In the old days, before I started treating this like a job rather than a hobby or bit of entertainment on a Sunday afternoon, I used to make solid predictions as to what I thought would happen during a race weekend. For a bit of fun this is what will happen in the 2008 British Grand Prix:

Lewis will entertain the sell out crowd on the Saturday by securing pole in a McLaren which has made progress since Magny-Course. He will be closely followed by both Ferrari’s of Kimi and Massa respectively. Sunday will be a classic case of good old pit stop strategy and the slightly heavier Ferrari of Kimi will take the victory with the Lewis and Massa left to battle amongst the back markers in order to secure the remaining podium places.

Apologies to any Brit fans going to the race hoping to see a Lewis win! He is a great driver and will go on to good things but at the moment he is still learning. Some of his comments are questionable but it’s what he does on track that’s important. He’s probably never been under as much pressure as he will be this weekend. Off the back of the worst races in his short F1 career he comes to his home track with an expecting sell out crowd.

Ferrari will be quick, maybe too quick. It will take something special for Lewis to win this weekend and if he manages to do so it may shut some people up (including me) and do his reputation a much needed boost – any mistakes will play into the hands of the press. Unfortunately for him I just can’t see anyone other than Kimi taking victory.

So I may have been joking at the start of this post, but seriously I do think this is a highly possible outcome. With no penalties (yet) we have a clean fight on our hands and a return the Turkey/Spain battles we had a few months back. This means a quick McLaren in qualy and a quick Ferrari in race pace.

Kimi’s race win odds are too short on Betfair @ 2.6 seeing as some bookies have him at 2.5. Plus if I think Lewis may get pole then I don’t really want to take race win odds on Kimi which are based on the assumption he will be starting first.Maybe Hamilton/Kimi on the double could be an option – it’s very hard to get matched on this market for any decent amount which may be a problem.

It may force me to look further down the grid for other bets if race winner is off the cards. Tests at tracks before a race weekend tend to close the gap a bit and after last weeks test it should be tight in the midfield. I doubt BMW will be as poor this time around but Renault may give them good fight for 3rd best team so Alonso could be one to watch in the w/o the big 4 market (if Betfair offer it later in the week).

I shall be at Silverstone on Friday but it shouldn’t much of a disadvantage as there will be plenty of time for research when I get back.

If you read a previous post of mine I stated I was looking for a new sport to trade. Some suggestions were made including Tennis, Golf, Cricket, NFL…..These are all (I imagine) good sports to trade but they don’t fit in with what I need. For example I don’t understand cricket (sorry to you cricket fans!) so trying to trade it would be useless to begin with as I need to learn the sport as well as the odds movements. Tennis is good but I think there’s too many professional traders out there and I would just be topping up their funds. Golf would be interesting but it lasts all day and I’m not sure I have that much spare time to devote to it. NFL I think is played at night time (UK time) and again I don’t understand the game. Most importantly these and any other sports I can think of a generally played in the summer – ie during the F1 season. I devote a lot of my time to F1 and there’s no way I’d be able to trade a golf tournament at the same time for example.

Horse racing intrigues me from a trading point of view. With practice I think it’s something I’d get the hang of but it bores me to death. I trade it without watching the races so all I’m looking at are the odds. Just numbers going up and down. After a while I get bored, loose concentration and inevitably throw away all those ticks I’d gained in one moment of madness.

So what’s left?.........Football.

Nobody suggested football – funny that ain’t it? Or maybe not as I’ve tried football in the past and as a trading sport it just doesn’t work – yes you could scalp the 2.5 goals market and probably make a profit for a few weeks, but then one game will come along where you are exposed at the time of a goal and you can say goodbye to all the money it took you two weeks to make.

The pro’s for me would be the fact it’s played over the winter period which is exactly the time I have nothing to do. It’s a sport I follow anyway and I would enjoy sitting down to watch a game – but it doesn’t work – you can’t trade it!!

I’ve been thinking about what to do for a while now and every sport I come up with fails me on one point or another – don’t know rules, will be at work when it’s on – those kinds of things and each time I end up coming back to football.

