GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 25 - June 2013

GPWA AFFILIATE INTERVIEW SERIES He separates the possible from the sales pitch in sports arbitrage trading When did you launch your sites? March 2006. How did you become involved in the industry? I was investigating sports arbi- trage trading and building a database of bookmaker information which I wanted to know in order to get started. While doing that I noticed this “affiliate” link on lots of bookmakers, so investigated further. At first I thought I could just affiliate with myself while arb trading, but of course that wasn’t possible. Nonetheless I real- ized that I had built a resource which no one else had made, and that maybe other people would like it, too – so I made a website around my list of bookmakers and information I had collected about them, and a website about how sports arbitrage trading works. Turns out a lot of people really appreciated the information! What exactly was it about the concept of sports arbitrage trading that got you so excited? Like most people, the initial pitch of arbitrage trading sounds amaz- ing! Five percent risk-free return on a trade! If I placed one of them every day for a month . . . well . . . I’d be a millionaire! Of course I was skeptical, which is why I spent a month investigating it before I actually did anything. I discovered the limitations, the practical considerations and the complications. In the end I had a really solid understanding of what was ac- tually possible, and what was sales-pitch. When I made SportsArbitrageGuide.com, no one else had really taken the time to tell people what arbitrage trading was really like, how it really works. I’m something of a stickler for accuracy, so I was happy to finally straighten everything out and tell it like it really is. To this day, though, what really excites me about arbitrage trading, is the idea that any day, anywhere, I can do some- thing which I know will make me a reli- able amount of money – all I need to do is invest the time (and have access to the trading capital!). What percentage of the people who visit SportsArbitrageGuide.com for the first time actually follow through and sign up to your site? SAG doesn’t actu- ally have any registration on it – my ap- proach is incredibly laid back. I just pro- vide all of the information for free, and let people use my affiliate links on their own. So I don’t have any sort of reliable stats on how many people will follow through to giving arbitrage trading a go, though I suspect it would be quite low simply be- cause it is not often that someone is in the right position to take advantage of it. It requires a mental commitment to get into arbitrage trading, and you have to have thousands of dollars in capital available to make a real go of it. The financial require- ment alone filters a lot of people out who come because they are broke and are look- ing for a way to make money! Why is arbitrage so often promoted as being “risk free”? Because the people doing the promoting are usually selling something, and “Make money risk free” sounds great! The honest appraisal of arbitrage trading is that any one trade can be a risky trans- action. All sorts of things could go wrong which can cost you your profit, or even lose you some money, or all of a large bet. However, these risks can be minimized, and the month-to-month activity of arbi- trage trading, where you place tens, hun- dreds or thousands of these trades, is as risk free as a normal job. As a bettor, to make money on arbi- trage you have to find the opportunities where you can make a profit by betting on both sides. How do you make money through arbitrage as an affiliate? If your players are going to win money, aren’t you going to lose money? Short answer – yep. I actually made more money from bookmakers in the beginning when I had fewer players because the chaos of arbers moving lots of money between bookmak- ers meant occasionally one affiliate account would be very up, and another would be very down. But as I acquired more players, they all seemed to average each other out. You need to remember that every trade has a winning side, and at least one losing side. My hopes are that the players would win at the bookmakers who didn’t affiliate with me, and lose at the ones that did! That, and also the No Negative Carryover relation- ships where someone could win $10,000 one month, and lose $1,000 the next month, and I would profit from the second month, were the main sources of income. These days, most of my income comes from the real products which arbitrage traders need: Alert services, and eWallets. An alternative way to ensure an income from bookmakers would be to swap to ac- quisition models, or turnover models, but because of the low number of conversions my website makes, I have always gener- SHANE Aegist Age: 31 Hometown: Sydney, Australia Living in: Koh Tao, Thailand Favorite Food: Pad See Ew Must Read Book: The Lean Startup , by Eric Ries Sites: SportsArbitrageGuide.com SureBetBookies.com GPWA Affiliate Interview Series