Back Soon

I am really sorry for the lack of a post for over a week. I have been on business in Paris where there is no access to Betfair and have been very poorly with a chest infection since I returned. I will make a more detailed entry tomorrow.

Where's Wally?

Right here!

After four days without a single back or lay, I returned to the lions den trading the two evening meetings netting me a profit of almost £40. 

This was all undone thanks once again to falling asleep on the sofa. I decided to get involved with the San Lorenzo v Tigre match which kicked off at the rather odd time of 11.10pm. Everything pointed towards a low scoring game but I decided to go against the grain and further practice my EGG skills.  

What a start! SL score within the first five minutes and even if it  remains 1-0 after 15 minutes then the rest of my strategy would ensure a half decent profit. Marvellous I thought, except falling asleep was not supposed to be part of the strategy. I woke up with about 5 minutes to go and the score at 2-0 so I was staring at a rather large potential red result. There was hardly anything I could do to salvage the situation other than hope for a goal. I took the opportunity of a Bingo Special to further boost my profit if a goal was scored with minimal risk. There were two  golden opportunities for both sides to grab a goal in the added time but it was not to be and the end result was a loss of £60.

I was not happy to leave it there and decided to do a handful of US races which enabled me to get back £22.  I won't be doing any trading until this evening as I will be travelling to London to watch the Hoops give the Canaries a lesson in football so as it stands I am £38 down for today and have this evening to turn it round.

Yet again I give sound advice of not trading when tired but don't practice what I preach. Anyway it is the sofa's fault as it shouldn't be so comfortable!

Not EGGstatic

A combination of work and family commitments has meant that the trading game has had to take a back seat this week. After what was a good start to the month, the inevitable sticky patch and careless moments has dragged me back towards my more usual average.

To bring me up to date, Thursdays evening UK and US racing continued on from the bad session the day before. I was still feeling rough yet I decided to trade so there was no suprise the I ended the night £49 lighter.

Friday saw the first batch of international matches and after much effort on two games I finished with a green of £7.63. I utilised my own EGG strategy on the Wales v Bulgaria game which didn't produce any goals by the 15th minute. I didn't mind this as it gave me an opportunity to practice the next phase of reducing my liability on the 2.5 goals markets and entering the correct score market. In the end I took a very small loss. I also made a small green on Ireland v Russia tinkering about but if I had used EGG then it would have been a far bigger win.

I did a full afternoon and evenings horse trading on Saturday and was only £25 up for all my efforts. I joined the boys for the evenings France v Romania game which resulted in a scratch of 86 pence profit. I used EGG which on balance was pretty stupid but again I came out with no harm done. However the aim is to have some kind of profit  more often than not if no goals are scored in the first 15 minutes and I am not there yet. If I can get this strat right I will provide the details.

I was so engrossed in the chat room, my lack of multi tasking skills came to the fore as I put two opening trade bets of £50 at 3.25 and 3.30 on Bushwhacker at the 20.40 Wolverhampton and then went back into chat and completely forgot about them. I had the sound off as the family were watching X Factor so not even the Simpsons (If you have GT you know what I am talking about)  could save me. What was so heartbreaking was the horse went as low as 1.15 so the £200 bonus was within my grasp. Had I greened up at 1.15 it would have guaranteed me £175.

 

Do I ever learn? No!

I got some of the losses back on Sunday when I made £53. I have not traded since.

Looking at my daily performance you can see how successful my football trading has become since I became a crew member on 6th September. Previously I had just been going around in circles.

I have spent the last week or so designing a trading spreadsheet specifically for Football and particularly the FT service. I have been trying to make it maintenance free before compiling it into a program so it looks as professional as my tiny brain can manage and then making it available to purchase at a token price to cover the compiler program costs. It is similar to my general spreadsheet but more automated and has a 'diary' where you can record your traded games with comments. The tabs interact with each other so data entry is minimal. 

Four of the tabs are shown below with sample data.

 

 

Finally, Adam Heathcote has made a rare entry to his blog. It's nice to see the guy well watered and still hanging around the trading scene so he can pay for his food and rent.  That should take him all of 5 minutes per month! However I don't understand why he would start a new venture when he was raking in £300,000 per year  trading unless of  course he never made £300,000 in the first place!

Doesn't Time Fly When Over 40

Another six days go by and I wonder where the time goes! I have been in and out of the markets the last few days which includes one of my whoppers. A month never goes by without a Handy Andy Whopper. Leaving (well forgetting actually) a £100 bet in play and the horse goes down to 1.15 before losing!

More later.

Mr Geek - A Mixed Message

I have been feeling rough over the last three days, so after the late football on Sunday which settled just after midnight I kept away from any trading until I caught some of last evenings Kempton racing. You really need to be 100% well and fully focused to trade the horses and I was very sluggish and wasn't in the zone. I only traded five races and managed to lose £67.06. It was straight forward pre-race trading with nothing going in play so at least I didn't lose my cool over the disappointment.

