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Social Trading 2016 Review

28th October 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Social Trading 2016

Looking back to last year, I knew nothing about Social Trading and even though I’ve got a good understanding of investments and have dabbled in the stock market before, Trading in general and Social Trading were a completely new thing to me.

I’d read both amazing reports of how people had made money without having to do much at all as well as articles describing how it’s impossible to make any money at all from Social or Copy Trading due to the way the platforms are set up, so the only way to get an answer to this was to try it myself.

For those of you who have never heard of Social Trading or Copy Trading before, this is a relatively new phenomenon, where instead of investing in the stock market, currencies or commodities directly, you invest money in a trader and copy a relative percentage all of the trades that they make.

This means that you are effectively trusting in the knowledge of the trader and invest in their strategies rather than doing this yourself.

There are no fees to do this, apart from the small percentage of each trade that the platforms will take.

3 Things I Learned About Social Trading in 2016

Spend Time to Research your Traders

eToro Stocktrader

There are many different platforms out there, each with thousands of different traders for you to choose from, so how do you know which one to invest your money in?

Personally I opted for eToro as it’s a fairly easy system to understand for the beginner and has a simple to use interface.

I also received a $1000 bonus for signing up with these guys when I invested $2500.

Each trader on the eToro platform has a profile, which gives you different metrics about their performance, what they invest in, the amount of assets they are managing, the maximum they’ve lost in a single day, their trading history since they’ve been on the platform and most importantly, a risk level, which is a metric that eToro generates to determine the traders appetite for risk.

My advice is to set up a virtual account to start with, choose a number of traders to follow with virtual money for a few months and only when you find a trading profile and risk level that you are happy with should you jump in and invest in them.

If possible try to interact with the trader themselves to see how rational they are, after all they’re going to be in charge of your money.

Create a Balanced Portfolio

eToro Traders Portfolio

It’s easy to get tempted and stick all of your money on a trader who’s seen massive profits over the last month or even 3 months, however, BE CAREFUL.

I have found that traders who bring home incredible returns for a few months are the same guys who will blow up their account and bankrupt themselves. The reason for this is their attitude to risk.

They’ll often have a high leverage and will risk a large portion of their account on single trades, which can either make them a killing, or ruin their account.If you’re going to invest I would suggest that you split your money out across a minimum of 5 traders, who have varied profiles.

By this I mean are split across:

• Their risk level – In eToro I would invest in anyone with a risk level over 7

• What they invest in – Split between commodities, forex and stocks

• The size of assets they manage

• The maximum drawdown level

• Whether they are a short term day trader or more of a longer term investor

Avoid The Most Popular Profitable Traders

If you base your investment decision solely on the basis of who is making the most profit, then you’d be crazy.

However, a lot of people will do this and see traders who are showing wild profits of hundreds, if not thousands of percent of profit.

Most people will see this, their big, fat, greedy eyes will light up and without thinking about it much will invest their money.

What happens next?

You guessed it, sooner, rather than later the trader is going to take one too many risks and their account (and therefore your investment) will become worthless.It’s strange because often these guys will have a lot of copiers as well, so a lot of people will be affected when these accounts are blown up.

The key lesson here, is learning to manage your appetite to risk.

What Did I Achieve?

I feel that I’ve got a good understanding of how Social Trading works now, particularly on eToro and I managed to make a bit of money from this.

It was interesting researching into the various traders, trying to understand their strategies and it was always a bit of a thrill when I logged into my account to see how much money I was making or losing.

Low Light of the Year

I’d been following Mister G who writes a blog about Social Trading and seemed to have a good knowledge of what he was doing, was quite responsive and cared about steady, long term growth, which is what I was looking for.

For some reason as soon as I invested in January he seemed to go a little crazy and was taking bigger risks with his investments.

This meant that in Jan he lost 20% and Feb 15%.I can accept this but this was different to his risk profile and what irked me most is that for someone who was very responsive in the community previously, after he lost a lot of his own and other people’s money, he went pretty quiet and didn’t respond to questions around his investment strategy.

Luckily I only invested $350 in him and ended up losing about $60 of that.

How Much Time Did I spend?

The good thing about Social or Copy trading is that once you’ve done your research you don’t need to invest too much time into this.

Whilst it’s definitely good to keep an eye on the traders that you’ve selected, I wouldn’t recommend switching around too often, as if you’ve picked a good trader they will have a strategy that lasts a few months rather than trying to make a quick buck.

This means that you might need to suffer a bit of a loss in some cases before you can make a gain, so just be patient.It’s also a good idea to have a watch list and look for other traders who you could potentially invest in, in the future.

Overall you don’t need to sink a lot of time into this, which is a massive benefit.

How much Money Did I make?

Well, to be honest I’m not so sure about this at the moment.

I invested a total of $2500, from which I got a $1000 bonus.In my account at the moment I have a total of $3541 equity.

I’m not sure if I can withdraw the full amount so at a bare minimum I guess that I’ve made a whopping total of $40

Was it Worth The Effort?

Well, the good thing is that there is not too much effort that you need to put into this, however, there is a certain amount of risk that you are playing with.

