What Tennis Trading Teaches You

by Davide Renna | Jun 29, 2023 | Sport Trading

In my early years as a Sport Trader, when I was still trying to figure out whether my dream was achievable or not, Tennis Trading was one of my greatest passions and an exceptional mindset workout.

Practicing Tennis Trading on a daily basis is particularly difficult due psychophysical stress it subjects you to and the amount of time spent in front of the computer to follow the very long matches of the various major tournaments.

Even when I got used to the type of stress, after finding and testing an interesting and viable strategy, I decided not to pursue this path for these very reasons.

In fact, I believe that one of the most important secrets to success in this profession is to find a balance between professional and private life.

Having the privilege to pursue a rewarding career, to be able to manage your own time, to earn decent amounts of money but not have free time and opportunities for social life is absolutely useless to me.

However, Tennis Trading has been a master of life for me in Sport Trading, and its teachings have actually made me a better Sport Trader, giving me the opportunity to apply what I learned in Tennis to a more predictable and less schizophrenic sport like Football.

Here is a summary of the main lessons from Tennis Trading:

Selecting Events 

Tennis teaches you that you can’t follow every single match, but you must learn to select.

Every week there are at least two major tournaments, one men’s and one women’s, and each has a significant number of events.

So, the daily offer is very wide and it is impossible to follow them all, which is why setting selection criteria immediately becomes a matter of survival.

This is basically where my decision-making process based on the continuous exclusion of candidates for selection, and the continuous narrowing of options, comes from.

This approach has helped me a lot in the management of weekends dedicated to football (or soccer), where I follow on average 6 leagues, so indicatively 60 events: among them I have to select only 4-5 events or maximum 6.

Growing in small steps

My approach to Tennis Trading is not particularly suited to a “High Stake” strategy such as I usually apply in football (or soccer) .

The strategic setting is often based on finding high odds (typically for the player perceived as the underdog by the market) and intercepting, often during the event itself, a downward movement in odds for a classic Trading operation where you buy well (high odds) and sell better (lower odds).

The strategy then is often based on more daily movements than my ordinary operations in Football. More movements at lower margins.

Although my later and current strategy approach is diametrically opposed, Tennis Trading teaches you to appreciate small steps forward and to perceive the end result, your goal, as a set of small steps, many forward and some necessarily backward.

In a strategy, such as the current one, based on a few high-value moves, this type of training has helped me visualize the overall result of a season, to be understood as the sum of many small daily steps that determine the performance of the week, of the months, and, month after month, the entire season.

Only the unit of measurement has changed, in Tennis it is the day while in Soccer it is the season, but the lesson is the same: no sudden boom, but step by step, day by day growth.

Accepting Defeat

For a very similar reason to the one mentioned earlier, Tennis Trading has trained me to accept defeat and consider it a natural part of the process, regardless of the nature of the mistake.

As mentioned, Tennis Trading is based on a multiple number of daily movements (an average of 4/5) with low margins, compared to my current strategy in football, which involves 20/25 monthly movements with high value, both as an investment and as a margin.

It’s understandable that 130/150 monthly movements, mostly involving high odds (thus going against the market), expose you much more to the event of defeat compared to 25 monthly movements executed often in favor of the market.

The differences in the win/loss ratio are significant (the win rate goes from 55% to 70%), and this trains you to perceive defeat as normal.

The undeniable truth is that you can’t win all the time, both because variance is part of the game and because human error is part of the learning process.

But in the face of this reality, which seems natural and physiological for everyone, the truth is that the difference in reaction to an adverse event like defeat, perhaps unexpected or unjust, makes the difference between a professional and an amateur approach.

An error often leads to a feeling of frustration, and a defeat can start a period of ’tilt,’ which often turns into a bad run, i.e., sequences of mistakes that can affect morale and subsequent performance.

In tennis, you can lose a correct investment because of a ball that goes out by a millimeter, a situation much more nerve-wracking than in other sports. Thus, it is more training in terms of mindset.

Thinking in Terms of Trading

Tennis Trading is by its nature much more “Trading” compared to the world of football, where movements are more measured, and in many cases, odds might not change until the final outcome.

For this reason, tennis has taught me to detach from the perception of a “sporting event” or money-related thinking, focusing on concepts like “margins” and favoring a “data-driven” approach based on statistical analysis of data related to my movements.

Just as before, what happens in tennis within a short time frame, such as daily or weekly analysis, happens in football over the course of a month or a season, but the mechanism is the same, and what I’ve learned is of considerable importance.

This approach has taught me to detach from the perception of money, allowing me to set up a high-stakes strategy without feeling the typical pressure of high investment.

