As the European Championship 2008 Qualifying Stage is approaching its completion, let's take a closer look of the fixed odds of the most important teams at this moment.

First, Germany remain the big favorite for winning the trophy. Their odds began at about 9.0 and they are now traded at 6.0 while they have a large portion of liquidity on them (16%). This trend is expected to continue even after the start of the final stage of the championship unless something unforeseen occurs. Upon examining the market on the Germany's Group winner (Group D), we see a steady downtrend from 2.25 to 1.07. Generally it seems that we can verify once more the downtrend every favorite of big tournaments or championships presents, which can be exploited in betfair.

Following, we can see Italy, the graph of which for winning the Euro doesn't show an exact trend. It started trading a little below 8.0, climbed up to 10, and now it is at 9.0.

However, there is big interest in Group B where Italy competes, since Scotland is the group leader at the moment but the favorite to qualify is France at about 1.30! All these have to do with the teams' schedule and as always the following games' importance is reflected perfectly (usually) by the market. Regarding this occasion, on 17th of November there is the determinative match between Scotland and Italy while France play against Lithuania and Ukraine. The qualification for this Group is wide open for the 3 teams, hence the fact that their odds for qualification are below 2.0 for all of them!

Finally, England attract attention as the most part of matched bets for winning the championship is on them (17%). Their odds continuously climbed from 7.0 to 12.5, but due to some good results they dropped to 9.0. Qualification for England seems like an easy task as the odds for that are at 1.31, while Croatia as the team with the most point in the Group are traded at 1.01. If we take a closer look at the Winner of the Group market, England were the favorites in the beginning at 1.75, then fell to 1.50, but having Croatia perform really well, England's odds went up to 3.55.

Like in every big event where the qualification stage takes place in a rather big timeframe, we are able to witness through the odds' graphs the difficulties each team faced during that stage. If at any point a team jeopardized their qualification, this is easily confirmed by a sudden breakout of the odds' price, while if everything went well, the graph will have the least peaks. These long-term bets can be combined with the individual games' bets for trading, for manipulating risk and for arbing given the right circumstances.

The article was published in Betfairinfo.gr.

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