Septembers First Loss in Thirteen

After a traumatic week I was able to get back in the swing of things on Friday evening and decided to trade Indepiendiente v Colon. The CS prices were not the best so I asked for higher prices and got matched for all but the 1-0 an hour before KO. I had also scalped the 0-0 and was waiting for the lay side to complete it.

Meanwhile I had been notified by a tweeter that there was a competition running for a hospitality ticket at the Wolves game with a seat in the Directors box. I entered but naturally didn't think that anything would come of it. You can imagine my surprise and excitement when I discovered I had won. I was then busily making the arrangements before realising that not only had my traded game been running for fifteen minutes but that it had gone 0-1. My immediate panic was whether the 0-0 scalp lay had been matched as I would have suffured a massive loss had it not. Thankfully the newly introduced 'keep bets' in the football markets had saved me as I had been matched in play. I wasn't so lucky with the 1-0 which by now was obsolete. I had also failed to place my lay of u2.5 so I needed to use the 1-1 to exit which I was able to do with a very small loss.

There were no more goals in the game so had I traded the game properly it would have resulted in the strats acceptable max loss of 35% ROI so I have recorded it as a loss. The strat was never developed to go for thirteen games without loss so a red is to be expected. In fact red runs will occur now and again (as shown on my results tab) but as long as the long term trend maintains it's profitability then I will be comfortable.

I tweaked the stakes at the beginning of the month to give a slightly greater reward for an overs result and for the early goal before the lay but it has increased the max loss of single stakes from £20 to £23 giving an ROI of 35%. I will monitor this over the course of the next couple of weeks to see if the extra rewards are greater than the extra max loss and will make further stake changes if necessary.

I never trade a game involving QPR as I find my heart rules my head when it comes to decision making. However, the Wolves v QPR match had decent Homer prices and many would have thought that it was a reasonable opportunity to get involved. Every football strategy has an achilles heel. For the Homer it is to have a score of 0-2 if the CS market has not been exited after the first goal and where the unders lay has not been placed. Unfortunately this game highlighted the possibility and shows why it is critical to lay off the 1-1 as quickly as possible after the 0-1. In this game QPR scored their second two minutes after their first so hopefully most people were able to exit in time. The FG softens the blow considerably but the reality is that the full CS liability is lost and what was an approx small profit of £5 at 0-1 becomes a £15 loss at 0-2. It doesn't sound much at single stakes and is less than the strats acceptable max loss but you are left totally helpless with just 10 minutes of the game played rather than the larger opportuntity of the entire half. This has only happened in just two of my picks.

Thanks to Mark from Sportingbet.com for looking after me at Wolves. The hospitality, never ending food and drink and of course the win were all first class. It was a fabulous day out. I  never would have known that Beverley Knight is a Wolves supporter!

Had all of my September picks been followed using just single stakes which is having an initial liability of of approx £64 to exit at a max loss of £23. The trading bank would be £220 higher. This is after deduction of commission.

I am in the mood for some Horse trading this afternoon. Will try to multi task with the footie

Hope you like the new background!