Since August, I’ve traded 395 matches as a part of my 5K Challenge.
If you don’t know, my aim is to turn a £500 bank into £5,000 using the O2.5 and BTTS markets.
With the winter leagues now done and dusted for the next few months, I thought it would be a good time to review my trades since August and see if I can gain any kind of insight.
Before I speak about all of the different stats and the conclusions I’ve come to, I first wanted to mention the main one which I really wanted to get a greater insight on.
When is the perfect time to enter an O2.5 or BTTS trade?
If I look at the vast majority of games using the Infogol App, I can see that nearly every team has the average time of the first goal at between 25 and 35 mins. But would that be the case with my own games?
After some rudimentary maths, I worked out that after 395 trades, the average time of the first goal was……
So what can we conclude from this? I mean, stats are all well and good, but how can we use this data to improve our trading decisions and make more profits?
For me, this enforces the idea that the strategy of drip-feeding your stakes in from around 15 minutes is still the best approach when trading our O2.5/BTTS selections.
Logically, as long as there is sufficient attacking play and chances are being created, it stands to reason that in many games as the game progresses, you will be taking a better price each time you drip your stake in. This is the perfect way of taking advantage of time decay and trading with VALUE.
Then hopefully, by the time the first goal does come, you will have a sufficient amount of your stake in the markets giving you a better return. You can then cash out for an instant profit, remove all liability or use my own preferred approach and gradually drip lay out again to maximise profits.
We can never know exactly when the first goal will come, however, these kinds of insights give us the opportunity to improve our overall knowledge and ability to make informed in-play decisions which is the key to successful football trading on Beftair.
So what else did I discover when trawling through all this data?
Percentage of games with a first-half goal
Well, you know people are always banging on about how the average number of games with at least one first-half goal is 70%? Guess what? My data also backed this up.
Out of 395 games, 277 had at least one first-half goal. That is exactly 70.12%!!!
Conclusion? Once again, there are no guarantees that you will find a first-half goal, however, as long as there are sufficient chances being created, in 7 out of 10 matches, you should find a winner.
What percentage of games had a goal before 15 minutes?
My stats showed that 110 out of 395 matches had a goal in the first 15 minutes or 27.84%.
So much for the theory that the vast majority of games don’t have an early goal!
Conclusion – To be fair, I am not too bothered if I miss an early goal as most likely in the vast majority of games the O2.5 and BTTS prices would still be fairly low to back anyway.
Timing is everything in football trading and it’s only natural that you will miss goals here and there. That’s life!
What else did I find?
Percentage of Over 2. 5 and BTTS games?
The number of selections that went over 2. 5 goals and BTTS was almost identical.
Over 2.5 – 224/395 or 56.70%
BTTS – 223/395 or 56.45%
If we look at the five major leagues for 2020/21 (EPL,Serie A, Bundesliga, Ligue 1, La Liga) we have an average of 52.8% of games that went over 2.5 goals.
So my selections slightly outperformed the average.
85’+ goals are fairly common
According to my data, in the 395 games that I traded since August, 123 or 31.13% had a goal on or after 85’.
This is why it can sometimes be beneficial to trade this timeframe in-play when one of the teams is chasing the game.
In my LTD2 strategy, I use 80% of my one point stake to lay the draw and then save 20% as insurance to lay the correct score late on if my stop loss is reached around 65’. This approach has saved me quite a few times over the years.
Then there is the dreaded 0-0’s
In total, I found 25 0-0’s or just 6.32%. That’s not bad as I think the average is around 7-8%. I managed to find three on the bounce just the other week but we won’t talk about that…grrrr.
This can happen when taking a chance on these end of season games where teams don’t have much to play for or are starting to get a bit weary. (Poor things)
And finally…
The vast majority of games had at least two goals
Looking at my data, a massive 318 out of 395 games had at least two goals or 80.50%.
But how does that measure up when comparing the major leagues for 2020/21?
EPL – 73%
Italy Serie A – 83%
Spain La Liga – 73%
France Ligue 1 – 78%
Germany Bundesliga – 82%
That’s an average of 77.8% of games with over 1.5 goals.
So my selections performed a little better than the average on finding over 1.5 goals at 80.5%
CONCLUSION
So there you go, a brief insight into some stats from my 5K Challenge selections so far.
For me, the biggest takeaways were the confirmation that the perfect time to enter an O2.5/BTTS trade is around 15-20 minutes which is what I’ve advised for a long time. Dripping your stakes in is still the best approach for me.
Also, the fact that I found at least one first-half goal in 70% of my trades was also an eye-opener and correlates exactly with the data touted by football trading communities and stat websites.
Of course, you won’t necessarily lose if you don’t find a FHG as the majority of goals are still scored in the second half, however, finding one around 30 minutes is super helpful as you’ll be able to make a decision on whether to stay in the trade or not. The game will usually come to life as well which is what we want when looking for goals.
It’s important to acknowledge that pre-match data or historical stats are only a small part of the selection process. In-play analysis should always be the ultimate indicator as to whether you should enter a trade or not! Learning to read a match in-play is a key football trading skill.
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