BETDAQ EXCHANGE VIEW: In the third of several interviews with Professional Traders using BETDAQ, Stephan Maher chats to WILL WILDE, Head Trader at Football Form Labs, about his Trading strategy.
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Stephen Maher:
Thanks for taking the time to do this Will. So, for anyone who doesn’t know what you do and who you are, can you tell us a bit about yourself?
Will Wilde: Sure. My name is Will Wilde and I’m the Head Trader at Football Form Labs. Football Form Labs provide the most effective football betting software on the market with the ability to analyse games both pre-match and in-play across 50 different leagues. I’ve worked in the industry for over seven years advising both bettors and bookmakers how they can more effectively use data to improve performance. In 2011, I launched Fidens – a proprietary trading managed account syndicate for betting on football. I use social media extensively, especially twitter, to improve my betting and can often be found on there @WildeWill talking to fellow minded bettors and posting my thoughts on upcoming matches.
Stephen Maher: How did you get into betting to begin it? And then, at what point did you come up with idea for Football Form labs? Was it after a few months betting or years?
Will Wilde: I got into betting at University when I built a program that arbitraged between different spread betting companies. At the time I thought it was a gold mine but little did I know that the spread betting companies wouldn’t like it! After University I joined a company called Bettorlogic and we used stats on a variety of sports to produce editorial for subscribers. A couple of years later we split into two different arms: Bettorlogic for our bookmaking facing operation and Football Form Labs for our bettor facing arm. Football is unique in its vast pre-match liquidity.
Stephen Maher: There’s something I didn’t know… you were an arbor..! How long did it take you to build Football Form Labs database, and how long do you spend each day managing it?
Will Wilde: Our database for Football (we have databases on many other sports as well) has been steadily built for over 10 years. It is fully automated and has 24/7 support from our development team. We are constantly adding to the database whether that be in the form of new leagues, new statistics or more efficient collection of data.
Stephen Maher: And from that then, what would be the average amount of bets weekly? How many ticks out from the database would the price have to be for you to place a bet?
Will Wilde: I concentrate on the five most liquid leagues in the world – the top divisions in England, Germany, Spain, Italy and France – and I’ll place a bet around 15% of the games I look at. Within our software we typically recommend approximately 10 bets per week. Over the past year we have made over 400 selections and returned a profit of 7% ROI. The amount of value we need to make a bet will be dependent on the price, league and market.
Stephen Maher: That’s impressive ROI wise. During the course of these interviews I’ve been asking people what is their biggest loss because no one likes an aftertimer! So what’s your personal biggest loss? And because of football liquidity I’ll ask you, what’s your biggest win?
Will Wilde: I think when talking about absolute figures it’s difficult to be relative as my stakes have increased as my betting bank has increased. Some of my most important wins (and losses) occurred in the early stages of my betting. My most memorable win was backing Spain to beat Italy 4-0 in the Euro 2012 final at something like 130. While the amount I won then would be insignificant compared to my current bankroll it’s the win I would call my favourite. I try to forget about the losses. The one that hurt the most was Argentina losing in the final of the World Cup last year. I’d been backing Messi and Co heavily throughout the two years leading up to the tournament and they fell at the final hurdle.
Stephen Maher: In terms of losing then, do you totally blank losses? Is that how you cope? I suppose that’s one of the toughest area’s to being a professional – in that regard what advice would you give to newcomers, from a mental point of view, to cope with losing runs?
Will Wilde: Losing runs are the hardest part about his job for sure. I typically bet Asian Handicap only on football which means you have approximately 50% chance of winning each individual bet. I once had a losing run of 14 consecutive bets. The chance of that happening was less than one in 16,000! At times like that it’s difficult to trust that you have a profitable strategy but the key for getting through it is looking back objectively and seeing if there was any reason for you to not have placed those bets. Typically the answer to that is no. To get through such runs you need a sensible staking plan and the right mindset to not chase on losses. Although that is much easier to say than do.
