PGA Tour Finds A New Home

Daily P/L: £12.03
Monthly P/L: £116.56

This is bad news. After looking at TV listings regarding upcoming golf tournaments I noticed that there was no mention of the PGA Tour on Sky Sports. Towards the end of last year I'd become very comfortable with trading on the sport and especially the PGA Tour. This is mainly due to all American sports having great resources of information available on the web which inevitably help any trader substantially. A quick scan over the sports pages of 'The Sun' ended up confirming my fears - PGA Tour coverage is now exclusively live on the Setanta Sports Channel.

This is detrimental for a number of reasons. Firstly, Setanta is a subscription channel that would put another £15 a month onto my overheads. As you can imagine, viewing the sport you want to trade is very important so my second concern is that liquidity in these markets will drop significantly as other Betfair users won't be prepared to shell-out for the coverage. Finally, if I'm unable to trade on what's potentially my most successful sport, then I'm going to have to work even harder to find a replacement.

So, what do I do?

I wasn't due to start my golf trading season until March so I've a little time to think things through. One option is to switch my attention to the European Tour which Sky Sports have picked up instead, but their tournaments don't supply as much free information.

To get a heads up, I may take a look at the Qatar Masters in the morning and see what happens.

Anyway, back to today. Thankfully, I stumbled across the One Day International between India and the West Indies. There was a moment when I thought I'd have to put my feet up for the weekend but fortunately a topsy turvey game gave me a chance to improve my profit & loss.

With India batting first they cruised into a very commanding position. After 36 overs they'd thumped 234 runs for 4 wickets and a score of well over 300 was on the cards. Their price was as low as 1.32 and the West Indies were struggling to peg them back but they then proceeded to throw the game away. Their middle order and tail end batsmen crumbled and they finished all out for 268. I'd already entered the market with a strong position on an Indian win as I felt any score in advance of 280 would be enough so with such a poor finish to the innings my confidence was starting to waver. However, as I anticipated a slow start from the West Indies I decided to watch the first 5 overs of their innings before making any further actions. Fortunately, Gayle lost his wicket to the first ball and the price on India came in rapidly from 2.00 to 1.50 so I bailed out for a small loss on my initial trade. I then re-entered the market at various points which eventually made up my small gain for the day.

It's obvious to me after today that I have to invest a lot of time in cricket to make 2007 a good year.