Okay, so let’s say you’ve chosen your sports arbitrage software, you’ve opened your new bank accounts, credit cards, and online wallets, you’ve positioned your spare cash to fund your new project, and you’re ready to start trading.
Now what?
How do you go from here to making money consistently with sports arbitrage trading?
Honestly, a lot of it comes down to experience. Your software will identify opportunities for you and your job will be to investigate them, betting on them when you can. After just a few months of arb trading, you’ll probably have a pretty good idea of how to find and spot the best trades. There are several ways to go about it, and you’ll probably discover plenty of your own, but… you’re not an expert, yet. So with that in mind, below, I’ll provide a few pointers for arbitrage betting rookies …
Start Small
I’ve emphasized this a few times. The reason is simple: when you first start out you will be prone to making mistakes. You will probably be excited, nervous, perhaps slightly overwhelmed by the navigation of the bookmaker sites and almost certainly on edge as you hear the clock ticking against you. If you add to all of this the pressure of knowing that you are placing bets worth several hundred pounds, you create a situation in which mistakes are almost inevitable.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Mistakes are a great way to learn. In fact, they are probably the BEST way to learn! However, if you can avoid losing large sums of money when making these mistakes and learning the lessons, then it’s better to do so. Not only from a financial perspective; also from a psychological perspective. If you lose a large sum of money early on in your sports arbitrage trading career, this will severely impact your confidence and may actually result in the demise of your project. It is impossible to trade effectively if you are constantly second-guessing yourself as a result of a large error you made in your first few weeks as a trader.
By making several small bets at first, you will start learning immediately and you will be gaining extremely valuable experience which you will use later on when making bigger and bigger bets.
My suggestion is that you invest no more than £1 in each of your first 100 sports arbitrage trades. At the end of the exercise you will have gained enormous experience and confidence, you will have a deep familiarity with a large number of your bookmakers’ websites and you will know, with absolute certainty, whether or not to continue with your trading project. And whilst you will probably be in profit of about £5, if you made any errors which cost money, the most you can possible have lost would be £100.
Join the Online Sports Arbitrage Community
There’s a reason they call it the information super highway.
In all walks of life, there’s really no better way to improve your skills at what you’re doing than practice, and sharing and swapping tips and info with like minded individuals.
Engage with the community within the TraderZone & check out sports arbitrage forums
Use one type of currency per account
It’s a good idea to use only one currency per-event, and to keep each of your accounts dedicated to a single currency. The problem is that currencies tend to fluctuate over time, if you’re betting say, euros against pounds, you’re going to have to double check currency rates every time you place a new bet to make sure you know what you’re getting. Not to mention, the hassle of constantly exchanging different types of currency every single time you place a bet can get a little overwhelming and hard to manage.
Surebets Detection Services and Software
A number of services like ArbAlarm allow arb traders to be in the know whenever a good opportunity springs up. These are definitely recommended for all traders, as they have the ability to gather and process price data far more efficiently than any human can do manually. This is not to say that you won’t also be able to find some arbs manually. This is entirely possible because software can’t detect all types of arbs all of the time (software requires consistency to work best). But for your bread & butter trades, you need sports arbitrage software.
Reinvest!
If possible, try to keep the profits you make from the first 2-3 months in the system. The increase in capital will, in turn, allow you to place more trades and make higher profits. After some time you can change the ratio – for example you may decide to withdraw 50% of your profits each month and reinvest the other 50%.
Cast a Wide Net
The more bookmaker accounts you have, the larger selection of sports arbitrage trades you will have to choose from. ArbAlarm scans well over 100 bookmakers. Although you may not wish to use them all, you should have an eventual target in mind of at least 50 accounts. Use ArbSurfer Pro to manage the process of signing up to them accounts and managing your various log-in codes.
Make Smaller and More Bets
Whatever investment money you have to spend on arbitrage betting, it’s wiser to make dozens of small bets with dozens of bookmakers than it is to make a few large bets.
As a general rule of thumb, look to bet approximately 75% of whatever maximum the bookmaker will allow on a specific event. IN practice this will mean that your average total investment in any arb will be around £600.
Start With Realistic Expectations
With 2-3 months experience and assuming you have enough trading capital and time to devote to your sports arbitrage business, you will almost certainly be generating profits of several thousand pounds each quarter. However, for the first 1-2 months you should set your expectations well below this and focus more heavily on building skills and confidence.
Stick With It
Persistence is extremely important. You need to go into arbitrage trading with a positive attitude and it’s important to be able to maintain this attitude throughout your ‘apprenticeship’.
You may have originally heard about sports arbitrage from any number of sources which claim that it’s ‘easy money, hardly any work, a road to riches’. Of course, this is all hype.
Sports arbitrage offers a route to an easy to maintain steady positive cashflow IF you first put in the effort to learn the ropes. Of course, it will seem easy when you watch an expert (YOU after 3 months of trading experience) but so does tennis when you watch Roger Federer play!
When you get to the stage where you know what you are doing, each trade you place should not take more than 90 seconds to execute. You will be able to decide when you want to trade, you’ll go to your computer, you’ll fire up your software and choose the trades that suit you. You could spend an hour doing this and by the end you may have placed 10 or 15 or more trades and you may have made as much as £300.
This may sound like ‘hardly any work’ but you wouldn’t have been able to do any of it if you hadn’t put the work in before whilst you were training yourself to be a sports arbitrage trader.