Then I thought about how I ‘trade’ F1. When I’m looking at a race weekend all I do is look for value. I use my knowledge of the sport to look for ‘incorrect’ odds and then I try to exploit this. Sometimes I will have profit before the race, sometimes I will enter a trade with the intention of laying it off in-play as I believe x, y or z will happen. I watch the odds during a race and can then begin to trade certain markets having learnt their little quirks over the years.

I loose sometimes, I have to because otherwise it means I have some creepy method of predicting the future! At the end of the day I’m confident my knowledge will get me through and trading ability will ensure I cut losses when I need to and let the winning bets run. This is what makes me a profit.

Going back to the football – surely I can apply the same theory to this. If I can find an incorrect odds price in one of the many markets available on a game I must be able to make a profit?

Which leads me to this….Flutterfly: Football Betting and Trading. I have started a new section for the blog which you can access from the top menu bar. The £70 pot of money from the Monaco Experiment will be my starting fund. It’s going to be a long and bumpy journey but let’s see what I can do in the 2008/9 season.

I managed to win back yesterdays loss to within £1 on today’s race. It started off with a lay of Kimi @ 1.49 but I traded back out before the start as the expected rain had not reached the track yet and I couldn’t see anyone beating Kimi into the first corner. So I waited until 4 laps into the race a laid him at 1.3ish and also made a small back of Massa at 6.

My thinking at the time was Massa should pit after Kimi and although Kimi was the quicker of the two, traffic later in the race could have played into Massa’s hands. Thanks to a dodgy exhaust on Kimi’s car it didn’t matter and Massa was able to take advantage. This all happened in the add break and the slowness at which the odds changed was interesting – I should really have made more of it but seeing as I was in a good position anyway with a lay of Kimi and back of Massa I just left it as it was.

I had backed Trulli to win the Winner w/o big 4 market but also laid him to finish on the podium. I thought Heikki would catch him near the end so these two bets cancelled each other out.

I didn’t really do much else because of not being at home and the limited time I had to spend on it – and the headache form two nights out on the booze – probably best not to do much trading when you are hung-over!

The championship is still wide open but Massa is looking good. He’s impressed me a lot this season and I think he’s the only one of the Ferrari/McLaren drivers who really deserves it.

So no profit this time but I’m pleased with the end result after yesterday’s shocker. Silverstones up next and another Ferrari 1-2 looks a likely outcome going by their form in France.

It’s all going to plan for Kimi so far this weekend and it looks like a Ferrari 1-2 is on the cards. It’s hard to anything else happening so it won’t be easy to claw back some of the loss from yesterday’s qualifying. Heikki just didn’t perform and a grid penalty for him now means a race win is out of the question.

Lewis odds drifted to 7’s in Q2 so I decided this would be a good bet given the chance he could go light, but he made mistakes on both attempts and lost out. With BMW also off the pace Ferrari should have an easy ride and really this was to be expected.

If Lewis had gone into this weekend with no penalty my thoughts would have been completely different. I would have been backing the Ferrari’s and most probably sitting on a nice profit right now. It looks like I read to much into McLarens tactics and focused too much on this, rather than the blindingly obvious fact Ferrari are massively quick around Magny-Cours.

It’s going to need something a bit special for me to profit from today’s race – something unexpected which will give me the opportunity to trade. Kimi should win but I’m not comfortable backing him at 1.5 and I can’t see much else I like the look of either. I need safety cars, rain, engine failures and pit stop miss-haps!

EDIT: Rain! - there is a chance of some rain in the race. I have taken a Lay position on Kimi @1.49

Well I’m still not sure as to how Hamilton will play it this weekend. It looked like many of the cars suffered high wear on their tyres, including Lewis so will be interesting to see how the rest of the day goes – but that’s my problem.

I’m going away this weekend so the time I could spend on research etc is going to be severely limited. I’m taking my laptop and will have a good connection where I’m staying but the set-up will be nothing like what I’m used too. This in itself is a bit risky so adding on top of that my complete indecision towards Lewis’ strategy – I’m going to walk away.

