With just Day 5 and plenty of potential rain left to come, it would be somewhat of an understatement to say this has been an up and down, topsy turvy, weather influenced event, from a cricket betting perspective.
Even now with less than an hour to go until Day 5 gets under way the betting exchange market is going crazy. In the last couple of hours alone I’ve seen England trading at 1.92-1.95, and 10 minutes later the draw is trading at 1.88-1.90, while the mainstream PayPal bookmakers have England at 8/11 and the draw at 11/10 (name your price on New Zealand).
For anyone reading this thinking why don’t you trade it then? The answer is I have done a couple of times, but that’s it for the time being, unless I see something I think to be way out of kilter. It’s just madness, as the market is all over the place. Trading a market like this at the moment, is more akin to playing Roulette.
The way I traded it this morning was to lay the draw at just under odds on first, and then lay England after, for a couple of ticks profit.
The reason I did it this way is because the market fundamentally sees an England win, and is just waiting for some good news on the weather front. Therefore the only price crash I could see coming was England getting backed in, if the weather forecast looked improved. And as I placed my draw lay first, that wouldn’t have bothered me.
Bear in mind this was two to three hours before the scheduled start of play, so there was never any real possibility of the draw price crashing. And I was always aware that the weather forecast for later in the day looks a lot better than it did this time yesterday.
This would have enabled me too sit on my draw lay (if the price had crashed), and hope/expect it to drift again as the weather cleared up later in the day (as it is expected to do so). That would be a risk, but it would have been a calculated risk.
Basically, I get the impression that the market this morning was fluctuating between two schools of thought/punters. Those betting on the current weather, and those betting on what they believe the weather will do later in the day.
Anyway, it’s just too unpredictable at the moment, we’re basically betting on the English weather, so I think I’m going to leave it alone now.
