Heading North

I know I should not be preaching to one of the most successful sports traders around but I thoroughly recommend to Peter Webb that when he takes a summer holiday he forgets all about trading and solely concentrates on time with the family. His entry earlier this month explains the steps he took to ensure that he didn't miss out on a single afternoon of the horses. I am sure that refreshing the batteries would have enhanced his already very positive trading results when he returned.

Of all the trading blogs that I subscribe to and my current favourite, Mets Trading Diary  is the closest I will ever have to a twin brother. His individual race P/L is of the same level, trades the same sports, uses the same softyware, looking to profit at least £30 per day and has the same thoughts and strategies, makes the same mistakes (although not as many). Even his writing style is similar. The only difference is that he is obviously more organised as his 'Mission Control' is much more hi-tech than my single laptop and how he can type using a music keyboard rather than the more conventional keyboard is beyond me! He talked about the temptation of going full time and then talked himsef out of it in the same post for the right reasons.

Another example of the myth of 'free money' reared it's ugly head on Saturday. Actually it was not ugly for me as my it was my beloved team, QPR who managed to draw their 'in play' game with Derby 2-2 having been 0-2 down as the first minute of the four minutes of added time ended. Had Betfair allowed odds to reach 10000 for laying the home team on 91 minutes, I am sure we would have seen some interesting bets matched.

Unlike my random display on Friday where I ended £50 ahead, the last couple of days have seen me perform solidly. I was especially pleased yesterday as I only traded races where I could see certain trends developing. So that's three days where I have secured £173. It's just a shame that we are now at the end of the main evening meetings. 

When I started this blog at the beginning of April I was looking to acheive £1000 per month / £33 per day which would mean that I accrue £9,000 by the end of the year. If you look at the chart below, I am almost five months in and averaging less than half that figure, a grand total of £13.71 per day. This means that I will reach £3,769 by the end of the year and £9,000 in January 2012. It isn't much for all the time and energy and just goes to show how difficult it is to maintain what seems a simple task of £33 per month. I need a daily average of £55 until the end of the year to put me back on track. Not impossible but very unlikely.

I have the house to myself today and with so many meetings on today, I am giving the horses one last push to improve my August total which so far only has one red day.

Target Practice

Yesterday evening saw my first serious horse trading session since I took my break. Well it started seriously but soon descended into a little chaos due to my idiotic targeting.  

By the time the UK horses ended I was about £47 up and I thought that it would be nice to get to £50 so I did some greyhounds and US racing and whatever I did I could not get over that £50. At 10pm I was £44 up and thought I could earn that extra £6 by backing Coolio for £25 at 1.28, after all when was the last time a potential evictee failed to leave at such short odds. Crazy I know and I paid the price but managed to make it back after a few US races.

As you can see from the above chart I had a bad day on the football whilst I was on holiday. I was in a bar watching the Man.Utd v Newcastle game and naturally alcohol and sensible reason do not go hand in hand so my trading on iBetmate left alot to be desired.

A Fresh Start

This month has certainly been varied and unexpected. When I posted on Saturday 7th August the thought of taking the family abroad was furthest from my mind. I had committed myself to not trade for one week and concentrate on the the family but on Monday we came across an opportunity of a cheap flight to the Canaries and managed to find a decent hotel at highly reduced price. So 48 hours later we were off to Lanzarote for 12 days. It has to be the best decision I have made in a long time. The laptop stayed at home and my only access to the trading world was through iBetmate. I made a determined effort to use the iPhone app as least as possible but it becomes very difficult walking into a sports bar at 3pm on the first Premier League weekend and faced with 6 massive screens all showing the different live games at the same time and not want to lay the draw on one game. Why can't the UK have these live matches too!

I have not touched the Horse Racing since nearly three weeks ago and the clean break has helped me clearly think about how I want to proceed in the future. The main evening meetings end this week and there will only be sporadic all weather evening meetings for the next few months so my opportunities will be limited unless I start to concentrate on other sports. I have therefore decided to increase my trading in football and start to make inroads in Tennis. We will just have to see how it goes.

