Exchange Traders

Website: http://www.exchangetraders.co.uk

Price: From £7 p.w.

Format: Membership (trading advice)

Sports: Football

Overview

Exchange Traders offers several products for people who are interested in Betfair trading. It has everything from manuals about football, horse racing and rugby trading, to the “Traders Advantage” - trading alert service. Let’s take a closer look at the “Traders Advantage” service.

There are three subscription plans available – 7 day, quarterly and yearly. These plans start at £7 for 7 day trial, not a very expensive service to try out.

E-mail communication is great with this service – I received detailed answers to my questions within 1 hour of contacting them. It’s very un-typical to see such a fast response times with these kinds of services so it’s a definitely a huge advantage over other trading services out there.

Overall, the Exchange Trader website is nice looking, easy to navigate and you’ll receive access to the members area immediately after payment is made via Papal. At the moment, they do not offer SMS or e-mail notifications, so you’ll have to login to the member’s area every day to check for new trades.

The Service

Traders Advantage aims to help ordinary people make money from In-Play trading on football games. Almost every day there are between 1-3 recommendations, with an average of 10 trades per week. Trading opportunities are published every morning in the member’s only area.

Here’s what a typical trading opportunity looks like:

Date: 31/10/07
Time: 19.45 Hrs GMT
Fixture: Carling Cup Teams: Sheffield Utd V Arsenal
Recommendation:

“If you asked anyone except a Sheffield supporter who would win this match, you would get the same answer, despite the likelihood that Arsene Wenger will play a young side. Arsenal’s youngsters are as good as any team outside the top four, as seen in 3-1 and 6-3 victories over Liverpool last season. With Arsenal performing their socks off this season (not losing since last April), and Utd sitting down in 19th position in the Championship with their first team keeper Paddy Kenny out with injury, there is only one likely result.

We will be backing Arsenal to win and trading out once they take the lead. They are currently available at 1.75 we would be looking for over 1.85 in play if possible.”

You just basically follow their recommendations, and place a bet (or two) before game starts, and trade out after target price is achieved. Anyone with basic knowledge in Betfair trading can successfully follow these trades because they won’t see complicated formulas or staking plans. You’ll usually back or lay a team, under/over 2.5 etc.

Risk Level

If you look at this service in long term, you shouldn’t experience any long losing runs or heavy loses. This is because you’ll use only 10% or 5% from your betting bank on each trade, and in many occasions even if trade goes against you, you won’t lose your entire stake, but just part of it.

Betting Bank

Exchange Traders recommends that you use 10% of your bank on each trade. If first bet is a “Lay Bet,” you make sure that your lay bet liability is 10% of the bank, not stake itself. I would recommend that you stake only 5% from your bank on each trade. This way, it’s much safer and the risk of losing your entire bank is almost eliminated.

Results

On to the most interesting part of this review! If you take a look at the Exchange Traders website, you’ll notice that they have a “past results” section. I must say that the results are misleading in someway…Here’s the thing –

Before signing-up for this service, I noticed something interesting in the past results section. On many occasions, the recommendation and actual trading result didn’t exactly match. For example:

Recommendation:
We have our fingers crossed for a low scoring draw and feel under 2.5 is a good price at 1.95 so we will be backing under 2.5. We will be looking to trade out under 1.6 before a goal if possible.

Trading Result:
We got our back bet on at 1.91 before kick off. A very tight game as expected no goals in the first half or before we traded out. 55 min’s in we got 1.1 matched for £155 guaranteeing £53 if the game finished over and £72 if under. This is exactly what we needed to recover the previous loss giving us £59 profit for the day.

From the example above – before game they advised that you trade out at under 2.5 drops below 1.6. But what did they actually do? They stayed in until price was down to 1.1, showing much higher profit than the recommended trade would give us. And there are many of these – just take a look at past results.

I contacted Exchange Traders regarding this, and here’s their explanation:

“…We watch every match we trade on and advise our members to do so. This enables us to make informed decisions when required. Trading is a fluid process that you can’t be too scripted with. If we told all of our 350 members to trade out at the same time, there would be no money in the market. We have tried this before, and it caused massive problems, so our members decided when to trade out for themselves; with most of them using our advice as a guide.

We do offer a ‘trading alarm’ service to 50 members but there are no spaces currently….”

So basically, you won’t achieve same results as they will do (or say) unless you’re on the “Trading Alarm” service. But like they said, there are currently no spaces available…

Conclusions

Surely, 7 days are not enough for these kinds of services. I did make a small profit (about £60 from a bank of £1000) but from 8 bets, there were only 2 losing trades. I presume these numbers could be totally different if I was on a losing streak.

Overall, Exchange Traders offers a great service but the question remains: “Will you achieve the same profits as they claim on website?” I’m not that confident about this. I’ll leave it up to you…