I would also suggest surrounding yourself with like-minded individuals. One of the most positive additions to my betting outlook over the past year has been the formation of a private messaging group with fellow betting professionals. They are a source of not only great information but also advice where we can discuss such subjects like how to cope with a losing run.
Stephen Maher: There is an element to that though that harms your discipline, say for example I send you a cricket bet, is it hard to place a proper stake, percentage wise, on that because of what you go through on football on a daily basis, does that lead to over staking on other sports because you’ve become so used to high stakes on football?
Will Wilde: Overstaking is again relative to your bankroll. I have some very good professional gamblers that I’ll listen to on a variety of sports such as tennis, cricket, horse racing, snooker and darts. If the market exists I’ll place a similar amount on them as I would on one of my own football bets as I trust the source implicitly.
Stephen Maher: On such markets, what do you think about Betdaq liquidity these days? What do you think they could do better to create more competition to Betfair?
Will Wilde: I’ve been pleasantly surprised at Betdaq’s liquidity in racing and major football matches. In many markets where Betdaq don’t have liquidity the same is true of Betfair. Concentrating on key markets which have high liquidity would help such as in-running cricket and tennis markets. On football most subsidiary markets can be supplied with liquidity on the back of liquid Asian Handicap and Asian line markets – those two key markets fuel all other football markets and the stake sizes available on them in Asia are huge, however most of the companies offering liquidity are out of the reach of those companies because of the changes to the POCT last year. There is a huge opportunity for a UK facing exchange or bookie to profit from the most liquid pre-match betting market in any sport. To compete the commission on those events will have to be small but as the bet sizes can be huge the absolute earnings for the operator can also be substantial.
Stephen Maher: I asked this question in another one of the interviews and at the risk of repeating myself, I think it makes sense to ask you the same thing.. I obviously read a lot of the stuff on Twitter when Betfair crashed all day last Saturday and what kind of annoyed me was a lot of people were actually complaining about a lack of liquidity – as we said its OK for the most part (especially close to the off) but the point is, we had so many punters complaining yet they weren’t doing anything to provide liquidity or create competition, if Betdaq are to become stronger it has to be punter driven I think – so they just can’t sit around complaining and do nothing. What do you think about that?
Will Wilde: It’s a very interesting question. Because I place most of my bets in Asia, Betfair going down has little effect on me but the outrage on twitter in such a situation is rife, and rightly so. Because all bets remain live during an outage traders can have a huge liability for hours on something that they may have only intended to hold for seconds. Availability of funds is a huge problem for most traders as they will often house a large % of their bank with their favoured bookie / exchange so when outages occur they can often not be in a position to deposit elsewhere. It needs to be punter driven. Liquidity is the life blood of an exchange. Punters and traders want to know that once they have placed a bet pre-match that the position can be managed in-play but for that to happen the bettor has to be confident that in-play liquidity will exist.
Stephen Maher: That’s true. Certainly Betdaq can work on their Horse Racing IR liquidity, and I’ll have to ask that question to a mainly IR trader at a later date and see what the answer is! Last question then, well two questions: 1) What do you see changing, if anything, if the betting world in 2016, and 2) What are your personal goals for 2016 betting wise?
Will Wilde: IR racing liquidity will always be tough and it’s a market that I’ve never been involved in apart from complaining that my horse lost despite hitting 1.01 in running!
The betting market will continue to expand in 2016 as it gets more and more competitive for operators. Exchanges are in a great position to pick up bettors who want to A) manage their position often in-running without taking the hit of paying the vig (overround) every trade as you do with a fixed odds customers or B) get a bet on after having their stakes limited by fixed odds operators. I expect the move of liquidity away from racing and into other sports to continue and in-play betting to continue to increase its market share against pre-match
My personal betting goal in 2016 is simple. Win more money than in all of my previous betting years combined.
Stephen Maher: Good luck with that goal! Thanks again for doing this Will and good luck for 2016.
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