Most of the traders that I invested in were fairly low risk, hence my reward being fairly low as well.

To be honest, apart from doing some of the research, and not having too risky a portfolio, this does feel a bit like gambling to me.

I don’t think there is a massive amount of skill involved at this level and you are kind of pinning a tail on a donkey, but it’s a bit of fun.​

Filed Under: Social Trading Tagged With: etoro

Chapter 6 : A Year in Matched Betting

23rd October 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Matched Betting 2016

I’ve always been a big sports fan and have partaken in the occasional punt on a horse, but only recently came across Matched Betting.

Like I said in my first article last year I have no interest in gambling but I had seen reports of people earning £1000+ a month from Matched Betting without putting in too much effort, so I was more than tempted to look into this.

The basic principle is that you place a bet at one Bookmakers that an event will happen, then you place a bet at a betting exchange that the event won’t happen.

Whatever happens in the event means that you will make a small loss, however, the trick is that in a lot of cases you will be given a refund by the bookmaker if that event doesn’t happen.

Examples would be:

• If the game ends 0 – 0

• If the horse finishes 2nd

• If there is a red card

On top of this there are over 40 bookmakers who will give you free bets when you open an account with them.

3 Things I learned About Matched Betting in 2016

Start Slowly and Learn the Basics

The concept of matched betting may take you a while to get your head around to start with, however, there is plenty of useful information available and as long as you pace yourself then you should be ok.

As I said in my recent article I think there are roughly 5 stages to matched betting:

• Stage 1 – Signing up to the bonus offers

• Stage 2 – Playing the account reloads and daily offers

• Stage 3 – Laying off bets in an accumulator

• Stage 4 – Expanding out into other sports eg Horse Racing

• Stage 5 – Moving into trading / arbitrageTo start with I would recommend having a maximum of 2 offers that you are trying to complete open at the same time, otherwise it gets too complicated for the newbie.

Take on the easy offers first and use a service like Oddsmonkey where they give you step by step guides to the offers.

Spend a couple of months at least, going through these offers and then you can start to try out the reloads, when you have a good understanding of what you’re doing.

OddsMonkey

Try to Act Like a Regular Punter

Bookmakers

Photo by tvol / CC BY

The most important thing for a matched bettor is keeping your accounts open so you can continue to take advantage of the reload offers.

As soon as you start to win a lot or exhibit strange betting patterns, then for sure your accounts will be restricted.

Unfortunately, the bookies are clever folks and with the help of their spying software (which is tracking everything you do) they have a pretty clear picture of what kind of customer you are.

The typical pattern that they will look out for is:

• A customer who only ever bets when there is an offer available

• A customer who places a bet at low odds to qualify for an offer and

• A customer who places a bet at high odds when using their free bet

Remember, bookies don’t like to lose money!!!

There is no exact science to it and you are still going to lose accounts at some point but you can help minimise the chance by:

• Not playing every offer

• Adding stakes above the maximum that you’d get back on a free bet for an offer

• Not taking the best match available

• Placing random bets not associated with free offers – Now you can use something like the Eachway matcher to make this profitbale

Never Bet When You’re in a Rush

Most of the mistakes that I have made over the past year have happened when I’ve either been in a rush or in a scenario that was not relaxed or where I couldn’t focus.

Examples would be:

• When a deadline was approaching eg the start of a race or kick off time

• When I was not in front of my PC, so mainly trying to place bets on the move on an Iphone

• When I was with friends of when someone was waiting for me to go out

• When I was on a lunch break at work

In all of these situations you can’t fully focus on what you are doing and try to rush, which will lead to mistakes.

You’ll either back the wrong horse, add the wrong stakes, or completely forget to lay a bet, so whatever you do, make sure you’re in a stress free environment to place your bets.

What Did I achieve?

After a year I would now class myself as a fairly experienced matched bettor, who understands most of what they are doing and have played out all the different offer types.

I’ve now tried to refine my time to only partaking in offers that are worth my while with either guaranteed profit, or a good chance of making a return.

Previously I would end up spending hours going through all the different offers and only making a few pounds profit here and there.I’ve managed to make a decent enough profit and still have some of the major accounts left open, although not as many as I would like.

Low Light of the Year

There are few lowlights that come to mind including the multiple gubbings on some nice accounts, which always hurt and missing the Bet365 Grand National offer as I read the rules incorrectly, but the lowlight has got to be a mixup with Smarkets that cost me a few hundred pounds.

For some reason when I tried to lay a horse in the Smarkets exchange it got the lay odds completely wrong.

I’m not sure how this happened; it was either a data entry error or a glitch in the system but instead of laying at odds of 8, it went up to 80 and of course this was snapped up in the exchange.

At one point I stood to lose £1500 but thanks to people in the Matched Betting Forums, I managed to minimise the loss down to about £300, but it was extremely stressful!!!

Highlight of the Year

Getting into horse racing and the racing festivals such as Cheltenham was fun, even though it was really stressful at the time, but the highlight for me has to be the discovery of the Eachway Matcher and playing the Extra Place Races.

The good thing about the Eachway matcher is that you can use this with gubbed accounts and can make a tidy profit.

