Goodbye July

I am glad to see the back of July with almost £500 lost in the final seven days. It just shows how quickly and easily losses can be accrued. For all the work I have put in, I have come out of this month with a massive profit of £69.50. Just enough for a few pints to drown my sorrows. I definitely switched off this last week and the lack of motivation and discipline had me resorting to gambling rather than trading.

The great thing about blogging is that I can refer back to see where the losses came from. That's why I recommend it to anyone. It should be a mandatory  task for all sports traders. How else are you going to learn?

So what were the main reasons to my other poor performance during this final week?

Sunday 25/7 -290.57. Mainly due to backing a horse at the photo with £100 at 1.08 when the result was a dead heat losing £43. Having a couple of a gambles in running laying at 1.25 and subsequently losing £60. Laying in a couple of US races that went against me was another £50. Trading a couple of football matches that were going against me but I decided to let them run costing me £106. All of these were completely avoidable and had nothing to do with trading. They were pure gambles which were just chases from the original stupid decision of betting a photo.

Monday 26/7 -114.35. The losses for the cricket and the football were the result of bad trading and the small loss on the horses was the result of a couple of in play calamities.

Thursday 28/7 & Friday 29/7 -58.90.  I had a little profit on the horses on both days but these were wiped out by some general betting/laying on the Athletics.

Saturday 31/7 -106.58. This was the result of a couple of stupid mishaps. I had decided that rather than doing the standard trading I would  spend the afternoon doing some experimental in play strategies using Bet Angel. I haven't used BA over the last few weeks and I felt I needed a stop loss facility that unfortunately Geeks Toy cannot provide. When experimenting I should have played with small stakes but I didn't and paid the price. In the end it was the offsetting (which is available on GT) that was to be my downfall costing me £83. When I use offsetting  on GT the closing trade only fires when the opening trade is filled. You can even set GT to offset a partial fill. However with BA I forgot that the offset fires the closing trade immediately whether filled or not so my lay at 1.25 remained unmatched but the offset back of 1.75 was filled and the horse ended up coming second. You can imagine I was particularly frustrated at such a big loss which should have been low risk.

If you have followed my diary since the beginning you will know that although I like the BA software, my low broadband speed was slowing it up, particularly on Saturdays. However yesterday  BA performed quite fast although not as quick as GT. It remains to be seen if the speed slows once the football season gets underway.

Whilst on the subject of BA, one function they have that has not been repeated on any other software that I know about  is their spreadsheet facility. The fact that you can create a bot that links seemlessly to the software is something that I have always been interested but never found the time to look seriously at it. I received a newsletter from BA reminding me of this facility which included a link with instructions of how to set BA to close all open positions when the race time is reached. I am really interested in the trade closing bot but that would mean having to use BA exclusively which could disadvantage me in other areas due to it's previously slow performance.

For more information click on the BA banner at the bottom of the right hand column. 

As the afternoons racing was drawing to a close I put a cheeky lay of  Jess with £300 at 1.02 with just the 800m left to complete. It was never going to happen except if she was tripped or got injured during the race. I never thought I would win but that's why the odds were 1.02!

So with my line graph starting to wilt, a fresh month awaits. Let's hope that the Grand Prix gets me off to a good start.