What Does a ‘tick’ Mean When Trading?
What Does a ‘tick’ Mean When Trading?
You may have heard this slang term batted about online. Initially, new Betfairian’s are confused.
It’s really simple though:
A ‘tick’ is simply an incremental difference in price. Typically on a betting exchange, such as Betfair.
This image below will help out further explanation…
If you look to the horse ‘Calypso Jo’. The current back and lay prices cross over between 14.0 and 14.5. Thus, the difference in price is 1 tick.
Similarly, if we look at the second horse in the race ‘Dalton’ there is also 1 tick difference in the price, between 4 and 4.1.
Sometimes this confuses people because the difference between the two is obviously 0.1 and 0.5. However, this is because the betting exchange is structured in such a way that — different prices have different tick increments.
One Tick Strategy:
Furthermore, you may have heard traders reference ‘taking ticks’ or even ‘scalping’.
Scalping Betfair is a systematical way of profiting, one tick at a time (sometimes 2).
Be careful though, it can be a dangerous game to play. Especially if the price action shoots straight through your orders…
You need to know what you’re doing.
To learn more about how you can potentially trade the exchanges please see my other articles here on medium, or even YouTube.
If you want to understand how Betfair graphs and charts work in more detail, it’s worth watching the video on the following link..
[VIDEO] Betfair Graphs: 3 Key Points (How to Read a Graph)
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