I used this a couple of times recently to pick up £200 profit on a couple of extra place races where my horse came in fifth which was a real buzz!

How much Time Did I spend?

So, this is the big thing for me. I think because I kind of enjoyed it and also because you can see immediate gains from your actions, I ended up spending hours and hours sorting through offers and looking for close matches.

In fact, I think because of matched betting, I was able to spend less time on the other activities that I wanted to pursue such as the websites.

However, I’ve learned that you can limit this and you really should do if you want to have any kind of life left!!!

How much Money Did I make?

Money

I started making detailed accounts of every transaction that I made to start with, however, in the end this was taking too much time so I just run a spreadsheet, which has details of:

  • Withdrawals
  • Deposits
  • Balance

From this I can tell that I’ve probably made about:

£3500 tax free profit

from matched betting during the course of the year, which isn’t too bad.

Was It Worth the Effort?

This one is really difficult to say. Overall I have enjoyed the thrill of matched betting and making money out of nothing, however, at times this can be really stressful and also quite addictive.

There is no gambling involved however, there is something quite addictive about making small wins all the time.

I think I’ve spent too much time doing this over the year to justify continually doing this, so I’m going to limit this to a few hours a week moving forward.

I’ve also lost a lot of my accounts so am getting limited on which offers I can play at the moment.

Also, it seems like matched betting is becoming a lot more popular so the bookies are not putting so many decent offers out there like they used to do.

I think in general the best days of matched betting are over, but there is still some money to be made from it.

Filed Under: Matched Betting Tagged With: Matched Betting Dream

eBay Drop Shipping with No Inventory

19th September 2016 By martinos74 10 Comments

I haven’t made many updates to the site recently as I’ve been focusing mainly on my latest make money online scheme… eBay dropshipping. EBay whatshipping I hear you say, well let me explain!

If you’ve never heard of dropshipping before, then simply explained the following happens:

  1. You advertise a product somewhere
  2. Someone buys the product from you
  3. You buy a product from a manufacturer
  4. They send the product directly to your buyer

Simply put, you make money by charging more for the product than the manufacturer sells it to you.

Basically you are just acting as one massive middleman, who passes the product from the buyer to the seller.

You’ll find examples of dropshipping everywhere from niche websites, to Amazon and EBay and strangely enough some of the large high street stores are actually just big dropshipping agents.

Yes, that’s right, if you buy from some of the UK’s major retailers, you’ll find that their products are bought and shipped directly from a third party…. That’s dropshipping.

David Vu Dropshipping Course

In most cases dropshipping will involve building up a relationship with a dropshipping supplier, however, there is actually a much simpler way to do this, which I learned about on David Vu’s course: eBay Drop Shipping with No Inventory Guide

The approach that is taught to you on this course, is that you don’t need necessarily to bother with a dropshipping supplier, and instead you can just sell products from any online retailer.

That’s right you can simply go to a major retailer like Argos, or Walmart in the States and resell their products on EBay, and if you add a decent enough markup, you’re going to make some money!

David Wu’s model is quite simple:

  1. You list a product on EBay with a mark up of 40% on top of the retail price
  2. ​You optimise your product titles so you can attract as many people as possible
  3. ​You sell a product, deduct 10% EBay fees and 3% Paypal fees
  4. You get to keep the remaining cash

Ok, so the reality is that the products that you are selling are going to be a lot more expensive than the same product listed either directly at the source, other websites and even other EBay sellers, so you’re probably thinking why on earth would someone buy your more expensive product?

Well there are a couple of reasons really:

1 – People are stupid and lazy – Most people will only buy a product from the first 5 listings that they see on EBay, so if you have good feedback and well optimised titles then there is a good chance you’ll be in this top 5. People who come to EBay are still under the mindset that they are getting a bargain, so won’t always check other sources online before purchasing on EBay.

2 – Reach – If you use the full 80 characters available in your product title field and optimise your title, then you will reach a lot more people than other listings for the same product might reach, which could mean you would appear as the only listing for certain search terms. For example the following title [insert example] would reach a lot more people than this one [example]

3 – EBay’s Global Shipping Programme – This is something that EBay recently introduced and most EBay sellers do not take advantage of yet. If you click a checkbox to sell via the Global Shipping Programme this means that your product will also be listed on other EBay sites around the world and you will be listed as an International Seller. You would have seen examples of this on listings before where it would say ‘Shipped from China’ for example. The good thing about this is that all you have to do is pay the postage to the UK EBay distribution centre, and they will pay the rest of the charges around the world.

Dropshipping Shops

Well, in truth a lot of the retailers aren’t so happy for you to resell their products and a lot of them will cancel your order if you send it to the Global Shipping Programme address.

I find this a bit bizarre really, because you are giving their product free promotion and sending sales to their websites, so why on earth would you try to limit this?

I guess the reason is that they still want to retain a certain amount of control over their pricing policies so aren’t so keen with this practice.

In the past I’ve used Argos, John Lewis and Homebase without a problem

However, if you do a bit more digging there are plenty of other suppliers out there who will be willing to ship your products.

