Cheltenham 2012: Day 4

Bit better today but not the week I'd hoped for

I managed just over a ton in the main race which was on a par with last year's performance. With Kauto pulling up early on in the race, it really shook up the in-running market as these things usually do; I suppose the writing was on the wall for Kauto ever since his fall in training the other week. I wonder how many insiders laid him for all they were worth?! Nice to see McCoy getting the winner after a baron first three days - what an incredible sportsman!

I think I might double my bank for next year, which will be 8k, as my 4k bank didn't enable me to be as active as I wanted to be. So in the end, I managed about £450 over the 4 days :-(

I'm glad this year's festival is over as I put a lot of pressure on myself in the last few days. Still, it gives me something to look back on next year!

Cheltenham 2012: Day 3

My spirit took a beating today...

I got off to a great start in the first at Cheltenham and was £50+ up but a last minute trade saw me scrambling to red out in-running. That didn't set me up with the momentum I needed to go on and have a good day, and a few other setbacks made sure I wasn't going home with much.

But my silliest blunder was to assume that Cheltenham's 17:15 charity race was ever going to go in-running. Another last minute trade saw my £150 stake get matched just before the market suspended and all I could do was hope that the selection would come good in the race. It didn't. Another lesson learned (I hope!)

To say I'm a bit pissed off at the moment would be an understatement. I had a really tough Feb and profits were down on last year, and this month is looking a bit ropey too. Don't get me wrong, it's not so bad that I would ever need to contemplate getting a proper job, but I'm considering going back to basics.

This means keeping a record of each day - as I did in the beginning - noting the profit made, the rolling profit for the month and a short summation of my behaviour that day. This really helped me back in the day and is probably just what I need to steady the ship once again. I suppose that, in my efforts to push for greater gains, I'm actually hampering my own performance by heaping lots of pressure on myself. I don't need a fortune to live off, and yet I'm trying to play with the "big boys" and getting pummelled as a result.


Pure greed scuppered me in the first race: once upon a time, I'd have been pleased with earning £50 from a race but now I'm not satisfied until that £50 becomes £60 or £70. For the sake of my blood pressure, I really need to get back to that situation where I'm just being happy with whatever profit comes my way.

A year ago, I never thought I'd be writing a post like this but it just shows that, once complacency creeps in, things can quickly unravel.

I'm putting my video production on hold at the moment until I can be sure that what I'm demonstrating can still yield a profit on the right day. I've got 5 videos in the can as it stands, but since I filmed them in late Jan/early Feb, it appears to me that the pre-race markets are too volatile for me to even get involved with any confidence; I don't remember them being this bad last year??

Cheltenham 2012: Day 2

Nothing special about today's performance in the grand scheme of things...

I've been using a £4k bank this time round but could do with £8k really to play at the higher prices. Not sure I'll be last year's total at this rate, and that £500 day is still eluding me, but we'll see what the next couple of days brings.


Even though I'm doing well, I know I've still got lots of improvements to make before I ever had the nerve to make trades like this guy!



A quick sniff around YouTube and I found this



I like how this guy uses custom columns in Gruss to do his in-running trading. It's good to get a different perspective on things sometimes.

Lost a fair bit backing in-running just before the horses took a dive. I often find myself wondering who these people are that hoover up the all back bets when horses fall. I assume it's a couple of people in partnership - one being the "spotter" and the other one the "hooverer"! If obviously requires some deft race reading skills.

That's the other thing that amazes me is how these commentators call a race so quickly and accurately - are you saying to me that they remember the silks of every runner to enable them to call the race with this amazing stream of consciousness? With the US racing on ATR, they show a position indicator at the bottom of the screen, and me and a mate were discussing whether each horse's saddle is chipped so that their coordinates can be tracked automatically; if this technology was linked to some trading software you'd have a pretty powerful bot right there!

Cheltenham 2012: Day 1

Well, a right crappy old day for me as far as making my millions at Cheltenham goes...

I put a lot of pressure on myself to get a decent sum and it contributed to some silly errors, like trading upto £50 in one Cheltenham race only to blow £70 in-running :-(

Also, I'm finding it hard to deal with the pre-race markets at the moment - they seem to be all over the bloody place and I'm wondering if there has been some monumental shift in the way they behave? The word on the street is that I'm not the only one that has noticed a change. Be interesting to see what happens during the flat season.

If things don't improve with my pre-race game, I may very well be shifting over to Betdaq for a while to take my chances there. The Toy works really well on that platform and everything looks the same, which is nice. I'll have to stick with Betfair for the in-running stuff though as the liquidity on the 'daq was terrible the last time I looked.

