26th March, 2019.
Email: [email protected]
A few people have asked me recently about pre-match trading and it’s potential viability, so I thought I’d do a bit of a study to assess some potential methodologies which can be applied on the Exchange markets.
As I’ve discussed recently on the pre-match betting analysis pages, the ‘purple highlighted’ players have an excellent return on investment historically, with data spanning back to September 2014. Primarily (with several caveats), these are players who offer implied edges of 10% or greater between my model and the Pinnacle price at the time that my daily spreadsheets are sent out with a market price of 3.00 or below.
Naturally, there’s going to be further price movement between the time that the daily spreadsheets are sent out, and the match start time, so assessing how these high edge players traded in the market is an obvious starting point.
There have been 412 ATP Tour ‘high edge spots’ which have qualified for this sample from September 2014, and the average implied edge price contraction between these 412 matches was 0.80%, so the average player who fitted this criteria pre-match saw their price drop by an implied 0.80% win percentage at Pinnacle between the time the daily spreadsheets were sent, and the match start time. Looking at it from a ‘Betfair tick’ perspective, this equated to an average of 2.26 ticks – a pretty solid movement in our favour, although given the one tick discrepancy between back and lay prices, and charges, it would be extremely difficult to get close to this when pre-match trading these in reality.
However, splitting the implied edge further, into defined brackets, did yield some interesting results, as well as potential avenues for implementation in the markets. I’ve uploaded the full database to this page (click download link at the bottom), but I’ve summarised the data in the table below:-
|
Edge % |
Matches |
Average Difference % |
Betfair Ticks |
Mean Average % Difference |
Mean Betfair Ticks |
|
20+ |
21 |
33.72 |
103.00 |
1.61 |
4.90 |
|
17.50-19.99 |
32 |
44.13 |
130.00 |
1.38 |
4.06 |
|
15.00-17.49 |
56 |
45.71 |
140.50 |
0.82 |
2.51 |
|
12.50-14.99 |
122 |
99.49 |
275.50 |
0.82 |
2.26 |
|
10.00-12.49 |
181 |
106.12 |
280.50 |
0.59 |
1.55 |
Here we can see that the 53 men’s matches with 17.50% or greater implied edge had considerable price movement, shortening by over four ‘Betfair ticks’ on average between when the daily spreadsheets were sent and the match start price, while there were reasonable results for the 12.50-14.99% and 15.00-17.49% brackets as well. The lower edge (10.00-12.49%) matches had less price movement in our favour pre-match, and it’s difficult to make a case to include them in any potential future strategies.
Summarising, the higher implied edge percentage players have historically represented a very low-risk pre-match trading method over the last few seasons and could also be very viable in the future as well.
