Looking over my old trading record

I had a quick look back at my old trading record, and it surprises me that, despite the erratic way in which I trade, I produced fairly consistent profits.

My first day of trading was 2 July 2009, and I recall that I made over £6000 in July 2009. There were lots of losing races, but very few losing days. And that was despite the fact that when I lost a race, I generally lost BIG.

Back then, I was working full time, and so my trading was restricted to evenings, weekends and days off. I created this blog on 7 August 2009, and in the 22 days in which I traded between then and 28 September 2009, I made a total profit of £6143. So, in something like 52 days trading, I made over £12,000. There were two days when I lost £994 and £896, but the wins far outweighed the losses.

This time around I seem to have continued just as I left off. The question I keep asking myself is "Is it just luck?"

I described how on Thursday I was very lucky to turn an almost certain £230 loss into a £200 profit. There was no skill in that at all. However, yesterday there was a race where I felt very unlucky to lose rather than make over £150 profit. So maybe it is just swings and roundabouts.

In the four days I've traded since my return, I've made almost £1800, so that's a total of roughly £14,000 in 56 days of trading; an average profit of £250 a day.

Someone posted a comment saying that in order to tell if you have an edge, you need to test it with 1000 bets or more. I must have traded well over 1000 races in those 56 days, and surely luck would have evened itself out by now.

I know that it's considered wrong to let trades go in play, but maybe in the long run it doesn't matter. Maybe they just even themselves out.

As well as the £14,000 profit, there's also the commission I've paid on those races. I have paid well over £100 commission on these four days alone.

One thing I was surprised to notice was that I had 34 winning races on the trot the other day. I would estimate that the proportion of races in which I am all green at the off to be less than 10%. So it is likely that in 30 of those 34 races, I was red on at least one horse, and probably more. It seems almost impossible that all of them ended in a profit. Those 34 races produced a total profit of over £1100.

I would much prefer to make £7 or so on every race before they jumped off, but maybe what I'm doing actually works. I'm probably at a greater risk of heart attack than the more conventional traders though.

One other thing, in 55 of those 56 days, I was probably full of alcohol by the end of trading. I intend to take this more seriously, and yesterday I kicked the alcohol into touch, at least until I had finished trading. A little alcohol can help you relax, but I was so relaxed at the end of trading on Saturday that I could barely stay awake!