Written by Alex Vella

To give you a bit more insight into the performance of our users and software, every month where 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 December. 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 December, 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 December, 166,682 trades were placed, €9,727,699 was turned over and €240,442 was profited at an ROI of 2.47%. Here is how each sport performed, broken down into recommended leagues (popular/bigger leagues) and non-recommended leagues (lower/smaller leagues):

Soccer

Both October and November saw some very impressive ROI’s on Soccer, especially on recommended leagues with ROI's sitting at 5%+. But the same cannot be said for December with ROI’s of 3.1% and 2.51% from a total of 77,215 trades. Obviously there is nothing to be worried about here as most people would be happy with that kind of ROI, but hopefully we can get back to the heights of October and November in 2021. If you go back and look at our results in those months, we achieved bigger closing edges and flat ROI’s. In other words, our edge was smaller in December. Why? Could be down to a heightened fixture list and more big movements just before kick off that moved out of our favour, or it could be a number of other things. Let’s see how January goes!

Tennis

No grand slams this month, so all our data has come from every other Tennis tournament played in the world. Not the greatest sample size with 2,221 bets placed, so our negative results could be solely down to variance or most likely the inefficiencies of the Tennis market. Even though our customers were placing bets at an average edge of 5.75% and closing at 3.5%, the lack of liquidity in those smaller ITF tournaments sometimes means an edge, even if it is 5.75%, simply isn’t enough.

Basketball

An exciting month for Basketball fans with the return of the NBA. For recommended leagues, we performed negatively which I would mostly put down to variance, even though it’s a big sample of 8,278 bets. The reason why I think it's variance is because we achieved a flat ROI of 1.18%, which is a better indicator than the actual ROI of whether you have an edge or not. And we can also see we have an average closing edge of 2.8%, which is pretty healthy. For non-recommended leagues, we once again produced a huge sample with some much better results than recommended leagues (4.48% ROI).

American Football

After some iffy results in October and November, I said we would take a deeper look into our American Football performance, especially on recommended leagues. For now, I will ignore non-recommended leagues as I can see that throughout the last 3 months of 2020, our flat and actual ROI’s were comfortably in the green. So let’s take a look at our recommended leagues performance, in other words, how we went in the NFL. We will be releasing our overall 2020 performance soon but for the purpose of this I will reveal our 2020 NFL performance, which was a total of 12,790 trades, with a flat ROI of 0.6% and an actual ROI of 2.52%. So that makes our October-December results look a little better, but still, a flat ROI of 0.6% in 2020 doesn’t exactly scream that we have this huge edge in the NFL market. So overall, I think this is something we will continue to monitor, ever since the beginning of Trademate we have had an edge in American Football and been profitable, so there is no need to make any big alterations at the moment. Watch this space!

Baseball

Such a small sample size so it doesn’t warrant any attention at all. Although, it’s interesting to see how much betting into less efficient markets (outside of the MLB) will affect the relationship between the edge taken and the closing edge.

Ice Hockey

Crazy results in non-recommended leagues if you compare back to our results in October and November (which produced great ROI’s). We will keep an eye on these results in the coming months but my money would be on an extreme case of variance, even though it’s a sample of 17,689. Will be interesting to see the 2020 results also.

Rugby

Not big enough samples to make any definitive conclusions with Rugby, as with previous months, it has tended to produce some big positive and negative ROI’s, which is normal for small samples. This is another sport where it will be interesting to the overall 2020 results, as it will give a much bigger sample.

CS:GO (Esports)

You wouldn't read about it! The ever-reliant CS:GO took an unexpected hit in December. Falling from ROI’s of 10.84% & 8.42% in October & November respectively, all the way down to 1.43%. If there’s one thing I’m confident in, this will be a one-off as CS:GO has proved to be one of our highest achieving sports. But at least it still got the highest average closing edge!

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And that’s all she wrote for my latest Trademate Sports monthly results. Thank you to everyone who stuck by us when COVID shut down just about every sport and league in the world. Hopefully, things will get back to normal soon and we can continue to take money from those bookies, cheers!

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