I could make a massive sum if I call the correct strategy but that equally means I could loose big if I get it wrong. It’s turning more into a bet than a trade and that’s now how I’m going to treat it. I will leave my partially matched bet on Heikki just for entertainment more than anything else – if my first instinct was correct I will be laughing, if not I can be happy I made the right choice by not throwing more money down the drain.

I will keep an eye on things but from now until qualy tomorrow – I’m going down the pub!

There’s talk of a drivers strike in France (would happen at Silverstone), but this made me laugh. When we stayed in Nice for the Monaco weekend the train drivers were on strike, the fishermen were on strike and then the lorry drivers. Now while in France the F1 drivers are talking of a strike! I can’t see it every going ahead but it could make for some interesting betting if one driver decided he didn’t want to strike and raced to victory.

Anyway, I’ve been doing dome serious head scratching over the coming qualifying session in France. My original thinking was a 3 stopper or light fuel is not going to do Lewis any favours and would not be as good as fuelling up and going for some solid points. Martin Whitmarsh’s first instinct after Canada was the high fuel load would be the obvious choice but since then Lewis has been making comments which would suggest the opposite.

I suppose it all depends on how quick you think you will be. I suspect McLaren as yet haven’t made a final choice and will use the data from Friday with the computer models they’ve no doubt been using to go one way or another – Light or heavy.

But I may have missed something quite critical in my thinking. Light doesn’t have to mean short first stint or 3 stops…..it could mean 4. A 3 stopper is not uncommon in France. In fact last year was the only time in recent years the pole sitter did not use a 3 stop strategy. Also a 4 stop has been used before my Schumacher when he used a short middle stint to jump Alonso in the pits.

Going for a 3 stopper may not get Lewis pole position. He may not even get on the front row if others decide a 3 stop is the way to go. I would expect at least one Ferrari and maybe a BMW to start on a fuel load that could be turned from a 3 stop to long stint 2 stop depending on how the race unfolds. In other words he would need a very light fuel load to ensure he would get pole if this is the strategy he wants to use. Maybe a 4 stop load that could be changed to a long stint 3 stop?

I still don’t think going light is the way to go but at the same time I don’t want to miss a chance for a trade. When I wrote my last post Lewis was trading under 4 but this has slowly drifted. I wouldn’t be surprised if the odds act somewhat irrationally as we enter the qualy session – we’ve seen it once already this season – and that was without a grid penalty. So I will hold and wait to see if I can get some nice juicy big odds on him which would fit in with my book.

Heikki also drifted a bit and I stick by my opinion he’s a great bet. Ferrari will be quickest but this is the time for Heikki to show what he’s got. I know Hamilton has shown some great performances in the past but has he really got a better chance of winning this race than his team mate as the odds would suggest.

Kovalainen has so far not really made much impression at McLaren. It can’t be easy competing with the ‘saviour of Formula One’, the man who as yet hasn’t made a decent apology to Kimi for ruining his race. Although some people have failed to notice it Heikki has done a reasonable job and bad luck may be to blame for his performances so far. Canada was a poor race for him but until then he had out qualified Hamilton with fuel correct times in nearly every race. A fastest lap and a number of appearances in the top 3 fastest laps shows when he gets going, he has got the pace.

Hamilton’s 10 place grid penalty is key to this weekend. McLaren can go one of 2 ways, light fuel with potential 3 stops to get pole (start 10^th) or use reasonable fuel, aiming for 4^th at best (starting 14^th or more). Lewis did use a 3 stop strategy (changed during the race) to secure 3^rd last year but Alonso who started 10^th because of gearbox problems also had to start the race with 16 laps fuel. He made little impression which may sway McLaren to use the higher fuel option. He should be quicker than the cars around him and staying out a bit longer may move him up the order for points – because realistically points are all he’s aiming for.

Unless of course Heikki can secure pole and control the pace of race. We’ve not seen something like this done for while and I’m not sure how well it would work but it’s an option. If McLaren felt the need to run light last year with a strategy that could be turned from short 2 stopper to 3 stopper, they may well use that again this year. Why? Because Ferrari will be quick and once again Kubica will be in the mix.