One website I have stumbled upon and added to my blog list is Trading the Football Markets. The guys on their seem to know what they are talking about and I might just dip in at £25 per month to see where it takes my football trading to. Then there is Best Betfair Football Trader who recommends the FTS system at a one off cost of about £50. He seems to have done well so far this season.

Refreshed And Ready To Go

It has been nearly three weeks since my last entry so I thought I would put up a quick post. It has been an extended break including a very last minute holiday in the Canaries which has really done me good. I have hardly done much trading during this time and will explain in more detail tonight.

Top of the League

I make no apology that as an avid QPR supporter and loyal season ticket holder I had to get that in at the beginning!

This is my last post for about a week. I have the week off next week for the sole purpose of taking time with the family. We had a big holiday in Florida last year and we always knew that we would spend a cheap summer at home. My wife has always been supportive when I spend considerable time on the computer and always watching the horse racing so it's only fair that I show respect  by leaving my computer off and not blogging for at least one week. It can be very lonely trading and at times you can feel very isolated but despite this it's important to always remember that family comes first.

Now that's not to say that I may have the odd bet via the Iphone app but serious horse trading is off the menu.

Since the first day this month I have not been seriously trading anyway and results have been small but most importantly they have been consistently green. I obviously do better when I am not really trying too hard.

By the way, Heathcote never published the comment that I left him a couple of weeks ago so it is clear that blogging is not high on his agenda and his site has been removed from my blog list as it has now reached three months without a post.

 

As my kids often tell me.......Stay Funky!

Quick Update

I have started reading Trading in the Zone. It is an extremely interesting book that deals with the psychological aspects of successful trading and I recommend it to anyone really serious about making it in the sports markets. Don't take my word for it, read the reviews on Amazon.

As I have been away I have not been trading that seriously but have been picking up the greens each day this month. Maybe I should keep to this strategy! I lost £25 on the greyhounds when my mate told me that a particular dog was an absolute cert so just like a true lemming I went for it to come second. My mate lost much more than I did.

I Miss My Ladders

I am currently working away in Paris and unfortunately the recent french betting restrictions mean that I am unable to login to Betfair or use the software applications. Surprisingly I can still access iBetmate so at least I can trade the sports that do not require quick responses such as the footie.

I have made another £40 since Sunday and I will update the stats when I am back in the UK tomorrow evening.

It's very boring in the evenings here so I have taken the opportunity on catching up with the many blogs I follow. One that has especially taken my interest tonight is Full-Time Traders Mindset. Jack hasn't posted for a while and was about to drop off my blog list. If you scroll down his page you will see that he has put a couple of links up to recordings of him trading. 

Now before I go on I have to say that he has a service called Sports Trading Journey which has absolutely nothing to do with me. It is just a massive coincedence the names are almost the same. I don't even know the guy. When I started this blog towards the end of March I did a search on similar names and nothing came up so I guess I was first!

Anyway, there aren't too many people prepared to show how they trade  but this is one guy who does it well with great commentary. There is another video on http://sportstradingjourney.com/.  I am guessing that at some point there will be a charge but while it's free it's great viewing.

Nothing much else to report other than to say there's nothing 'english' on the telly and the broadband connection has suddenly gone very slow that I am suffocating with boredom. I am missing my daily fix of all the action on those ladders and it looks like a rare early night is in order!

An Added Extra

With the family retired for the evening I settled back to watch the conclusion of the PGA golf and took the opportunity of laying Overton who was leader at the time. It looks like he is not going to win but a profit is a profit. Hopefully it will settle before midnight.

Who needs horse racing!

Best Advice For Ensuring Daily Profits

Quit when ahead and enjoy the rest of the day with the family.........simples!

Passed July's total already.

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.