7 Betfair Exchange Trading for Beginners: Getting Started on Betfair
How to Get Started Trading on the Betfair Exchange
Now you are finally at the good bit, you know about everything you need to know you are now ready to start making some moves on the Betfair Exchange, but what do you need to do first?
Well the first thing is to head on over to Betfair and create an account, when you have an account you are ready to move onto the next step.
This is where people now get muddled and start thinking they need a lot of money, I am going to talk here about the Betfair bank to start with. My advice is always start with an amount you are prepared to lose! You don’t need to go crazy when putting money in start with a small amount, my thought here over 10 years of working with traders is ‘If you can’t handle £50 bank then you 100% will not be able to handle £1,000!’
This now becomes the trading bank, it is capital and it is very important, do not treat it lightly! I do not mean to come across negative here but it takes time and most importantly patience to become a good trader on Betfair, there is a real possibility that you will lose a lot of trades while on the path to becoming the Betfair trader you want to be, so don’t go crazy!
Treat this initial bank as an investment in your trading future, get that mindset ready for it, you are after long term success here and make sure that now you use this Betfair Exchange account for only trading, if you like to bet do that with a bookmaker – the exchange account is your trading hub.
I will cover trading software later on in this blog post, so don’t worry about having to have a super duper fast computer with 6 screens etc… at this stage we want to keep it simple.
‘Trading can be as easy or as complicated as you make it!’
The most important thing here is to pick a sport and market to trade and get experience of the markets.
I know it can be really tempting to just pick anything and trade but having some thought behind the choice can help and then you can arm yourself with the information you need and lock that vision into a sport, then with the BTC community you can connect with the right traders and follow the right threads attached to that sport with laser targeted focus to help you get to your goal faster.
There are two main things that I think are the greatest influence on what sport you should pick and they are:
Time
Interest
I will go into more detail on both of these over the course of the post and explain exactly what you need to understand when picking a sport.
Let’s start with time, I see people commenting on groups, emails etc… wanting to become a full time trader but they don’t have the time, time is a very important factor in our lives and I firmly believe to be a success on Betfair you have to have a happy balance, so you need to pick a sport or market which you have the time to trade – most people who are want to be traders cannot trade the horses in the day as they are at work, but they can trade in the evenings. So if this is you then maybe the horses will work for you, but also be aware that other commitments such as partners, family etc… will also still be there so you need to make sure you balance the trading and life otherwise something will usually give.
The same can be said with other sports such as football, the bulk of the trading on this sport is done at the weekend so there is not really much point picking football unless you have the time at the weekend to be able to trade. Tennis is a favourite of mine but the times are always changing, so some days when the Aussie Open is on for example I am up at night in the wee hours.
The next thing to consider is interest, I find it much easier to trade a sport if I like it. It also gives me an advantage for a few reasons really, the first being I know the players or horses etc… so that helps but also I don’t mind spending time doing the research.
If you have the time to pick a sport that you have an interest in why not start there? You have a background knowledge on the sport and you will find it easier to learn about the jockeys, teams, players etc… because you already have a base level knowledge of them you now just need to start to watch the markets and see how you can turn that information you have into profit.
Be aware though you will start to see the sport you love very differently as you’ll be spotting opportunities to trade, you’ll be down the pub and your mates will say I am going both teams to score in this game its coming in, when you turn round and say you know theres only a 25% chance of that happening, which is 1.25 and the bookies are only giving you 1.5 thats not enough value!
#Betfair