There’s nothing illegal about this practice, but you want to make sure your supplier doesn’t mind you selling their products, otherwise you might be stuck in a situation where someone buys a product from you and you can’t fulfil their order.

eBay Sales

I’ve only be doing this for about 3 months now but I can say that it does actually work.

The graphic is from my actual account and so far I’ve sold over 30 products in the last 2 months. If you take out eBay and Paypal fees you’ll probably make about 20% of the sale price.

The beauty of this money making tactic is, that the more products you list, the more you’re likely to sell, so you just need to beef up your store with as many listings as possible.

Realistically I think you need to have about 1500 products in your store to be able to make £1k a month from this business model.

The idea is then that after you get to a certain threshold you can then keep scaling up and pay a Virtual Assistant to do a lot of the mundane chores such as listing products, fulfilling orders and even providing customer service.

2018 Update: I currently have about 4000 products in my store and am making about £500 a month profit after I take out expenses. This isn’t a huge amount, however, I invest very little time in this at the moment. I have a team of listers who add the products for me and all I day is deal with customer service and managing the orders.

Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet to success and like any other way of making money online, you’re going to need to put in the hours.

Once you’ve chosen the product to add, it typically takes about 10 minutes to add a new product listing to eBay and to correctly format the titles and source the images.

On top of this you’ll also be spending time on the following:

  • Buying the actual product (10 mins per sale)
  • Uploading tracking numbers and comms with the buyer (10 mins per sale)
  • Answering customer service and product enquiries
  • Managing stock levels (Yes, even though you’re not stocking any products you need to ensure that the retailers don’t run out of stock, otherwise you’ll be left with no product to ship)

This all sounds great so far, but there are a number of things that aren’t so great when you get involved in this:

  • If you don’t have an old eBay account and need to set up a new one, then you are initially limited to listing only 10 products. You can contact eBay to increase this limit after one month, and then every following month you’ll need to contact them again, which is a minor irritant
  • It takes a long time and is a really laborious task to source products, copy their pictures, add all the product details and optimise your listings titles
  • Trying to monitor stock levels is a major pain and you’ll often find that you’re supplier is out of stock, which can leave you having to source the product from a more expensive alternative or a less reliable source, which could risk your reputation
  • Once you start building up your eBay dropshipping empire, you’ll quickly realise that this is going to tie you down too. One of the key metrics that eBay uses to give your seller rating is whether you ship your products out within your specified timescales and how quickly you can add tracking numbers. Basically this means that you need to be able to get access to the internet at least once per day, or risk running behind on orders and affect your ratings.

Overall, out of everything I have been looking into this year, I really would recommend this way to make money online for a number of reasons:

  • You’ll be able to make your first sale really quickly, which is really motivating to see how you can make money out of nothing really easily
  • You won’t need to fork out loads of capital to buy stock, as you only buy something when an order comes in
  • You get to learn how eBay works and also which products will sell well, which can be an essential education for other money making strategies
  • It has potential to become fully automated once you build the business up to a certain level and can be generating the ultimate goal of passive income.

The best thing about this is that you can get started in next to no time and it won’t cost you anything, so what are you waiting for? 

Give it a go and let me know how you got on!!!​

Read more about David Wu’s Course

Filed Under: blog, Dropshipping Tagged With: ebay Dropshipping

Matched Betting Calculator : 6 of the Best Calculators

21st July 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Matched Betting Calculator

Unless you’re a maths genius then you’re going to need a matched betting calculator whether you are a novice or a pro, to help you figure out your lay stakes, profits and potential under or overlays.

There are a variety of calculators out there ranging from the basic calculators to help you calculate your standard qualifying bets and free bet lays, up until the more advanced matched betting calculators, which cover more advanced techniques like underlaying and ditching.

I’ve picked the best calculator to use for each of the different stages in your matched betting career:

Quick NavigationBest Matched Betting Calculator for Complete NovicesBest Beginners Matched Betting CalculatorBest Basic Matched Betting CalculatorBest Intermediate Matched Betting CalculatorBest Advanced Matched Betting Calculator

Best Matched Betting Calculator for Complete Novices

Well, it sounds like hard news for you, but if you’re just starting out I would completely recommend that you make your own calculator! This isn’t Blue Peter, but if you’re getting into matched betting then understanding how to make a spreadsheet and understanding the underlying mathematics involved in matched betting is essential.

Creation your own matched betting calculator will really help you in the long run. It might hurt your head a little bit to start with, but trust me, once you’ve run through the steps and figured out the maths behind this,it will really pay dividends.

And as if by magic, here’s one I prepared earlier to show you the kind of thing I’m talking about: Sample Matched Betting Calculations

Best Beginners Matched Betting Calculator

You’ll find that pretty much every matched betting service offers a basic free calculator of some sort, and they’re all based on the same underlying calculations, so a lot of this is really finding the calculator that is right for you.

After all you’re going to be using this calculator time after time, so you want to find something that is easy to use.

