Friday 17 August 2012

After a three year gap, I'm back trading again. Or should I more accurately call it trading / gambling? I say that because I have very poor discipline when it comes to trading. My brain doesn't allow me to guarantee myself a relatively small loss, so I usually end up going in play to try to green out. It can get very hairy, and I've had some very lucky escapes, but in the past two days since I returned to trading, my luck has been holding out, and I've made a total profit of over £1700.

One of those lucky scrapes was in Thursday's Beverley 3:35 race when I layed a horse to a liability of £230. The market moved against me, and I went in play. The horse traded at 1.01 before it finally lost. During all of the time that was happening, I was frozen like a rabbit in headlights, and doing nothing about it. Despite my terrible trading, I was rewarded with a profit of £200 before commission instead of losing £230; a swing of £430 to my day's profits in that race alone, and there were other races where I was close to losing large amounts.

On Friday, I slightly amended my tactics and set a limit of £300 liability on transactions on any single horse. That can mean a liability of £600 though if I bet horse A to win and horse B to lose.

I played 78 races in the two days and lost in only 6 of them. The question is, am I doing something right, or am I just being lucky? If you were to place a large number of bets randomly, you should expect to break even before commission is deducted. I'm doing significantly better than that, but I'm not sure if 78 races is a large enough sample to say that I have an edge.

An average daily profit of £850 would be very nice, thank you very much; as would a small fraction of that,

So far, the losses have tended to come towards the end of the day when I was already sitting pretty with a good profit. I have to make sure that if I have a big loss near the beginning of the day that I don't go into chase mode. There might even be something to be said for taking a break and missing the next race if that happens. Another thing I should probably do is remind myself that I'm not starting from zero, but from a £1700 profit, and that the next race won't be the first, but the 79th in a series of hopefully thousands..

Thursday 16 August 2012

Friday 17 August 2012