It has been quite a month! Obviously, Wimbledon is one of my busiest times of the season. I am always looking for ways to make things go a little smoother, especially in the first round when we have 128 matches over 2 days. This year I tried something new. Let’s open a new tennis service 3 days before the tournament starts! Genius, right?
The Tennis Profits site, which I have set up with Steve Brown from Goal Profits and Matt Bisogno from Geegeez, went live on the Thursday night/ Friday morning before Wimbledon. I had pointed out that Wimbledon was hard enough for me on it’s own so that I was probably going to struggle. I also said that it made total sense for the business to open up for Wimbledon.
Depending on whose estimate you use, we had 3 to 4 times as many people sign up compared to what we were expecting. That’s obviously great but there were a few teething problems. Probably the biggest was the email system failed. That meant that when someone signed up, they weren’t getting log in info and when they emailed for support, a reply would go out but didn’t always arrive. We had offered a cheaper rate to anyone who signed up in the first few days. Paul Gillman, who takes care of a lot of the admin side of things had a challenging few days, as did Matt and Steve as they tried to get the emails sorted and deal with some bugs with the database.
I found myself in the chatroom with a load of new members, many of them with zero tennis trading experience, and tried to host as best I could. No small task when I was also researching 128 matches across Monday and Tuesday, supporting Tradeshark members and actually trying to trade a match or two myself. It became clear that there were a lot of details that just had not been discussed about how the chat would be handled. “We” put out an email saying that we were doing live trades in the chatroom. Really? In my experience, live trades don’t work. I have tried most things as part of the TradeShark service. In a room full of newbies, almost anything I type as regards a trade is met with several questions. Not all of them are quick to respond to. So I was trading a match, typing what I was doing and why so that members could trade along side me and replying to questions. A few times I was so busy typing instructions that I would forget to place the trade myself.
To be honest, live trades would probably now work in the TradeShark chat as there are a lot of people with experience. Most of the people in there don’t really need me to reply to a barrage of questions after each instruction. I was assuming that most of the people in the tennis profits room were total newbies. A lot of them ARE new to tennis trading but we also have some knowledgeable people in there. I have made changes to how the live trades are run. The biggest change is that questions are kept to a minimum. Quite a few still don’t really get that. As I am pretty stubborn (slight understatement), I will find a way to make them work better.
One change that I introduced was to do live streamed trades. I share my screen as I trade a match and can explain what I am doing over the microphone. I can pass on a lot more relevant information without it having a huge impact on my own trade. I have done 3 of those so far. The first 2 were small reds which wasn’t a bad thing at all. Those trades are a lot better for people to see as they will learn much more. In the third one, there was a little banter about how I was going for my hat trick. I had to disappoint them with a £100 profit. I have tried live streaming in the past but was trying to field questions during the match which just doesn’t work. In Tennis Profits live streams, I don’t look at the chat until the stream has ended.
One big concern that I had in the first few days was that I would end up spending every day in the chat room. We have 1 tennis trader. Me. However I provide suggested trades every day on the Home page and will do 3 or 4 live trades a week. That’s much more manageable and leaves time to continue to support TradeShark members as well as trading matches for myself.
There have been several additions and updates to the site since we opened the doors and the feedback has been excellent.
Has anyone tried trading the Olympics tennis matches? Bet365 have been a little hit and miss on having markets and the scoreboard is a little slow to update. There also don’t seem to be any fast streams. Add that to the fact that the matches start at 3am and you can see why the tournament isn’t really grabbing tennis traders’ attention. I did trade a couple of matches this morning which worked out OK. Ostapenko seemed to be struggling against Vesnina and I caught a couple of nice swings. There was a decent amount matched on Betfair but the problems with score updates meant that traders were wary of leaving unmatched bets in the market. A little later, a 1.05 lay on Tomljanovic worked out well when her price moved out to around 1.50.
Did you enjoy Freedom Day? Not a lot changed round here really. Almost everyone is still wearing masks in Tescos. I went to pick Sue up from work a couple of evenings ago. I have to drive past A and E to get to where I pick her up from. I counted at least 14 ambulances and another 3 outside the main entrance. The Covid ward is now full and they are going to have to convert a second ward. Most of the patients are younger than in the first wave and most have not had the vaccine. Quite a few stories of patients catching it during the Euros celebrations. We are not yet seeing increased cases due to Freedom Day. Those will start next week and having seen some of the protests all over the country about Covid passports it’s hard to not expect a massive increase in diseased people. As the type of people who will have joined the protests are the ones less likely to have had a jab, it would seem to be the perfect super spreader event. It’s quite an achievement to get so many fuckwits on one island.
I love hot weather but not so much when I am stuck inside. Much cooler today and apparently its going to be like this for a couple of weeks at least.
Just a reminder that the TradeShark Trading Tips service is unaffected by Tennis Profits. Most of the Trading Guide will move onto TP but the full guide is still available as normal.