Hope you're all suffering as badly as me having a great week ;-)

Lift off

After my last post, I managed to turn things around a bit in the last 7 days

It's a good job really, as my confidence in (and enthusiasm for) trading took a bit of a hammering during the first three weeks of this month.

It was interesting doing the Leicester card today having just visited the track the week before last. Having an appreciation of a track's layout helps me to view the race in my mind's eye, which assists my in-running judgement calls. A tight, undulating track like Leicester, with its uphill finish, can certainly shake up the in-running markets more than a 1-miler on Newmarket's "July course" for instance; I find those a waste of time to trade in-running, especially if Tommo is calling them :(

"let's leave that one to the judge...!"

With Cheltenham just 2 weeks away, I want to try and get together a 4.5k trading bank. Last year I used a 3.5k bank and managed to get into a good stride to earn a decent sum. I don't really like chasing targets as it puts undue pressure on me but I've got a few more weapons in my arsenal since last year - especially in-play - so let's see.

A thoroughly crap Feb

I think the title says it all!!

I can't get any "lift-off" this month at all, and 1st-21st February takings are pretty poor

Of course, the snow caused a lot of problems at the start of the month but I simply haven't been able to get into any kind of rhythm when there's been racing on.

I'm finding the pre-race trading almost impossible at the moment - there seem to be too many "players" out there moving the prices around too quickly for an out-and-out scalper like me. It's not just odd days now either, but pretty much every day. All this low grade / small field dross doesn't help matters obviously, and I expect a lot of other traders are feeling the pinch too without much punter money around.

I was up by a ton today just from the in-running stuff but as soon as I dipped my toe in the pre-race waters I was "done" for £70!!

"Profit gone!"

I'll just have to try and abstain from the pre-race stuff at the moment until I can get a handle on it again.

Leicester
I ventured over to Leicester racetrack last Thursday for a little "jolly"...and jolly cold it was too!

the uphill finish

Despite doing a lot of prior analysis and turning up "armed" with my selections for all six races, I only ended up putting my money down on the feature race of the day in which McCoy was running. I find it difficult to get out of trader mode when it comes to gambling - I suppose I'm just more appreciative of money now and can't bear to throw it away.

I managed to land the winner...well one of them! Mr McCoy got up besides my selection in the final furlong  to force a deadheat grrrrr! A fiver stake on a 4-1 selection at half the odds didn't exactly have me laughing all the way to the bank ;-)

It was nice to get out from behind the screen though, even if Leicester is a complete nightmare to drive through! I did my degree there many years ago, and I have a certain fondness for the place.

I want to make a habit of getting to the tracks a bit more, and have decided to make it a life's ambition to visit every UK track before I peg it. I was going to include the Irish ones too, but I've just been on Wiki and there are more than I thought!!

Blog stats
Following on from this post, I'm pleased that the blog remains the go-to place for "cow" searches on Google

No 7 made me chuckle :-D

Taken aback

I wasn't even going to trade today but was pleased I did as just about everything I did went right

The pre-race trading has been a bit hit-and-miss lately but I couldn't put a mouse-click wrong today. Sometimes, just having the rub of the green and being able to scratch a trade can do wonderful things to the PnL sheet; when the markets are swingy and erratic, I usually end up redding-up more often that not and then find myself trying to claw back my losses in-running, which can be pretty exhausting.

The in-running stuff was kind too and one of the strats I've been working on came to fruition in the 15:05 at Wolves. And while on most Winter days, I'm happy to 'knock off' around 16:00 to go to the gym, I just knew I had to keep going until the end today otherwise I'd be out of pocket....I was right - I would have forfeited a month-and-a-half's gym membership!

Training videos

Last week, I spent ages in the editing room, polishing up some footage of my trading which I recorded recently.

I've basically got 4 videos done now: three are 'real-time' i.e. I'm explaining my actions as I'm doing them; the fourth one is annotation-only because I really wanted to concentrate and make the best trades I could. I plan to do about 10-15 vids altogether. I won't talk over all of them, as it's a bit like having a hands-free phone call whilst driving - your mind isn't fully focussed on the road. I was very kindly asked to do some live webinars recently, but had to decline for this very reason, I'd probably end up losing you money!!

Anyway, I'm hopeful that there will be a 'package' available by the end of March, containing a mixture of talking+annotated and annotated-only videos. They'll be aimed at the beginner trader looking to make the step upto an intermediate level. I'm using my usual stakes, the plan being that beginners can scale-down their stakes and the strats will still work...obviously it doesn't always work the other way round so small stakes trading is not realistic in my opinion.

Today's effort would have been perfect video fodder, but I wasn't recording as there was someone in the house and I feel a bit self-conscious talking away to myself in my office when there are people around!