Save the Student

http://www.savethestudent.org/matched-betting-calculator

I personally started off by using the calculator at Save the Student, as this is really easy to understand what’s happening: Initially if you choose the easy sign up offers it will pull through the different matches available without you needing to go to any odds matching software and this then gives you step by step instructions of where to go and what bets to place:

Matched Betting Calculator Save The Student

Matched Betting Calculator Save The Student

Once you’ve done the basic offers you’ll need to migrate to finding these matches yourself, but they also have a pretty decent basic matched betting calculator that you can use for qualifying bets and free bets:

Matched Betting Calculator Save The Student Automatcher

Matched Betting Calculator Save The Student Automatcher

Best Basic Matched Betting Calculator

Matched Betting Blog

http://matchedbettingblog.com/matched-betting-calculator/

A tiny bit more complex to use but one of my personal favourites due to its simplicity and the fact that it updates without having to click calculate is found on the Matched Betting Blog.

As you can see in the screenshot below, this has 3 modes:

  • Qualifying Bet
  • Free Bet – Either Stake returned or Stake not returned
  • Risk Free Bet – Which comes in useful for some offers like Bet365’s 4/1 horse racing offer, where you get a risk free bet on the next race if your horse wins the race

Matched Betting Blog Calculator

Matched Betting Blog Calculator

Best Intermediate Matched Betting Calculator

ODDSMONKEY CALCULATOR

http://www.oddsmonkey.com/oddssearch.aspx

You’ll see this calculator in a lot of places as it’s built by Oddsmonkey, who you now need to create an account with to use. At the time of writing you can still access the free version on Mbassist site: http://mbassist.co.uk/calculator.aspx

This calculator has 2 modes:

Simple Mode

You can add your normal, free bet (stake returned) and free bet (stake not returned):

Mbassist Matched Betting Calculator Normal

Mbassist Matched Betting Calculator Normal

Advanced

As you can see from the screenshot we now have a few more options to this calculator:

  • Underlay – This is where you don’t put the full value of the lay into the exchange
  • Overlay – This is where you put more than the full value of the lay into the exchange
  • Custom slider – This helps you adjust your lay stake to a custom value

Mbassist Matched Betting Calculator Advanced Mode

Mbassist Matched Betting Calculator Advanced Mode

As you can see from the screenshot, adjusting these values dramatically changes the potential wins at the bookies or exchanges and is a common tactic used by more advanced matched betors to help with things like reducing qualifying losses.

Best Advanced Matched Betting Calculator

Trickybet

http://www.trickybet.net/lay-calculator

Moving up another notch in complexity is the Trickybet Matched betting calculator, which has a handy odds converter, a standard basic calculator and both a Dutch 2 way and Dutch 3 way option.

I also really like the advanced Lay calculator and the extra options that it provides:

Trickybet Matched Betting Calculator

Trickybet Matched Betting Calculator

You have the under / overlay options but on top of this if you have a bet that has only been partially matched, and are having a mental meltdown about what to do next, you can use the ‘Part lays already in place’ fields to determine what your lay bet should be.

This can be priceless if an event is starting shortly and you haven’t managed to get a full match.

​SUMMARY

Let us know which is your favourite calculator to use and if there is any calculator we’ve missed!​

Filed Under: Matched Betting

Accumulator Generator Review

8th June 2016 By martinos74 2 Comments

Accumulator Generator Revie

I recently purchased the Accumulator Generator software, which is the latest in a range of products from Betting / Software whizz Mike Cruickshank.

I did this mainly due to the lack of good offers around in the Matched betting world at the moment and this looked like a decent way to add a few more pounds into the piggy bank, so here’s what I found:

What is Accumulator Generator?

Accumulator Generator is basically a piece of software that scans a wide range of bookies that are out there and provides a selection of pre-selected Football accumulators that will help you make the most out of the bookmakers offers.

In general, bookmakers love footy accas, as they are a big, steady source of income for them and the odds are stacked even more in their favour than with a standard bet. Pretty much every bookmaker is now offering some kind of ‘Acca Insurance’, to draw the average punter in.

Most of the terms of these Acca Insurance offers are that if you lose a single leg of your Acca, then you are eligible for a refund.For the normal punter that is a great bonus, but for the seasoned matched bettor, this shouts ‘OPPORTUNITY’ and the Accumulator Generator makes the most out of this, by providing an easy to use interface and a series of straight talking training videos that will get you up and running in no time.

How Much can You Earn from Accumulator Generator?

Well, to be honest that is entirely up to you and how much time and effort you want to put in and also how much you want to risk your accounts from getting referred to the traders.

Realistically though, you’re looking at earning on average £10 from every £50 staked, which is a pretty decent return.

Most of the bookies limit you to having a maximum of a single acca finishing each day, but even if you just placed a single acca each day, that’s a return of over £300 a month, which isn’t to be sniffed at.

What’s Included in Accumulator Generator?

Accumulator Generator Training Videos

The software itself as actually pretty easy to use, but to help you get started Mike has provided a series of training videos, which take you all the way through the basic principles of what a Football Accumulator is, to detailed descriptions of the 5 different strategies that you can employ.

I found these videos really useful, not only in helping me understand how to use the software, but Mike often goes into detail explaining the logic and maths behind the software, which is a nice touch.

