Please note that the changes in the market that I talk about in this section happened several years ago. I have seen the markets move back a little towards how they were 10 years ago.
Two main changes at the current time is that the gaps between available back and lay prices is smaller ( a good thing). Today there is less money placed on the tennis market before the match but once the match starts the money flows in and there are huge amounts of money matched on main tour tennis matches.

There have not been any major changes in the tennis markets recently and if anything the markets are getting back to how they were when I started trading in 2008. Tennis remains an excellent sport to trade on Betfair.
I have left this section on the site as it can be useful when trading the Challenger tour matches that tend to have less money in their markets.

The tennis markets are constantly changing and evolving. One of the biggest of the recent changes is the reduction of the amount of money that traders are prepared to leave in the market. They are scared of being “hoovered” by big users who gobble up unmatched bets often spanning 10 ticks or more. There are a lot of traders who use a tool on the trading software called “fill or kill”. With this they can set the amount of time that their bet will remain on the ladder/market unmatched. For example they may set it for 1 second. Their bet will stay on the ladder/market for 1 second and will then be automatically cancelled. I’m sure you will have seen large amounts that appear and disappear very quickly. It seems to be mainly big traders who use this tactic.

So what does this mean to the rest of us “normal” users? The main difference is that we see bigger gaps between the available back and lay amounts. There is a misconception that the size of market movements has changed. This isn’t actually the case. However as we see these big gaps people think that the amounts available on the ladder are at the current price. This is incorrect. In a market with decent liquidity ( say above 50K matched ) then the current price is mid way between the offered back and lay prices.

In the past because we had smaller gaps between available back and lay prices we got into a bad habit of taking a price that was offered. By doing this we weren’t quite getting the current price but we were getting a price maybe 2 or 3 ticks away. Now that we have gaps of up to 20 ticks ( or more ) if we take a price that is being offered by another trader we are potentially taking a price 10 ticks away from the current price.

So what can we do about this? One of the reasons that people take the offered price is that they know they will get matched (unless the available money gets cancelled). That is ok if we are trying to get out of a trade that could be about to go against us. What we really need to do is to become the trader who offers the prices for others to take. As I said above the current price is approximately half way between the available back and lay prices. We should offer a price a tick or 2 better than the actual current price. As long as it is a market where money is being put in after EVERY point then we will get matched.

In the big matches like finals or semi finals where often it is the only match available to trade then the gaps between the prices will be smaller. These markets behave exactly as all markets did 12 months ago.

So when you see people writing about how some strategies don’t work anymore they are incorrect. It’s true that we have to think a little more and often can’t take the old lazy route of simply taking the offered prices.

There are people who moan about the changes in the markets and then there are those of us who accept it and change our ways.