Massa found himself on pole last year albeit because of a mistake on Kimi’s last lap which may have piped it. Kimi made use of the heavier fuel load to pass Massa in the 2^nd round of pit stops for a convincing Ferrari 1-2. McLaren may be close this year but not close enough and it will be hard to see anything other than Ferrari dominance. Unless of course Heikki can step up to the table.

Kubica will again represent good value in qualy odds but the race win may be a bit too much to ask for this time.

Last year I heavily backed Kimi to bring home the goods which he duly done. This year it’s a bit more risky. Massa has finished 3^rd and 2^nd in the last two years so he will want to go one step further again. The way he’s been performing this year I wouldn’t write him off - his drive in Canada impressed me and I’m still in shock from his Monaco pole!.

This is going to need some more investigation…..but Heikki most definitely is great value in the circumstances.

I had time to experiment with the horses today so came up with a points scoring system to use which rewarded good decisions! It was really simple and nothing fancy but it worked and after a while I kind of forgot about it, but found myself sticking to the rules anyway. I scored points for doing the ‘right’ thing – not leaving open positions when going in-play, not waiting and praying for odds to come back down and getting out asap - All those kinds of things which are typical newbie errors. I scored no extra points for making larger sums of money so it was all about the trading technique.

Here are the results. The stakes I used were a fixed £5 on each and every trade. To avoid unwanted larger losses I stuck to backing then laying rather than taking heavy liability Lay positions. Not a massive profit by no means but this is the first time iv’e tried to trade the horses, properly, in the last 2 years and I’m kinda pleased with the results. 2 losses out of 10 and a total return of £1.87 from a bank of £5.00.



Maybe I will give it ago again another day.

As you can tell I’ve updated the site, but it’s about time I started some serious posting. I felt the blog got off to a good start but with the holiday in May things got a bit hectic and most of my posts were just quick notes rather than thoughts and theory.

I’m feeling confident with my trading at the moment but there’s another week until the French grand prix. I want to get practicing and try out some new software so I may give the horses a little go tomorrow.

I’ve tried to trade horses before but with mixed success. The toughest thing about learning to trade an event is having the patients to sit there for hours on end, working away to win yourself £1 –if your lucky. Unless you’re rich you can’t use big stakes to find your way and if you were rich, you’d spend the day outside instead of steering at a computer screen. Inevitably you get to a stage where things may be going well – lets say you are £1 up from having used £2 stakes to trade on 6 races – but you get impatient and a voice in your head says “why not let this one run, see if it comes in. I’m only risking £2 and that’s nothing – I could win £10 if this horse comes in….”

Of course the horse doesn’t come in, you loose £2 but worse still the whole experiment is ruined. The return you had was not bad considering the stakes and if you had continued that way a decent set of data could have been obtained. You could look back and work out, had the stakes been higher what you would have one from a days trading. Because of that one lapse you get into a ‘I give up’ mentality and have the belief trading horses doesn’t work. It was betting that didn’t work – the trading worked fine but your concentration let you down.

Should I have time to trade the horses tomorrow I will take a different approach. Maybe devise some sort of game that encourages me to stick to the trading which also takes away the focus of the money. If I’m trading to reach some target other than a monetary one, letting a bet run would not be in my interests. Sounds good to me in theory but now I just need to think of a way to do that.

Strangely this never happened to me with F1 trading. I think it’s because I was an F1 fan first and then found my way into betting. The small stakes I used years ago were more for my entertainment than the return I would get. It was more to do with getting it right, predicting the outcome and testing my race reading ability - The money was just a bonus and in a way it’s still the case today.

I have moved Flutterfly to a new server to solve some issues I had and cope with some future plans. You can access the site the same way as before, via www.flutterfly.co.uk, but if you subscribed via RSS you now need to use this feed link:

http://www.flutterfly.co.uk//atom.xml

Thanks, John.

It certainly was a BMW pay day with a great 1-2 for the team and another good days trading for me – with a little help from Lewis.