In my mind, a stake (the value of each of my movements) is simply a number mathematically determined by a ratio with the total budget available.

From this perspective, 10, 1.000, or 20.000 doesn’t make a difference, and I owe this to the “mathematical” approach, which is more clear-headed and less emotional, formed through years of Tennis Trading.

Keeping Your Nerves Steady

The multitude of daily events and the resulting increase in the probability of adverse events, some of which are much more absurd than in the world of football, like a net cord on a break point that decisively and irreversibly deflects the ball out of bounds, has trained my mental resilience.

The time for analysis, response, reaction, and decision-making is significantly limited in Tennis Trading, forcing you to quickly absorb and restore your psychological balance in a very short time.

That is not easy at all, and that’s why I consider Tennis Trading more of a passion and a perfect training ground. For instance, in the summer, when European leagues are on break, Wimbledon’s grass often becomes a source of inspiration and training for me.

However, it would be challenging for me to maintain this pace throughout the year. With higher investment ranges typical of a professional activity, I would seriously risk not having a personal life and engaging in other activities.

Nevertheless, the lesson is valuable because, just like a professional athlete who tests their muscles during the summer training with higher intensity than usual, the same happens psychologically. When you return to the normal rhythm, everything seems simpler and more natural.

Learning to Stop

The frantic pace of Tennis Trading helps you understand when it’s time to stop. In a day, you might execute even 10 movements, but it naturally occurred to me that 5 were sufficient.

I’m quite habitual, and I believe, in my way of learning and living, that a good habit should be built through small daily steps. For this reason, I don’t like to stop, even though it’s necessary occasionally.

Thanks to Tennis Trading, I’ve learned to listen to my body and clearly perceive when pleasure was turning into duty, losing that playful aspect that remains fundamental to me.

Adapting to a strategy that requires less pace and time has taught me valuable lessons. Occasionally interrupting a regular, pre-set schedule for leisure, such as taking a complete Sunday off, is actually advantageous. On the contrary, it can help recharge batteries to enhance my perceptions and intuitions in the immediately following periods.

Learning to Wait

Learning to wait has been the most challenging challenge for me. I’ve always been fast and often impulsive, driven by the desire to take immediate action.

In a discipline that is much more “Trading” like tennis compared to football, it’s crucial to wait for the right moment to enter and exit, and sometimes to be patient.

The tennis event, from the point of view of odds movement, is often schizophrenic. Sometimes you might enter at the wrong moment. Instead of the odds decreasing, they increase dramatically because the match is taking a different direction from what you expected.

This does not preclude the possibility of returning to the starting point or even reversing the situation to emerge with a profit.

A tennis match is already quite long when they play the best of 3 sets; in the Grand Slams, where they play the best of 5, anything can happen.

That’s where the skill of waiting is forged, limiting the excitement associated with the desire for action and favoring the clear balance that allows you to find the right timing to enter and exit. It’s all about experience and practice.

In football, it happens less frequently, but this approach acquired in the beginning helps me wait for the right moment to invest, selecting lucidly from the multitude of opportunities that the fixture list continually presents to me.

In a high-stakes approach, this is still essential: controlling the incredible urge for action, that is physiological, to wait for the right moment and launch a winning attack.

Just like an eagle in contemplation before striking its prey, knowing when to wait for the right moment is crucial.

Training Discipline

Training discipline is not easy at all. I remember that initially, I wrote down the fundamental rules of my strategy and used my wife as a “checker or supervisor.”

Training and culture play significant roles: a German may have a stronger inclination to adhere to rules, potentially at the expense of creativity. On the other hand, an Italian might resist strict regulations, yet often bursts with creativity and problem-solving prowess.

Tennis Trading teaches you to be rigorous, to encode the patterns and situations. Situations which, according to your strategy, it’s advisable to enter, and to avoid exceptions since the narrow margins don’t allow deviations.

Certainly, it’s valuable training. My strategic approach consists of rather rigid codes of behavior, even more useful when the investment amounts rise significantly.

I’ve long held the belief that the best safeguard for my invested budget is precise situation encoding, a method validated and reaffirmed annually through experience, data, and results.

In fact, my system of rules enriches itself every year, expanding the possibilities of action compared to movements that proved to be successful, as exceptions, in the previous year.

To enrich the portfolio of encoded movements every year, it’s necessary to leave room for imagination, creativity, inspiration, and experimentation.

For this reason, I allocate a small part of the annual budget to free movements with a reduced stake, within which I experiment, let my imagination run wild, and open up to new knowledge.

Davide Renna

Davide Renna is an Entrepreneur and Sport Trading Expert, dedicated to driving financial growth and innovation.

www.daviderenna.com/