However, I made it up on the football thanks to a few minutes of the Mickey Mouse cup between Sheffield Wednesday and Chesterfield. I thought there would be early goals and used a strategy which I tested out in the Boca v Lanos game on Sunday night and paper traded two games on Tuesday.

It is called the EGG strategy with stands for Early Goals Gamble. You place a bet on over 2.5 goals and the key is whether goals are scored by the 15th minute. After this time if one or no goals are scored you then trade the correct score looking to reduce the immediate liability. I will share it with the Nugget Crew members once I am comfortable that the strategy consistently works but for now it's in test mode. It is not rocket science as the first 15 minutes instruction is to do nothing. The hard work on the CS starts in the 16th minute when the score is 0-0 but if one goal is scored during the 15th minute there is some ammunition to work with. Last nights game was 1-1 after a quarter of the first half and I just locked in the profit and there ended my football session. Obviously I was very pleased but the core of the strategy is what happens when it's 0-0. We all know that 0-0 is a football traders nightmare so I need to see more of the 0-0 after 15 minutes before I share the strategy. Naturally game selection is critical with a reasonable price for the overs essential but it is safe to say that EGG is strictly not recommended for Italian, French and Portuguese games.

I have a backlog of spreadsheets to email out so if you have been waiting for a week or so I will get to your request over the next couple of days.  I was asked by a fellow nugetteer to produce a  spreadsheet solely on football. I have produced it largely based on my overall trading spreadsheet but is split by strategy types so that it gives an instant overview of which strats are working and which do not yield the profits. I have added a mini diary tab so that records can be kept on what you actually did during each game. It's nothing fancy but if football trading is your main sport then it works! I am just waiting for feedback before making it generally available.

I logged into GT yesterday and was presented with a mixed message from Mr. Geek!. I hope he doesn't mind me putting up a link to his forum post but I am not sure of the message he is trying to convey so I will let you make your own mind up. Is it that he is just not posting on his forum? Or is he stopping the advancement of his product?   It was only a few days ago that he announced that the charting was in test and once that was issued he would concentrate on the stop loss facility. I am getting a mixed message! If anyone can add some clarity to the situation it would be appreciated.

If he is walking away, whilst I personally would be disappointed, no user should have cause for complaint for the free software that he has provided over the past year. My personal message to Mr Geek is that it is a shame if such a great product with a large and supportive customer base is not developed further. We have all had a very long and successful free trial and it's time that you, Mr Geek, made some money out if it and started charging us!

Strong Start Continues

I did a full session of Sunday racing which resulted in a total waste of four hours as I collected the grand sum of £1.44 over 33 races. Perhaps my mind wasn't totally focused on the job as I was flicking over between the Chelsea game and the Ryder Cup.

Then in the evening was the football. Now I have to be careful what I say here because I do not want to upset anyone that thinks I am plugging you know what too much. So all I will say is that action speaks louder than words as you will see below.

I also had a small win of £13 that carried over to the early hours.

Black Sunday is long forgotten.

Another Green Day

Just a quick post to say that my football trading continues to be a success along with decent Horse racing profits based on only a handful of races. I spent a large part of Saturday afternoon watching a live QPR stream.

Six Month Ramblings

When I started this blog six months ago I had planned to acheive a consistent profit of £1,000 per month netting me £9,000 by the end of the year. I have used the phrase 'easier said than done' on a few occasions recently and nothing is more apt than in this case.  £33 per day sounds an easy target but the losses soon drag me down and I'm left playing catch up.

Now let's look at the reality. The most important fact is that I am green, that's always a good start. There have been 184 days since the start of the blog of which 141 days were traded. 96 green and 45 red. 

11 of the 45 red days were losses of over £100 (24%) whilst I only acheived profits of over £100 on 21of the 96 (22%). 

As you can see from my Analysis tab, my daily average is just over £15 and at this rate I will reach £9,000 on the 17th November 2011 rather than the end of this year. To reach my original target I am going to have to make at least £68 every day.

Looking at the shorter term view my performance since the 4th September could have been exceptional had I not succumbed to the frustrations of an IT glitch on black Sunday! The Nugget Crew over at Trading Football have certainly helped me acheive my best football month by far with a healthy profit of £365. The £25 monthly membship and a further £80 on the videos was cash well spent. 

I have made no secret that the big loss last Sunday hit me hard and I have been quite low for most of last week and was not interested in any trading or contributing to the footie chat. So on Thursday night  I made a conscious effort to cheer myself up and turn things into a positive by deciding to turn some of my overall green into reality by withdrawing for the first time since the introduction of the blog. £15 a day may not seem much but looking forward to doing something with £1747.41 is a different matter. After withdrawing I was left with a bank of  exactly £2,000. It make's everything worthwhile and I am now full of beans and ready for the October challenge which incidentally got off to a modest start.

