spread betting

Sweden win.

what rather then sell england win?

The draw is a likely result, so sell England is the best option.

Sell their performance, although obviously that is more volatile.

More volatile, or less volatile?

Think about it carefully...

Why do you want to bet on the spreads
if, as you say, you have little experience,
whereas you presumambly have exchange betting
know how ?

Well clearly the match performance has much more variance in it than simple match supremacy, are you seriously suggesting otherwise?

TMA, is your question for me ?

The mind bending nuances of spread betting :-

- "I think England will lose ...I'll sell their performance" - they duly oblige and lose 1-0...but wait.. they get 18 corners and hit the post twice!

- " I predict a tight game , defences on top - not many goals...I'll buy the time of the first goal"...a game of few chances ends 1-0...scored in the 2nd Minute.

Kenilworth, no, it was to Eradicate.

Eradicate seems to have disappeared from the thread, but I suspect I know what he was getting at.

With betting on the match outcome, or buying/selling goals or similar, your whole stake can swing one way or the other on a single event, or very few events.  Same for a match odds bet.

That is surely more volatile than a market for which the make up is likely to rely on the outcome of a lot more events within the match.

This assumes sensible staking.

That makes no sense whatsoever!

There is a very low variance in goals or supremacy make ups, + or - 6 times your stake is absolute most you are reallistically going to lose, and in the vast majority of times it will be 3 or 4.

Contrast that with the match performance, which frequently has 3 figure make ups and you can win or lose a hundred times your stake or more.

Only a complete idiot would suggest otherwise, I suspect I've been fished

Ok, so you are going to use the same stakes on a market that has a variance of 3 to 4 points as you would use on a market with a possible variance in the hundreds?

A properly staked bet result is not made volatile by the absolute number it makes up at, rather, it is made volatile by the likelihood of it giving you a greater variance between winning and losing makeups over time.

You back a team to win at 2.0, and on average, your whole stake gets wiped out 50% of the time.  And you double your stake the other 50% of the time.  You stake 1k, and over a series of ten bets, your profit/loss runs like this:

+1k, -1k, +1k, +1k, +1k, -1k, -1k, +1k, -1k, -1k

The average difference between a positive and negative result is 2k

You make a spread bet in a  market that can make up anywhere between -50 and +200 but 90% of the time it makes up between 10 and 90, risking 1k on the 10 to 90 scenario, buying 25pp at 50, your collects might run like this:

+100, -300, +400, -1600, +600, +500, +200, 0, -100, +200

The average difference between a positive and negative result is 999. 

Wouldn't you agree that makes it half as volatile, despite the one big wipeout?

I think a lot of people make the error of looking at the one or two exceptional results in these markets, and thinking this makes them volatile.  Staked properly, they are way less volatile than betting on match results in a 2 horse race.

Well with using different stakes of course you can demonstrate what you claim. But most people would define "volatility" as having a big difference between the best and worst possible outcome.

You could say that buying a teams runs in cricket at 10p each will not result in big losses or wins either way. But to say that the market is not volatile would be stupid beyond belief.

Also "Staked properly, they are way less volatile than betting on match results in a 2 horse race"

We were originally on about goal or match supremacy, which is NOT the same as 2 horse race. Presumably you would not argue that these have high volatility?

My point would be the more incremental the market, and the larger the differences in possible makeups, the less volatile it generally is to someone who approaches betting on it in, shall we say, a certain way.  (If being blunt, I would say properly.)

I know of what I speak, I really got my first big kick to my bank and stakes by spread betting, as it happens, on cricket.  What especially attracted me was that you didn't necessarily go backwards quickly when you were on the wrong side of a few in succession.  Of course, once every hundred bets or so you will get a holocaust of a wipeout, but this is more than balanced by the odd huge win if you are selecting the right bets.  But we are surely not going to claim this type of betting is by and large volatile just because you get the odd rogue result that is worse than anything you could have foreseen.  It is less volatile BECAUSE it has so many possible makeups.  You are much more likely to get a result that represents the merits of your bet than you will by betting win/loss, or win/loss/draw, or other markets where their are only a handful of results.

Sure, if you had $10 to win on an outcome at 2.0, and $10pp on innings runs, the innings runs bet is by a long way more volatile.  But what fool would stake like that?

Spread betting is only as volatile as your staking allows, so if you want to risk $1k, and you see the worst foreseeable result as being -100 points, then stake at $10pp. In that way, mostly, you will not find spread betting in these widely variable markets volatile at all compared to markets with less possible outcomes.

And to your final question TheMasked, I would say yes, goals purchases and sales do have quite high volatility.  If you wanted to risk $1k buying goal sup at 1, and you saw the worst foreseeable result as -1, you would buy $500pp.  So you have relatively massive amounts swinging on individual incidents, ie goal/not goal.  That to me is what volatility is.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind betting in markets with as few as 2 outcomes, but you either win or lose the lot every single time.  With spread betting on markets with widely varying outcomes you are constantly turning over amounts way less than your intended stake, hardly volatile stuff.

Apologies, I referred to you as The Masked,  it should have been The MaskedAggressor.