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Football Trading – Are You Trading TOO Many Football Matches?
Do you sometimes find yourself making mistakes or missing opportunities because you are trading too many matches at once?
Or you start a football trading session well but end up trading too many games and end up wiping out your problems?
The answer may well be that you are experiencing something called “complexity bias”, which means we, as humans, have a natural tendency to overcomplicate things that don’t need to be.
Our minds are hardwired to make some situations more complicated than they are—it’s called the ‘complexity bias.’
Even though it’s a bias, that’s not to say we should avoid it completely—we actually benefit from our complexity bias in many ways. We complicate our coffee, meals, even our sense of fashion sometimes. It’s part of how we distinguish ourselves.
But when our love of complex things sends us into a spiral of overwhelm and self doubt. That’s when we can call the complexity bias out.
With this in mind, take a look at your recent football trading and see if you can see any signs of “complexity bias” impacting your football trading. And if it is, we should be looking for ways to remove it and we have a few tips that you can follow throughout this article.
Football trading should be taking seriously if you are intending to make a profit but it does not mean that it can’t be fun and it certainly does not mean you have to be trading multiple matches at one time, or for 12 hours straight every day.
Lessons From The Financial Market That Can Benefit Your Football Trading
Complexity bias is a logical fallacy that leads us to give undue credence to complex concepts.
Faced with two competing options, we are likely to choose the most complex one. That’s usually the option with the most assumptions and regressions.
Complexity bias is our tendency to look at something that is easy to understand, or look at it when we are in a state of confusion, and view it as having many parts that are difficult to understand.
The use of “state of confusion” here is particularly relevant to Football Trading, particularly if we are trying to monitor and trade multiple games at the same time. Simple strategies and information become harder to follow and to take in as we are making our brains jump from match to match, statistic to statistic and still expect it to process things coherently.
“Life is simple, but we insist on making it complicated”
– Confucius
This concept over complicating and over trading is equally prevalent in the financial investment markets where in a 1999 study, by the Financial Analysts Journal found that the 20% least active traders were significantly more profitable than the 20% most active traders.
In many circles, sports trading is increasingly becoming classed as an Investment Class, so there are definitely important lessons that can be learned from these markets and applied to our football trading. You can read our two-part guide to sports betting as an investment class here.
The Benefits Of Reducing Your Football Trading Volume
By reducing the amount of matches that you are looking to trade, your Football Trading will benefit in a number of ways.
– Quality over Quantity
By being selective in the matches you choose that fit your criteria and your availability you can target only the best trading opportunities that present themselves
– Reduce Variance
If you are trading one strategy across multiple games across a long trading period you will experience much larger swings in emotion and performance.
By selecting one or two games a day or seven to ten games a week, you will be able to handle your discipline and emotional swings much easier. Each trade can be done in isolation and if it wins, great. If not, you come back the next day and so on.
– Increased Enjoyment
The motivation for many of us, at least initially, to attempt to become football traders is born from both an enjoyment of football and a desire to make a new income stream that will give us more flexibility and control over our life.
If you are trading 5 games at the same time or trading 12 hours straight each and every day, then it will soon become a chore and you will risk burn out and poor decision making.
– Discipline
By being focused and simplifying your trading objectives you will find it easier to retain discipline, monitor and learn from your results, keep your staking under control and manage 3-5 strategies effectively.
– Trade Less / Invest More
We see it time and time again where football traders start to see improvement in their trading and their next decision is to try and replicate this success by trading MORE games. When what they should be doing is sticking to what has been working but look to grow and compound their stakes following their existing strategies. Again, quality over quantity will lead to bigger profits.
Removing “Complexity Bias” from your Football Trading
The image is above is taken from my personal trading account and shows the last 7 days at the time of writing this article.
You’ll quickly see that we have made almost £350 profit from just 6 games spread across only 7 days.
(It’s a little lower in terms of volume than normal due to part of the week being covered by International fixtures)
If we were to extrapolate that our across a month, we’d be looking at something in the region of £1,400 profit per month from less than 30 games (or 1 a day on average per month).
How much of a difference would an extra £1,400 a month make for you?
Value Football Trading + Match Shortlists = Optimal Football Trading
To replicate this approach, you will need to become a full member of Predictology.
By doing so, you will have access (among other things) our daily match shortlists which are perfect for Football Trading. These include daily shortlists for the most optimal games for:
- First Half Goals
- Over 1.5 / 2.5 / 3.5
- Home Win / Away
- Favourites to lay
Not only that, we produce a football trading report for members each day like this one.
It highlights specific matches that fit our proven models and indicates the Target Odds required.
Members then just drop in the latest odds from Betfair and it will quickly demonstrate whether a market is offering value at the current pre-match prices and is suitable for their football trading.
Predictology Members Are Improving Their Football Trading As They Can Now:
- Select the time and day to trade that suits them
- Know which games are available at that time
- Know what markets are offering the greatest value before a ball has been kicked
- Adopt of the advised strategies to trade based on where the value is
- Have a clear plan on how and what they are going to trade
- Execute and profit
Combining value football trading with the tools and football trading match shortlists available with Predictology will remove complexity from your trading and reduce the likelihood of you over trading and handing your profits back to the market.
Predictology has helped 100’s of aspiring football traders improve and become profitable in their football trading. Will you be next?
This is a great article and something I battle with to be honest. Really useful – thanks guys.