What Do Sports Betting Traders Do?

What Is Sports Trading?

Well, to understand this, you need to understand what financial traders actually do. To put it very, very simply, traders try to work out which stocks or commodities are undervalued and buy them up before others realize their actual worth. It could be stocks in an up and coming technology company or it could be understanding that a certain commodity like platinum will have its worth shoot up in the very near future and investing in them.

How they work this out is obviously extremely complicated, which is why they are often paid so much by prospective investors.

Where Do Sports Bets Come In?

Sports betting can seem as simple as betting on your favorite team for a few extra bucks, but what you’re actually betting on are the odds behind each match or game. When you bet on an underdog, you’re betting that low odds will prevail against high odds. When you bet on a favorite, you stake your money on smaller winnings that the higher odds will prevail.

Casual punters or bettors don’t usually think in those terms, but usually just like to get in on the action by making a few bucks by supporting their favorite teams and players. Sports traders, however, are all about investing in low odds – that’s literally what traders of all sorts do, if you think about it. When commodity traders invest in particular commodities that they see as undervalued, they’re effectively just doing the equivalent of betting on the underdog.

When sports traders “invest” in an underdog team winning, they’re basically doing exactly the same thing but substituting a low-performing commodity or stock with a sporting event.

Trading vs Betting.

Now, you may have noticed that there is functionally no difference between what a sports bettor does and a sports trader. They’re both “investing” in an undervalued team or player. So, why are they considered different things and not just synonyms of one another?

The answer actually has less with what they do and much more to do with what their intentions are. Sports betters, even the most committed and serious ones, are fundamentally working on a small scale. They hope they’ll win money, sure, but to them, the actual sport is what’s important. This is certainly true of those who just do it for a quick thrill, but even those who regularly bet on sports are always, when you get down to it, just betting on sports.

Traders, however, don’t actually care about the sport. Their own personal feelings towards a team or a player are irrelevant to what they do, as is the sport itself. What they’re actually working with are numbers, pure and simple. Traders are basically statisticians who gather data and try and see in that data investment opportunities by ascertaining the odds of one thing or another happening.

So, when a sports trader bets on the outcome of the match, their only real interest is in maximizing their return of investment – of making money. They don’t go on gut feel or personal, in-depth knowledge of the sport and players involved, but collect as much information as they can and then use mathematical formulas to make their decisions as scientifically as possible.

It’s never just a bet.