Day one - 7th August 2009

It's a special day to start a blog; the 7th of the 8th of the 9th.


I plan to publish my Profit and Loss listing from Betfair each day. This will hopefully encourage me to do well in my trading. That seems an odd thing to say because you would think that the financial rewards of doing well would be sufficient encouragement, but somehow it doesn't quite work that way with me. I've come to trading fairly recently having spent many years gambling, and like many traders who began as gamblers, I have a problem with discipline.


At the moment I trade on horses pre race, but I hope to move into other sports sometime. I have a 9 to 5 job, so that means that I can only trade evenings, weekends and days off work.


I feel that I should be setting myself a target from the beginning, but I'm not sure what that would be. One thing for sure, I don't want many losing days. 6th August was a bad losing day, hence the creation of this blog. Surprisingly I've noticed that some traders use a target as a ceiling for their earnings. They reach their target for the day, or a race and so they stop trading. I don't see the point of that. If you are a profitable trader, why stop? Not only are they limiting their earnings, they are limiting the amount of experience they gain, and therefore their improvement is hindered. Being part time, I try to get as much experience as possible.


The target I'm going to set is £200 as a daily average for those days that I trade. I' d like to see that figure grow too as time goes on. So lets see what happens...