Accumulator Generator Training

The Accumulator Generator Acca Matcher

The centre piece of the software is the Acca Matcher screen, which you can see in the screenshot below:

Accumulator Generator Acca Matcher

As you can see from the screenshot, the Accumulator Generator software throws up a large number of potential Accas that you could use, searching over 50,000 potential accas combinations per bookmaker and providing you with the most profitable selection.

The software usually throws up pages and pages of accas which range in value usually up to a maximum of about £15.For each potential accumulator, the software provides the following key information:

• The ‘EV’ or Estimated Value column shows the returns you should expect to receive when you complete the Acca, if you had placed a £50 stake.

• Length of the Acca, which is really useful to know in case you’re not likely to be around for a few days

• Teams – Which matches are included in the Acca

• Total Back / Lay Odds

And to help you sift through all of those footy accas to find the one most suitable for you, there is a handy filter tool that you can use:

Accumulator Generator Acca Filter

The Accumulator Details Screen

Once you have found an Acca that you are interested in you can click through to the Accumulator Details screen shown below:

Accumulator Generator Acca Details Screen

This is another key screen that you are going to be using at the following times:

Creating Your Acca

This screen shows you the details and timings of each individual leg of the Acca as well as the individual back odds for each leg, that you will need to place at the bookmaker.It also gives you some useful statistics about the likelihood of losing a certain number of legs in each acca.

Updating Your Acca

As soon as a leg of the accumulator has completed, you’ll need to come back to this screen and add whether the leg has won or lost, and then hit the ‘Save Acca’ button.This will then update the ideal stake that you should add as a lay stake.

Sometimes the lay stakes will fluctuate, so you can manually override them on this screen and this will recalculate the ideal stake to lay for you. This is a great feature and makes it really easy to use.

Footy Acca Leg Reminders

One key thing for you to remember if you’re using this software, is to lay each of the legs of the Acca before the game commences otherwise, you’re likely to ruin your acca.

Luckily Mike and the team have already thought about this and have provided a ‘Reminders’ section, which provides you with a list of the timings and games that you will need to lay off next for each acca.

This automatically updates when you input the result of the previous leg in the Acca details section.

Accumulator Generator Bet Finder Feature

The final feature worth mentioning in the software is the bet finder, which helps you find bets with close matches across all of the different bookies.

This is a killer feature which you can use to:

• Help you gain maximum profit from your free bets and go under the bookies radar

• Place Mug bets on decent Acca bets

• Find a comprehensive list of other offers from bookmakers

Accumulator Generator Bet Finder

Just check out this video from Mike, as he walks you through each of these features in person on the Accumulator Generator:

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Accumulator Generator Strategies Explained

There are a number of different ways in which you can use the Accumulator Generator software, depending on your attitude to risk and the time you have available.

You’ll get detailed instructions about each of these strategies in the training videos, but we’ve pulled out the key points from each strategy below:

Back, Lay and Hope

With this system you place you accumulator at the bookies and lay off each leg one by one. You are hoping that only one of your legs loses so you can hit the refund from the bookmakers.

If all of the legs in the accumulator win, then you make a small loss

If more than one of the legs loses, then you make a small loss

If you only one of the legs loses then you receive the refund from the bookies

This is a low risk, easy to follow approach that a lot of beginners will use, and means you need to lay each leg one after another

Bonus Included

With this method you will make a profit whatever the outcome, however, the further down the accumulator you get before you lose a leg, the more profit you will make. If you lose a leg at the start of the Acca then you just won’t make as much profit.

With this technique, you just keep on laying the bets until you lose 2 legs

Lock In Profit

This technique is fairly similar to the previous technique, however, you are pretty much guaranteed to make the EV of the Acca each time.

This technique means you are less open to any fluctuation in the lay odds and guarantee the profit, regardless of what happens.

Again, with this technique you keep on laying the bet until you lose 2 legs of the Acca

Advantage Play

This is a completely different approach for those of you, who don’t have the time to lay off your bets and also don’t mind taking a bit of a gamble.In this approach you don’t lay off any of the bets, but use the special ‘Advantage Play’ filter to find your accas.

These will usually be accas made up of of legs with low odds so you are a lot more likely to win the acca or the refund. The software selects the best possible odds combos from a bookmaker, which effectively removes the bookmakers edge and gives the advantage back to the punter.

They advise that this isn’t recommended for users, who haven’t been betting for long, probably because you could go for long runs without hitting a refund.

The overall recommendation is that you need to put on about 100 accas to see if this approach works for you.

Lay All Method

Most of the other acca methods require you to lay off the accas sequentially, so you can’t have more than one game in your acca taking place at the same time. This can, of course, prove to be quite time consuming and a bit of a pain.

The Lay All method, however, is different as it selects Accas where you can place all of your bets up front, without having to worry about remembering to lay them at specific times.This is the easiest approach, but there don’t seem to be as many candidates of accas in this category.

How much does Accumulator Generator Cost?

So what’s the price for this package of money spinning fun?

At the time of writing the cost is £148.99 + VAT, or you can sign up to a £1 trial for 14 days

Try it Now!lorem ipsum dolor

Is Accumulator Generator Worth the Money?

