I Made A €200 Profit During My 1 Week Trial of Trademate Sports

25 Jan, 2021

The following review was written by a Trademate Sports customer who wants to remain anonymous.

I trialled Trademate for one week in October, 2019. I chose a quiet week as it was international football break. I made a profit of over 200 Euros, but I will not be certain of the final profit until the remaining trades are settled. These are my personal and honest thoughts of the experience and the Trademate product. I was not paid to write this document, I simply wrote this to give something back for having the opportunity to trial Trademate.

MY BACKGROUND

I’m a 48-year-old Software Developer from England. I have traded betting exchanges for 10 years but I wanted to try value betting for a while. I knew about the Kelly Criterion and it made sense, but I didn’t have an edge. Therefore I decided to trial the software with a limited bankroll of around £500.

MY EXPECTATIONS

I read all the available material on the Trademate blog and I understood how the product found edges between the soft and sharp bookmakers, and the strict application of the Kelly Criterion. I further understood that variance will go away with the more trades and the turnover that comes with that.

I thought I would find all of trades, and set myself a target of 50 trades a day. I expected to be slow at booking trades since I would be unfamiliar with each bookies website. My plan was to start the trial on a Sunday afternoon.

The rationale being that I would have a decent amount of trading opportunities and then I would have the rest of the week to hone my skills and be ready to push hard on Saturday - the last day of the trial.

MY EXPERIENCE

POSITIVES:

● The Trademate interface is very clean and minimal. This may sound minor but when you compare to bookmaker websites, the minimal detail helps during the complicated task of booking some trades. The Trademate and bookmakers websites are like ying and yang.

● You don’t need to be behind your desk to use Trademate. The website is responsive so it renders well on phones and tablets. Also, push notifications to Telegram for trade alerts help too.

● The dashboard helps a lot, keeping track of trades, balances, profit and loss makes things very manageable.

● Trade details and breakdowns of My Bets was something I only found after 5 days of using the product. It was excellent to see the value and the payout.

● The Slack channel. It’s good to be able to ask questions and get careful, helpful and friendly responses.

● The Search bar. It took me a few days to notice it when I was trying to remember trades. I didn't really notice it, but it helped to filter trades by bookmaker when doing reconciliations.

NEGATIVES (NOT REALLY NEGATIVES BUT THINGS WHICH COULD BE IMPROVED):

● It would be nice to have something to show the last time a preset was updated. Even just a tooltip over the green wifi symbol to say “last scanned 6 seconds ago” or similar.

● ROI. I think a lot of potential customers will be put off by the average ROI stated on Trademate’s marketing. Potential customers should think how much can this opportunity make me instead? Like if I have turnover of X, this will lead to a profit of Y. Also, there is marketing where the ROI shows 0.7% for customers who trade 500-1000 trades. The number stands out, at the very least the webpage should explain it.)

● Not all trades have links. I understand the complexity of it (BetVictor launched a new site during my trial) but it made a huge difference. For example, if I saw an edge on Betfair Sportsbook I could book the trade in seconds as there was a link. In contrast, I could spend minutes finding an Asian handicap on Coral.

WHAT I WISH I HAD KNOWN:

● When the trades would appear. I spent Monday and Tuesday with a separate PC running Trademate, waiting for alerts. I booked only 10 trades for Monday and 10 trades for Tuesday. Here is an article that provides 6 tips on how to use Trademate has efficiently as possible including the best times to use the product, which is:

Between 10am-3pm (UK time) on Saturdays and Sundays.

Next between 6-7.45pm on Tuesday-Thursday when the Champions League and Europa League is played.

● What bookmakers to use, which would give me the most trade opportunities. I added the available bookmakers from my country.

● What filters to use. I found some around in the blog and the My Value Betting Journey from 1k to 2k videos.

● Trademate is very modern and mobile. I think this is understated and certainly a plus. Finding value trades can be viewed as time consuming but with Telegram alerts and Trademate’s great user interface it is certainly a positive which I feel you don’t market enough.

TIPS WHICH MAY HELP ANYONE ELSE THAT TRIALS

● Use a password manager. It saves time and means you can use stronger and different passwords across the bookmaker accounts.

● Use a separate bank account. I had a Monzo account, I used that for all my activity so it was completely separate from everything else. Here is an article on how to use eWallets in sports betting.

● Trademate do say to make small deposits. I did this. Obviously the variance means that it is not beneficial to deposit your starting balance across all your bookmaker accounts. I made a few deposits, enough to get maximum account opening bonuses, but small enough that I had cash reserves to deploy to whichever account needed a top up. See how our intern Alex set up his Trademate account here.

● Be very careful booking trades, especially Asian handicaps. Just make sure that both the oddstype, line and odds align.

● When quiet, spend some time looking at each bookmakers website. Edges only last a short period of time so being able to efficiently navigate a website and find the exact market will save you time.

● Always check the price. Even a very small price change compared to the alert can change an edge from positive to negative.

● Some bookmaker websites ask you to confirm the bet, always remember to do it.

CONCLUSION

● I enjoyed the trial.

● I made money.

● I spent too many hours using it, I want to focus on targeting the “10 hours” a week, that would give the best reward.

● I would recommend it, but I would give that recommendation with a warning that it’s not a get rich quick solution, it will make money if you are methodical and careful and have a reasonable starting balance, and also that soft bookmakers will eventually close your account when they discover you are winning. I’d also tell anyone I recommend that they should understand the Kelly Criterion, understand variance, be emotionally prepared for losses and focus on that green Closing EV line!

PURCHASING TRADEMATE CORE

After enjoying my trial week with Trademate Sports, I purchased Trademate Core with the big data analytics tool on Sunday the 13th of October 2019.

I’m very impressed with the analytics and I immediately found that my American Football trades had lost me £97. It was very good to get an idea of what was working and what wasn’t.

I realised Ice Hockey was a great winner for me, less so Soccer and Rugby Union. I decided to remove Baseball, Basketball and American Football from the filters and analyse them separately in the Big Data.

I observed that trades on Asian Handicaps were profitable, regardless of any other filtering parameters. Maybe luck or what, or soft bookmakers have difficulty pricing them.

I spent hours in the Big Data tool. It’s a very nice feature and I spent a lot of time studying Soccer Under/Overs markets and what filters I needed for 2-4 hours and 8 hours to the event. I found it tricky to get the standard deviation to where I wanted it to be. I did manage 4 and 4.1 a few times.

I managed to make a filter which in theory should make a positive ROI for American Football. I plan to do the same on Baseball and Basketball.

I also made a filter for Ice Hockey. I am doing very well on Ice Hockey at Unibet. I need to study this in Big Data tool to understand why.