A lay of Lewis was the right thing to do but I realised afterwards maybe I should have waited until the race had started. His odds dropped to 1.35 after the first lap so I guess it’s a decision of weather the extra 0.30 is worth the lay in case of a first corner incident. I’m confident he would not have won the race had he not run into the back of Kimi anyway. A safety car was likely at some point during the race and it was always going to throw a spanner in the works, causing Lewis’ odds shoot up to evens before anyone had entered the pits.

The thing I like about BMW is it’s really easy to tell their drivers apart. Seeing Kubica sat at the side of Kimi had me going for the mouse button to back him as soon as Lewis tried to show his dad how to crash a car. I got matched and traded it again a few laps later to green up. When Nick fuelled to the end I moved all the money over to him and then gradually moved it back to Kubica once he was free of Glock. This with the original lay of Lewis added on top gave my book a good looking green, allowing me to sit back and watch the rest of the race.

Not much luck on any of the other markets today. A few winners and losers on points and ‘will they finish’ left me around about break even on these markets.

Adding today’s win to yesterdays means a very successful weekend of trading. I was a bit annoyed after Turkey as I felt I made a mistake by not backing Massa. A break away from trading seems to have done some good as I would say this was probably my most successful grand prix ever in terms of the way I traded and the profit.

Unfortunately we now go to Magny-Cours and Silverstone which don’t tend to bring about such eventful races – but the way this season is going things could be different.

My betting bot software subscription has just run out so I’m having a look around to see if anything better is about (but slowly running out of time before the race start!). A frustrating feature of the software I use is what probably caused me not to get matched and even up my book yesterday. The liquidity didn’t help but the bot was also partly to blame – the problem is it’s so cheap and really easy to use compared to some of the others.

Anyway, on today’s race I’ve taken a lay of Hamilton. I’ve said before I don’t like odds on favourites and 1.64 was a far to short considering he has to avoid the wall of champions on every lap, time his stops perfectly to avoid safety car issues and battle with a track that’s falling apart.

Today’s favourite word will be ‘Marbles’. The marbles at turn 10 will no doubt claim a few victims and this should be an interesting race.

Other than the lay of Lewis I’m not going to do much before the race – there should be (hopefully) plenty of changes which will make for good trading. Now I just need to find some software to allow me to trade it.

An interesting statistic I’ve heard, but not yet looked into, is that since the start of 2006 the driver starting 2nd has never been leading at the end of the first lap. That’s on any track not just Canada.

This is a perfect example as to why trading is better than betting.

I made the comment this morning I thought the pecking order would be Ferrari, BMW, McLaren. I got the BMW bit right but got it back to front with the order.

Yet I still managed to get a nice trade because of Kubica’s fast lap at the end which momentarily took pole position. To the left is my book at the end of the qualy session. I was trying to get it even but the liquidity was poor - probably becuase of the football.

Not as much as I would have liked but then with an outright bet I would have lost every penny I put down.

Luckily I hadn’t taken a lay postion on Lewis for the race. He was almost 4 tenths quicker than everyone else in the last sector, mainly because of the last corner.

The dutch on P3 came in (again) so all in all a good day considering I was way off the mark.

I will have to look at the stats now because I seem to have misread the situation….or have I? Kovalainen is down in 7^th……

I was getting bored of the standard look template so changed it a bit. Hopefully looks a bit more professional now.

Please let me know if there are any problems with the links or layout etc.

Just a quick post as I’m busy trying to create a new look for the site.

Although Lewis topped P2 I am convinced my original thoughts about this weekend are looking good and the order will be Ferrari, BMW, McLaren. The problem is Ferrari look like they have very good pace and unless it rains it will be hard to see anything other than a Ferrari 1-2. Not a major concern as the odds on both BMW’s have come in significantly and I could get a nice green right now.

I will wait to see what today brings but I’m contemplating a lay of Lewis as 3.05 for race win is getting a bit low.

Will also go for the usual dutch of midfielders to top 3, Rosberg, Webber and Trulli for starters but I may include a few others.