Keeping records is a must for any trader but blogging adds that little extra to help you recall the bigger moments of the past. It was upon looking at my bar chart that I noticed the big loss of over £350 in June. I couldn't remember exactly what happened but a few seconds later I was able to click on the post and it all came flooding back. It was a replica of last Sunday and £550 that could have been best served in my pocket rather than the drain.

The number of daily visitors to my page have always been more than I ever imagined but has particularly grown over the last couple of months. I honestly never thought that a diary of my journey would be so interesting to others. It was never meant to be anything other than a personal diary to aid my discipline. That objective is still questionable but if any of my ramblings has helped people make various decisions in their trading/gambling life then I hope I have helped to make the correct one's for them.

I would like to mention the spreadsheet. With more new hits to my site, the more requests I have been getting for it. The first time I made it available was June and the continued interest  over the months has meant that I have been spending time re-adjusting the layout and formulas to bring it up to date in addition to various bespoke requests. The past month has had considerable interest and taking up quite a lot of my time so it is only fair that I charge a small fee for my time. Therefore new requests for my spreadsheet with a start date different to the 1st October will be charged £5. The last version will always be available for free and anyone with reasonable Excel experience should be able bring them up to date. I have some outstanding requests which I hope to complete by the end of the weekend.

I have done some horse trading in between watching an excellent quality stream of the Crystal Palace V QPR match and will report my results in the morning.

Off to the Nugget room!

Happy Birthday Geek

I have not done any trading since Sunday but as I keep seeing my depressing last post every time I login I feel the need to add to the blog to help push it down towards the depths of the archive. I did make an opening trade on a footie game on Monday but scratched it for the same price a few minutes later as I just wasn't in the mood. It's funny how a big loss after such a good run can knock you for six.

I had planned to trade the Cruzeiro game which started at 11.30pm last night but I fell asleep on the sofa about an hour before the start and as I awoke a few minutes ago, I found myself as a sad and lonely user in the chat room. To put the icing on a rather depressing cake the game finished 3-0 and the timing of the goals would have been perfect for my opening AA strategy and my subsequent trades would have netted me a strong profit.

Talking about cakes and in particular birthdays, it is one year since the Geeks Toy was launched. It is excellent trading software and best of all it's free. Whenever I am in contact with fellow traders most are using GT. We are not using it because we are stingy buggers, we use it because the ladder facility is head and shoulders above it's competitors. As I have said previously I use GT in conjunction with Bet Angel as their charting is second to none and is an absolute necessity to predict short term price direction. However, things could possibly change as GT is currently testing an advance charting tool which could leapfrog it's already strong product to even higher peaks of the competitive trading software market. It is yet to be seen whether the product will continue to be available free of charge but whatever Mr Geek decides to do he has already proved that the generosity of his time, effort and lack of financial gain is second to none.

Happy Birthday Geek and thank you.

Finally I have been receiving reports of recent problems viewing my blog in Chrome and Safari. The background does not load properly and sometimes error messages appear. Please note that I have developed and tested my site on Firefox and recommend that it is viewed in that browser as it performs at it's best. It also loads perfectly on all recent versions of Internet Explorer.

Turning A Healthy Profit Into A Big Loss In 3 Hours

I suppose it had to happen. A day which started out so brightly ended with a big loss. It is a frightening example of how easy it is to let things run away with you.

After the successful very early morning games reported in my last post, I added a further green from the Spanish division two game which kicks off every Sunday at 11.00am. The football just goes from strength to strength.

Below is my P&L at 1pm.

However it was soon to turn on it's head. Firstly my laptop froze just as a race was going in play and I lost £140. It was a back bet that was left open so my chances of a positive outcome were always against me. Shortly afterwards I took a loss of £44 on the Grand Prix so by 3pm I was about £140 down and then I went into my irritating chase mode by regularly going in play with all my defenses down and at one point I was £260 down. That's a massive loss of about £305 between 1pm and about 4.20pm. Crazy I know!

I went to the shops to clear my head and returned half an hour later to start again with a clean sheet. Something I should have done two hours earlier. I managed to claw back £60 which included a correct score that was settled at one minute past midnight. I decided to include that in Sundays P&L as it meant that my loss was just under £200.

Regular readers will know that I have these bad episodes now and again. It seems to mainly be triggered when a large loss is caused by computer hardware which is out of my control. I know that I should raise above the frustration but I am only human and it's easier said than done.

I always post my line graph on these occasions to remind myself that despite Sundays awful performance I am still on an upward trend.