Written by Alex Vella

To give you a bit more insight into the performance of our users and software, every month we go through our overall results, as well as taking a deeper look into our performance with each individual sport and leagues.

We are doing this with the help of our back-logged data. This is because the big data tool inside the software has a cap of 10,000 trades to speed up loading time, so for some of our sports it will not show results of every trade placed in January. There are no filters on this data, it is every trade placed no matter what the odds range, time placed, edge, etc.

Limitations

Before we get into how we performed in January, it’s important to note some of the limitations of the data we will show you:

1. For the Flat ROI calculations, stake sizing of €1 per trade is used to remove the effect of users with large bankrolls skewing the results. Also, this way we can see whether our edge is based on beating the market, rather than the Kelly criterion.
2. There is a chance that some of the bets in this data are duplicated as multiple customers could be placing the same bet. But the chances of this happening regularly are low as our user-base is quite geographically-diverse, which means they have to use different bookmakers.
3. Something else that is possible but even more rare is customers logging their own bets manually within our software. Those bets are not recommended by us, but they will still appear in this data, win, lose or void.
4. Some of the sample sizes will be very low, meaning no conclusions should be taken from those data-sets. The bigger the sample size the more accurate the data. Generally, a sample size of under 2,000 trades will include a lot more randomness and needs to be taken with a grain of salt or completely ignored.

Results & Key Findings

In the month of January, 214,707 trades were placed, €13,930,369 was turned over and €234,527 was profited at an ROI of 1.68%. Here is how each sport performed, broken down into recommended leagues (popular/bigger leagues) and non-recommended leagues (lower/smaller leagues):

Soccer

The unthinkable happened in January with recommended leagues finishing in the red. Since starting these monthly results articles, this is the first time this has happened and hopefully the last! Soccer is our bread and butter, so it’s quite a shock to see it finish with a negative ROI. At the moment, the only explanation I can think of is COVID and that the market might not be at its most efficient at the moment, considering the ridiculous schedule. I’ll put my neck on the line and say this month is just a one-off but we’ll see! On the other hand, non-recommended leagues performed nicely over nearly 50k trades. Interesting to see flat staking performing better than Kelly which is quite rare over a big sample like that. Another one-off for me.

Tennis

No grand slams this month, so all our data has come from every other Tennis tournament played in the world. As most people know by now, Tennis has never been a top performer for us, which is mostly due to the inefficiencies of the Tennis betting markets. You can see we have an edge by looking at the flat ROI results, albeit very small. So I would say, once that sample size increases a bit more, you would start to see the Kelly staking take effect and go on a good run. If the flat ROI starts to edge towards the red, that’s when it’s time to start questioning whether the edge is there or not.

Basketball

Incredible to see how many trades were placed with Basketball this month, trumping Soccer by a couple thousand bets. Both recommended and non-recommended leagues ended with a decent ROI of 3.08% & 1.76% respectively. From my own NBA betting, it is crazy to see how long bookies are taking to react to market changes, considering it’s one of the biggest sporting leagues in the world.

American Football

For those who have tracked our results in the NFL since October, you’ll probably be shocked to see the results of January. This is just a classic case of variance evening out over a large sample. After 3 months of negative flat ROI’s I started to get worried about the results of the NFL, but after looking at the whole of 2020 I was reassured that this was just a temporary blip. And I think this month’s results prove that. Yes, we are overperforming, there is no doubt about that, but this really good month evens out all the bad luck we had at the back end of 2020.

Baseball

Such a small sample size so it doesn’t warrant any attention at all.

Ice Hockey

The NHL returned in January and from my own experience, it produced a lot of trades on a daily basis. Non-recommended leagues look good as always so let’s take a deeper look into the poor performance of the NHL. In 2020, we finished with an ROI of 3.01% over 25,000 bets, and a closing edge of 4.16%. In my opinion, although 8,904 bets is a big sample, I’m going to blame this month on variance for now. COVID could be a factor as it seems to be a very congested fixture list, but I’m not knowledgeable enough about the NHL betting markets to know whether that could be true. Feel free to message us through with your thoughts and how you’ve performed through the season opening compared to previous seasons.

Rugby

Not a big enough sample to make any definitive conclusions with Rugby. Seems to be a very non-liquid market when looking at the relationship between edge taken and closing edge. But that is to be expected in a less popular sport like rugby.

CS:GO (Esports)

Another month on CS:GO where the ROI didn’t reach the normal heights of months gone by (8-10%). One thing that hasn’t changed are the big edges, so I think this might be a temporary lull. That’s if you consider a 2.64% ROI a lull! The best months on CS:GO were when the samples were around the 10k mark, so I’m thinking February will be a different story.

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And that’s all she wrote for my latest Trademate Sports monthly results. Overall, this was our worst performing month since starting these monthly articles, which was down to the Soccer and Ice Hockey results. Considering they are two sports where their fixture lists are very congested currently, there is a chance that COVID is having an effect here.

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