Looking ahead to Canada and some of the talk is about if this could be the first race win for BMW. First of all the weather forecasts for the weekend are similar to Monaco which could lead to an unpredictable weekend (and safety cars), but lets assume we were going into the weekend with fine weather.

Lewis is slight favourite this weekend according the odds, mainly because he won last year but also because the super soft tyres and this circuit seem to suit the McLarens. There’s a difference though between Monaco and Montreal which may harm Mclaren. If you can’t get good enough grip out of the corner your top speeds going to be effected which is not a problem in Monaco, but with the long straights of Canada you will notice it. Lewis in particular has complained about not having enough grip coming out of a corner so we will have to wait and see if the super soft tyres are any better at getting them that grip.

The super soft tyre has received complaints from Ferrari who cannot get them up to temperature as quickly as they’d like. The cooler conditions in Monaco probably didn’t help them but they still managed pole and although rain is predicted, the temperatures are still expected to be in the high 20’s.

These two factors may even up the playing field and make for an interesting battle. BMW as far as I know do struggle with getting heat into their tyres but not at the same noticeable degree as Ferrari. They also seem to have half decent grip and the BMW engine is no slug when it comes to top speeds. If they can get the right strategy I see no reason why they cannot challenge for the win – getting it will depend on the weather.

Kubica or Heidfeld? Kubica is the obvious choice on current form but Nick is in need of a boost and light fuel to get a good grid slot may be something he looks at. He’s getting caught up in the middle of the pack which is finishing his races before they’ve started. With the odds as they are there’s no harm in backing both as even a small stake on Nick could prove worthwhile. Kubica is the man you would expect out of the two and is also handy in the wet if it does rain.

I would expect a Ferrari on pole but the odds on BMW are too good to miss, especially when I feel the pecking order may be 1.Ferrari – 2.BMW – 3.McLaren.

It’s usually around this time of the season I like to have a look over some of the stats. A sample of 6 races is by no means a gospel set of records but it can sometimes give you an insight into some things which on the surface may not have been obvious.

The picture below is a table of the qualifying odds available on the drivers from the ‘top 3’ teams and the actual place they then achieved. I have lest put Monaco for two reason, firstly I wasn’t here to capture the data and secondly it doesn’t give a true reflection as Monaco is a bit of an odd ball race.


Really this doesn’t tell us much about what will happen in the future but it can be used to give us an idea as to who may (or may not) give good value. I said in one of my earlier posts that each year there tends to be a driver underestimated by the bookies and punters alike. Montoya was a favourite of mine for offering great value and last year Massa stole his crown. Looking at the stats it again indicates Massa has shown great value in terms of his qualifying odds, but you’d be lucky to get 7.2 on him again this season. Backing Massa in every race would have provided a profit even though he only secured 2/6 pole positions. Kubica would have also provided a return on this basis but everyone else would have given you a loss.

Kimi is the obvious poor performer in respect of the qualy odds. He has been favourite (or close to it) in every race but his odds don’t outweigh his hit rate of 1 pole. Laying Kimi in each race would have proved a profitable strategy, as too would laying Lewis.

Both Ferrari’s show profit from race winner situations.

Heikki and Nick obviously haven’t managed a pole or race win so you it means little to compare their odds. I do believe they may still represent some value, as Kovalainen is not that much slower than Lewis in qualy so are is much longer odds really justified…time will tell.

Things would look only slightly different with the inclusion of Monaco – Massa would show even better results in qualy form and Lewis would have gone some way to making up his race losses.

Anyway, the purpose of this was to allow me to come up with some vague odds ranges for each driver. These will act as my guideline during the next couple of races in helping me spot value in the drivers odds. Anything above the range indicates back value, anything below represents lay value. As I said above this data is not gospel and is just used in the decision making process.

Looking ahead at Canada’s odds, interestingly Massa shows value again in both qualy and race odds…..he’s surprised a few people in Monaco but can he really do It again?

Here are some of my pics from Moncao



I'm not sure how I managed to miss the track on that last photo. Its also strange that the marshalls are standing with their backs to the track?