My honest opinion is yes, this is definitely worth the money and you will more than make the £150 one off cost for the software back pretty quickly, however, this may not be for everyone for the following couple of reasons:

You Need Good Availability

Although the accumulator generator software gives you all the tools and information that you need, for most of the strategies that we’ve talked about, you’re going to need to be near to an internet connection and computer to lay off your bets at specific times, ie when the leg has finished.

If you’ve got a lot of time on your hands then this will be fine for you, or you can just use the Advantage Play or Lay All Techniques

You Have an Increased Risk of Gubbing

So logically, if there are thousands of people who have signed up to this software already, then that means there is going to be a lot of people who are betting on the same accas that the Acca matcher throws up.

From a bookies perspective any flurries in activity or any suspicious betting activity/patterns gets flagged up pretty quickly in their systems. Remember, these guys are recording pretty much everything you and others are doing so patterns become clear quite quickly.

If you overuse this software, and go for the highest EV accas all the time at the highest stakes, then I’m afraid, you’re risking your account at some stage. BUT, by being a little more cautious with your approach you should blend in more easily and shouldn’t have any problems.

My Recommendations

• Don’t abuse the system and don’t hammer all of the offers

• Mix your accas up across different bookies

• Don’t always take the highest EV accas

• Don’t always place bets at the maximum stake

• Try to stick to matches that are in the more popular leagues rather than betting on Albania vs Kurdistan

If you’re in any doubt about this then just sign up for the 14 day trial and it will only cost you a quid. This is what I did and was plenty of time for you to get used to the Accumulator Generator software and figure out if it is right for you.

For a fuller review of the software, check out this video from our friends at Matched Betting 101

ACCUMULATOR GENERATOR IN Summary

Price:    £149 one off fee or 14 day trial for £1

Value For Money:

Ease of Use:

Like I say if you’re in any doubt, just throw a pound at this and sign up for the 14 day trial then you can make your own mind up.

Try it Now!

Filed Under: Matched Betting Tagged With: accumulators

Chapter 5 : Footy Accas and Sports Arbitrage

21st May 2016 By martinos74 4 Comments

Matched Betting Dream Footy Accas

Could footy accas be the solution to a dry month of matched betting?

Well, after completing a lot of the sign up offers and also being gubbed from a few bookies, I’ve noticed 2 main things recently from reading a lot of the matched betting communities out there:

  1. There are a heck of a lot of gubbings going on
  2. There are very few decent offers around at the moment

A lot of people have put this down to a post-Cheltenham clear-out, but a lot of people are also saying that matched betting is dead and is nothing like it used to be. To be honest I’m finding it all a bit more time consuming than I would have hoped, and even though there is money to be made out there, you still need to put a lot of hours in.

Claims of people making £500 – £1000 per month, are now looking to look at little exaggerated to me, unless of course, you are spending hours in front of your computer trying to squeeze every penny out of every offer available.

With this in mind, this month I thought I’d take a look at a couple of other options where people have been claiming big winnings as well:

  1. Accumulator Generator
  2. Sports Betting Arbitrage

Accumulator Generator

Accumulator Generator

If you don’t know, the basic concept of an Accumulator or footy acca as it is commonly known, is that you place a bet on a series of events happening, and if they all win, then you receive a multiple of all of the odds combined and usually make a big profit if it comes off.

However, if any of the legs of your accumulator loses, then you lose all of the bet. Typically footy accas are anywhere between 3 to 6 legs (matches), and obviously the more legs there are the more you can win, and the easier it is to lose.

Most bookmakers now offer something called ‘Acca Insurance’, which means that if one of your legs loses, you would be entitled to a refund of your initial stake, which is where a matched bettors radar starts flashing!!!

Paddy Power Acca InsuranceWilliam Hill Acca Insurance

Bookies love Accumulators, because they always have an edge over the punter and most of the time the bet will end up losing. Basically, the table is weighted even more in the bookies favour for Accumulators than on single bets.

However, Accumulator Generator is a bit of software that scans the different bookmaker’s offers out there and provides a combination of matches, where you are likely to make a profit, by taking advantage of the Acca Insurance refunds.

In the screenshot below, you can see a list of all of the footy Accas that were available on a certain date, and in the ‘EV’ column you can see the estimated value of the Acca. This shows you how much you would make from placing a £50 bet on the Acca, but generally you’re looking at a £10 return for every £50 spent.

Accumulator Generator Acca Matcher

The idea is pretty simple… put an Acca on with the bookmaker, then just lay off each of the legs of your bet after each match finishes.

There is a screen in Acccumulator Generator dedicated to each Acca that you put on, as you can see below, and the system is also clever enough to give you reminders of when you need to put your next bet on.

Accumulator Generator Acca Details Screen

After each match finishes, you put in the result, and then add in the lay odds of the next leg in the sequence and the Accumulator Generator software will automatically provide you with the lay stake required.

There are a number of different tactics that you can use but the easiest is back, lay and hope technique. This is where you put the selection on at the bookies, then you lay one match at a time, and stop laying as soon as you have lost one match.

