Financial Trading Tutorial ( Time-Decay )

Published Monday, October 17, 2005 by Darren Davis | E-mail this post

I have decided to write the Financial Trading tutorial here because it allows me to edit things easier than on BetMatching.co.uk. If you haven't been on this site before, this is my blog and it has a lot of information on other ways to make money on the internet besides betting and gamblling. Feel free to take a look around. Anyway, lets begin with the tutorial:

Financial Trading for beginners

First of all, i hope you are familiar with how betfair works. The Betfair basics are explained on BetMatching.co.uk.

Go to the Betfair site and bring up the financial bets from the menu on the left of their website. The Intraday bets are the ones you want (can be FTSE or DOW index). It should bring up a list of hours in the format 1pm - 2pm, etc. Click on the hour that is in-play right now. The odds should be displayed as below:

We have our Betfair screen ready, but we are not quite ready to place our bets just yet. Before we place our bet, we need to analyse the index using charts so that we can be sure that we'll be on the correct side of the bet.

I recommend using yahoo charts which are free ( http://finance.yahoo.com ). Once you have the Yahoo charts window up, you need to find the graph of the index you are trading. You can type in the index symbol into the search bar at the top of the page (^FTSE for FTSE index and ^DJI for DOW index). I will be trading the FTSE so i'll be using the FTSE chart. After you find the chart you are trading, click on the technical analysis section to give you a more detailed chart, your Yahoo page should look something like this:

I won't go into reading charts right now because the topic is too large. There is plently of information on reading charts available on the internet if you want to learn in more detail. For this tutorial, i am just going to focus on my method.

I use charts to make a decision on whether i think the index is going to rise or fall. I back the outcome on Betfair on whether the index is likely to end above or below the level they specified ( from the screenshot, we can see that the betfair level is above or below 5283.30 ).

At 1pm today, my charts indicated that the index would rise above the level. All i did was place a back bet on that outcome and then placed a lay bet to guarantee a profit. The result? Well take a look for yourself:

The green figures under the Betfair levels show us the amount that we will win. This screenshot shows us that we will profit no matter the outcome. If the FTSE finishes above 5283.30 we will win £9.70. If it finishes below 5283.30, we will win £13.53. We can't lose.

I used the calculator available here to calculate my stakes. This method is so simple. All you need to do is figure out whether or not the index will rise or fall then back and lay that outcome. To guarantee a profit, you must back at higher odds than you lay.

Sometimes i back the outcome when it reaches 1.10, then a few moments later i lay at 1.05. The odds will fall as time passes on the outcome that looks most likely.

I usually back and lay when there is only 10 - 15 mins of in-play time left (for the 1pm - 2pm time band, i only bet at around 1.45pm). This limits risk as there is only 15 minutes left until the outcome is decided. A summary of this method has been provided below:

1. Find the most likely outcome ( look for low odds, confirm your decision with charts )

2. Place back bet
3. Click on the lay side of that the most likely outcome
4. Offer odds a few ticks lower than your back bet (i.e back at 1.10 then offer to lay at 1.05)
5. Use the bet calculator and calculate your stake to guarantee a profit
6. Place your lay bet
7. Sit back and wait until your lay bet is matched
8. Bet matched, you have now guaranteed a profit!

I hope this post has been useful to you. Remember that our aim here is to make a lot of small wins (i.e 5% every hour), do not get greedy as this increases your chance of a loss. I have found that this method works very well for me.