Trading Update

It's been four weeks since my last post and my commitment to blogging every day is easier said than done. Even though I am not currently in a 9 to 5 job there just aren't enough hours in the day.

I review the next three days fixtures and prepare the newsletter around 7.30am which takes a good two hours. That leaves me about three to four hours to do other daily stuff such as shopping, doing the normal chores of daily family life and  relaxing and catching up with what I have recorded on sky plus. Then I am back in front of the laptop for three to four hours trading the horses. The last race is usually around 4pm which is the time when my wife arrives back from work and the kids from school. I then have a few hours with the family before the evenings football starts and I am usually at the console from 6.30pm for four hours. It's incredible how quick the day goes. It will be Christmas soon!

My general trading has been coming on leaps and bounds. Horse racing especially as I combine my own style of trading with Robbo's service over at Trading Football.  His single back to lay approach is really paying off and the guy never seems to sleep as he is trading football in the evenings and tennis throughout the night. On top of this he has time to maintain his blog at http://robbotradingpro.blogspot.com/.

With so much going on at the moment I don't have time to join the TF community for the football and to be perfectly honest I do miss it. Bingo, Ads and Robbo are super people with a great service and have very knowledgeable senior traders working with them. I wouldn't be trading any football if it weren't for them but I wouldn't change what I am doing in my life right now. It's hard work but thoroughly enjoyable.

The Homer Family picks have been maintaining there usual strong strike rate since the middle of December after an awful four weeks following the launch.The introduction of the Extreme HomerDog has been particularly encouraging. This strat is supposed to have a lower strike rate with a larger payout as the home side is by far the underdog. There is nothing that you can gain from the stats to justify the selection other than they are at home but the strike rate is on a par with all it's siblings with profits for a low CS result an average of £50 compared to the others that have a low score CS average of £23. A great example was a game last week between Doxa Dramas and mid table Aris Salonika. Doxa are rock bottom of the Greek league and had scored one goal all season. Their stats were P12, W0, D3,  L9. Doxa opened the scoring midway through the first half but were eventually beaten 1-3. We don't care who wins the game as long as the home team makes some sort of effort to score a goal. At 1-0 the trade was greened up for a £40 profit and on to the next game.

Picks aside, the daily list of qualifying games consistently have more wins and scratches to losers so whilst there could be consecutive losing trades, at the back of your mind you will always know that the true average will come to the fore.

The results on the right show the P&L if you traded the same games as me on single stakes.

I bumped into an old friend about three weeks ago at a wedding. Hadn't seen him for a couple of years. He has always backed the horses and had claimed to be very good at it but I never thought much about it. I told him what I was doing and how Betfair works etc. He told me that he backs at the bookies but not interested at all about anything online as hasn't a clue about computers and has no interest in it at all. He knows his horses and what was really interesting was when he told me how he makes his picks and the way he rules horses out.  I asked him had he ever thought of picking good priced horses to lose and I was shocked to hear that he had never even thought about it so I asked him if we could keep in contact and that whenever he did his selections could he let me know the best horses that he was very confident would not have a chance. He didn't even have an email address so would call me but I have since sorted it out for him.

Now I know nothing about horses apart from the fact they have four legs and make lots of mess that I have to avoid on approach to QPR!  He tells me the major contributor to his selections is the going and that he does his selections early in the morning but often changes them if the going changes and doesn't submit his bets until later in the day. He has been sending me a few selections a day from the last 10 days and there have been just two occasions where the horse has won the race and prices have been under 5's. What I find really interesting is that in most of the selections the horse has not even been in contention with 2 to 3 furlongs to go. They often disappear in the back straight. It has certainly been profitable for me.

So I thought it would be interesting to put the selections up here and we will see how they continue to perform. I will only put selections where Betfair price is no more than 16. To get better prices the lay can be made against the SP with a maximum price set or alternatively waiting for a better price in play.

1420 Lingfield– City Legend currently 5.7 to lay
1520 Lingfield - Sumani currently 4.5 to lay
1530 Hereford – Bull Market currently 9.0 to lay
1620 Lingfield - Ermytrude currently 3.6 to lay
1940 Kempton –Pharoh Jake currently 12.5 to lay but there is a big gap as the back is 10.0
 
Lingfield -Standard
Hereford - Soft 
Kempton - Standard

As he doesn't lay horses he has no staking plan but for now let's see where this take us. However to have some kind of marker I will record as a £100 liability to SP.

So that's another thing that will keep me busy!