• If you win all of your matches in the accumulator then you will make a small loss

• If you lose more than 2 legs in the accumulator you will make a small loss

• If you lose only 1 leg, then you will qualify for the Acca insurance and this is where you make the profit.

What Does Accumulator Generator Cost?

At the time of writing the cost is £148.99 + VAT, or you can sign up to a £1 trial for 14 days

Is Accumulator Generator worth the Money?

I used Accumulator Generator for a 30 day trial period, and came to the following conclusions:

1

YOU NEED LOTS OF TIME

Most of the techniques used by Accumulator Generator, mean that you have to wait until the match has finished to place your lay bet. Games can be finishing at any time of day or night, as a lot of the matches will be in different locations around the world. What this means is that you constantly need to be aware of when your next match is finishing, because if you don’t lay one of your legs you can ruin your accumulator.

For some people this may be fine, but for me I found that this ended up affecting my free time, and meaning I always wanted to be near to a computer so I could place the lay bets easily and ensure I had internet connection. I can see that if you had a lot of Accas on all at once and you dedicated a weekend to this, then it may be worth it, but overall I found this a bit of an inconvenience

2

THERE’S AN INCREASED RISK OF GUBBINGS

Now, I don’t know if this was just a result of the post Cheltenham gub-a-thon from the bookmakers, but every day I was hearing about people losing their accounts (primarily William Hill) after they had been using Accumulator Generator.

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It seems pretty obvious to me that this would happen. If there are lots of people putting bets on the same random matches then this is going to send signals to the bookies, that something is a bit fishy, and I’m pretty sure that any matches that the Accumulator Generator was throwing up, would bring up some kind of flag at the bookmakers HQ.

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There do seem to be a lot of people that have signed up to Accumulator Generator so I fear that it has just become a victim of its own success and now is a quickfire way to get a gubbing.

3

YOU CAN MAKE A TIDY PROFIT

I think again, the golden rule with Accumulator Generator is not to overuse it and you will probably be ok.

If you stay away from the highest Estimated Value footy accumulators, don’t always bet the maximum stake, only play a few accas a week and don’t bet on really obscure games, then you’re less likely to get flagged up.

I can see that the temptation would be to put loads of multiple Accas on with different bookies each day, and the individual profits would start to add up, but in my opinion you’re probably going to lose your accounts pretty soon, unless you’ve had your account for a long time with a track history of betting on Accas.

…Read my Full Review of Accumulator Generator

Sports Arbitrage

Whilst we’re in this dry patch of matched betting, with lots of gubbings going on and not a lot of offers that were particularly appealing, I decided to branch out and try my hand at Sports Arbitrage.

To be honest, I just fell into this more by accident and out of boredom than anything else.

For those of you who don’t know much about this either, the principle of sports arbitrage or ‘arbing’ is pretty simple:

Place a bet at one bookmaker for certain oddsTHEN

Lay the bet on a betting exchange at lower odds.

I was just checking out some odds on oddsmonkey.com because I needed to use up one of my free bets, when I noticed there were a lot of bets that had ratings of around 110% , like in the example below:

Sports Arbitrage Example

I’d never looked at the highest rated bets too much previously because I was guessing that if you place too many bets with these high ratings, you’re likely to get your account flagged.

However, as I’d recently been gubbed by the likes of Paddy Power, Bet Victor, Stan James and Coral, I thought there is no harm in placing a few bets on these accounts.

Depending on the size of the arb I thought this could bring in a few useful extra quid, as using the oddsmatcher software they were quite easy to find and put on although didn’t bring in groundbreaking returns as you can see in the example below:

Sports Arbitrage Example2

Can you make money from Arbitrage betting?

Well, in my brief foray into sports arbitrage this month, I would say that there definitely is money to be made from this, however, you need to consider the following items:

1

YOU NEED TO BE QUICK!

I was using the free version of MBassist or Oddsmonkey as it is now, which refreshes its odds every 30 minutes. Unless you are using some kind of paid software, which updates as soon as an arb is found, then in a lot of the cases, by the time you get to put the bet on, the odds in the exchange have changed and there is no longer an arb available.

2

YOU’LL PROBABLY GET YOUR STAKES LIMITED

So, my little experiment was going along swimmingly well, until one of the bookmakers (Stan James) started limiting my stakes. In fact they limited them so much that it was pretty much impossible to put a bet on any more.

3

YOU RISK LOSING YOUR ACCOUNTS

Yes, the bookies are actually quite clever, and anywhere they notice they may have a disadvantage, then sooner rather than later they will catch on to you an close your accounts.

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From what I have read, the same can be true for arbs.I’m not 100% sure how they find out, but I imagine that most bookies are aware of when an arb is taken, so if they see this behaviour repeatedly on your account, or a flurry of bets at a certain time, then they are likely to either limit your stakes or close your account.

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I’d only recommend doing this occasionally and spread out across your various bookmaker’s accounts, and definitely don’t overdo this on accounts you want to keep.

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However, if you’ve been gubbed already, then you may as well make the most of it and take them for every penny you can get.

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Filed Under: Matched Betting Tagged With: accumulators, Matched Betting Dream, sports arbitrage

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