If you looking to learn how to improve your spread online betting strategies, keenly read through the following laid-down tips for success.
Spread Betting Tips
Knowing Your Market
The scope of spread betting is enormous, allowing you to bet on anything from sports to financial markets to politics to house prices. To succeed as a punter, you must therefore choose your markets carefully, preferably wagering on the market you are most comfortable with. For example, if sportsbetting is you forte, know everything there is to know about and then focus all your bets on it, rather than trying an avenue such as politics that you don’t know anything about. Besides knowing your market, strive to master the spread betting strategies and tactics of that market, as that is the only way to encourage sustainable success.
Setting a Game Plan and Realistic Targets
Just because you know the online NFL betting market doesn’t mean that any spread bet you make in it will be successful. Winners and losers in spread betting are often separated by game plans and betting strategies. It is almost impossible to develop you own plan overnight, so learn to be patient and invest plenty of time and effort into trial-and-erring your strategy until it is perfect. Once you have a solid game plan that leads to success, like let’s say betting only on odds that have points of 7-or-below, stick to it.
Still on game plans and targets, it pays greatly to safeguard yourself against emotions such as greed, fear and false hope, which can easily corrupt your focus when betting. Just like other forms of trading, it is easy for you to get carried away and make impulsive spread betting decisions. To avoid being swayed by emotionality, you can set trading targets and rules such as:
Target profit goals (per day, month, year)
Maximum losses you can take
Size of the trade at any given time
Entry/exit strategy
As you become more confident and conversant with the market, these spread betting rules can be adapted or changed to any new strategy you wish to adopt.
Stick to the KISS Principle
It is good betting practice not to complicate things in spread betting. Once you have familiarized yourself with your target markets and you know how long you intend to hold a trading position (along with a predetermined knowledge of how much you are willing to risk); go to the betting boards and simply place your bets. Avoid trying to hear what everyone out there is saying, or which mathematic formulas some statisticians are using to handicap their spread bets, as this will only confuse you.
And while you are at it, remember to start your wagers on a very small scale, especially if you are a beginner. When you use larger sums and big stake sizes, especially as a beginner, you are highly likely to make rash decisions that could cost you in a big way. Once you are comfortable with the simple trades, like betting on individual events, you can then take progressive steps into more complicated stuff, like parlays.
Buy or Pass the Extra Point?
Bookmakers usually have costs tied to bets, commonly known as juice, and these are included in the spread bets, leading to a bit of some gap between the bid price and offer price on a share that you intend to buy. And in the instances that there is a lot of public interest on a particular spread, sportsbooks can increase the spreads by half a point or even a point. If the half or extra point is affordable and worth some extra value to you as a bettor; then it is okay to buy it. However, if the extra point comes with too much risk or offers no value to you as a bettor, then simply avoid purchasing it.
Understanding and Anticipating Line Moves
Given several factors can affect spread betting lines, the Oddsmakers can move at virtually any time. In sports betting, for instance, the announcement of a key player suffering an injury can lead to big shift in the spread betting odds. Sometimes, though, line movements are ‘manufactured’ by the Linesmakers to simply throw the bettors into disarray and confuse them. As a trader, you must therefore understand how the line movements happen and be ready to adjust your bets accordingly.
Do Not Fight the Trends
Spread betting markets, whether we are talking about sports or financial markets, are heavily trend-reliant. So, when the market indicators are pointing towards a trend, feel free to ride on it, of course while you maintain your professional discretion in the process.
Don’t Rely on Tips from ‘Pundits’
Given that spread betting is multi-billion money-minting industry, the online betting market has seen a steady rise of so-called pundits, with nearly everyone claiming to have a foolproof way of handicapping spread bets. Don’t trust these blood-sucking leeches who are out to bleed you of your hard-money, unless you are looking for a fast way to go broke. Listening to professional advice from trusted sources is okay, but when all is said and done, learn to trust more in your own judgments.
Keep Informed and Up-to-Date
Whether or not you’ve traded for tens of years and you think you have found the Holy Grail of spread betting success, it is advisable to cultivate a strict culture of constant learning and re-learning. Spread betting, just like other forms of betting, is a continually changing environment that calls for you to make use of all the resources available around you to maximize your understanding of its dynamically shifting markets.
Learn from your spread betting mistakes
Over the course of your betting, right from the moment you start as beginner, you should have a monitor and evaluation system that is able to track your progress in the spread-betting strategies. And if you find that there are certain mistakes that inhibit you from achieving your full potential, learn from them and strive to correct them, rather than repeat them at the costly expense of your time and resources.
