you will lose your initial stake but it provides higher levels of return.

It's an exercise left to the reader to extend this analysis to other games with a different initial pricing structure e.g. where there is a outstanding favourite, to see if this isolated example holds true.

I will be performing further analysis on this and post my results in due course.