Mets' Trading Diary

Purple debut

2012-01-14T12:32:00.000Z

With Betfair down again yesterday afternoon, the positive side was that I could take a look at the Betdaq version of the Geeks Toy. I'm really impressed actually, everything looked exactly the same as the Betfair version (more-or-less), even the profiles that I've set up in the Betfair version were shared with this version - quality!

As for the Betdaq pre-race markets, well it felt a bit like trading the dogs on Betfair: loads of gaps in the prices and no obvious clues as to which way they were heading. I managed a few quid, enough to take the wife out for tea maybe!

The in-running markets are about as liquid as a typical Meydan race on Betfair - doesn't suit me one bit.

It's nice to know that - if Betfair did suddenly implode - I could probably still scrape some sort of existence on the 'daq.

ATR Tracker

I often find that I need to jot down a note or two about a horse if it does something interesting in-running that may serve as an angle the next time it runs.

At The Races have launched quite a useful tool on their website which lets you make some quick notes on upto 50 horses that might catch your eye

They then send you a reminder on the day that the horse is running (if declared).

New year, old habits

2012-01-01T23:49:00.000Z

There seemed to be some opportunities today that were too good to be true - it was like "taking candy from a baby". I was feeling quite invincible at one point and was getting excited about a potential first £500 day before it fell apart

"...here you go, Mr Drain, have a share of my profits - it's not like I've been busting a gut to make it for the last 3 hours!!"

150 notes wasted. I'm still trying to figure out what the hell happened at at 14:55 that made me go off the rails for 20 minutes!! At one point, I swear I had an out-of-body experience and someone else was operating my keyboard and mouse!!

Just glad I managed to get back on an even keel again. A complete waste of an hour though.

Lazy Trader from Greed All Over made an interesting observation about his own trading via his comment on my last post

At this rate, neither will I.

2011 review

2011-12-31T21:58:00.003Z

Well, 2012 is nearly upon us and it's certainly been an interesting year as far as the trading goes...

About this time last year, things started to "click into place" and January was the first month when my income actually matched that of my old job. When February and March followed suit, I could relax knowing I would be financially ok, at least for a little while.

I log all my results in a spreadsheet and it's clear that I've not improved massively since January...and it wasn't for lack of trying believe me! I'm constantly pushing myself for higher returns, but higher stakes and silly "heat-of-the-moment" blunders have held me back a bit.

When I started filming my trading at the start of December (for some training videos I'm hoping to do in 2012) it dawned on me where I was going wrong in my pre-race trading. As a result, I've managed to tighten up my game quite a bit and the last 6 days have been amazing.

My strike rate is approx around 65% at the moment so my goal for 2012 is to improve that to at least 75-80%.

Late 2011 also spelled a mini-crisis in terms of my mental wellbeing. My self-imposed isolation since late 2009 really caught up with me in October of this year and I was feeling pretty miserable for it. I've got good health, a loving wife and wonderful child, a part time job I love, loads of free time to indulge my passions and yet I felt lonely and just...well...crap.

I fought the lows like every man should - with alcohol ha ha!! Obviously, that can only work for so long and then it's a case of figuring out why you're not happy in your own skin. That's for another day but let's just say that certain therapies have helped brighten my mood, like exercising with others (I've joined a gym), taking the St John's Wort herbal supplement (the jury is still out on that one), talking things through with the wife and even some retail therapy (new 32" LCD now takes pride of place in my already overcrowded office space).

I've even installed Sky HD for the office so I don't have to use the crappy video sender from the downstairs box to watch At The Races.

It's all about making life easier for yourself, and it's something I want to expand on in 2012 as I feel we get ourselves into an unnecessary pickle sometimes that could have been avoided with a different approach

another unnecessary pickle?

Anyway, that's enough rambling. To all my regular readers: I wish you a great 2012 and I hope you can continue to follow my journey well into next year...and hopefully beyond!

Take care! :-)

Mooooooooo!

2011-12-28T00:00:00.000Z

It's been ages since I checked the viewing stats for the blog via Google Analytics. I had a look today out of interest and noticed there had been more traffic than usual. On closer inspection, it now seems my blog is the "go-to" place for pictures of cows!!

bloody marvelous...

Google has suddenly decided to index the cow picture I used in this post on page 1 of their image search for the word "cow"!

Oh well, at least this blog is useful for something!

Back to trading matters and I'm pleased to report a couple of decent days trading

It's a relief actually, as Christmas over-spending and a recent bout of decorating has left my bank account a bit wounded. Also, the missus keeps banging on about getting a new dining room table so I felt I had a point to prove.

The Boxing Day madness of races going off every five minutes suits me down to the ground as I can really (cliché alert!) get "in-the-zone"; barring any silly mistakes, I know I'll always make money on these days.

Today was nice enough too although I'm still prone to making some horrid gaffes

£100 gone in 15 minutes. Not great, but I'm well used to the ebb-and-flow of money now and keeping a cool head in the next two races quickly made up for those errors

Ho-hum!

Slim pickings

2011-12-18T16:45:00.002Z

Not much doing today - got into a bit of trouble early on and spent the rest of the session trying to claw it back...before ballsing-it-up in the second last :-(

Yesterday was far, far better...but this blog doesn't just sing when it's winning!

My emotional state has certainly improved since my post in early November, when things seemed somewhat bleak; my interest in all things trading remains indifferent though, including reading other blogs and even updating my own. I think it's because I'm approaching the end of a long and intense first year trading as a professional and I'm ready for a New Year now and a fresh start.

I've started taking the St John's Wort herbal remedy / supplement in a bid to try and "steady the ship" a little bit - it's meant to be effective at improving your mood and apparently they're mad about it in Germany! Maybe that's why they're so steadfast?! Taking that, combined with the fact I've joined a local gym to train at (instead of in my garage in isolation), have both helped immensely.

I had a couple of nice emails in November from people looking for a bit of advice. It's good to be able to give something back to the trading community in this way, in the same way I absorbed some terrific advice from other bloggers in the early days. My email address is at the top of the blog if you have a question about something I may have written in the past - I'll try my best to answer it.

I downloaded Camtasia 2 for Mac last week on a free trial basis and had a go at recording some pre-race trades for some training videos I intend to publish in Spring 2012.

That's been a bit of a learning curve in itself though, as articulating my thought processes while trying to execute them is harder than it seems. I managed a couple of green outcomes but there were a few red ones too as I found I was "putting myself off"! I was also aware I was pausing and saying "eeeeeerrmmm" at lot in between speaking, which is just plain annoying!

I may choose to just record the vids and narrate / annotate them afterwards, but I can't help feeling it would take something away from the experience.

I've chosen my domain name and have a dummy Wordpress blog in place - I just need to "pull my finger out" and get it done now. I'll only release a product that I'm 100% happy with though - and if I don't feel that the vids are up-to-scratch then I won't release them to the marketplace. If I decide that I'm revealing too much of my edge, or not enough to be useful to anybody, then that's another good reason not to release them.

Off the crab

2011-11-26T15:25:00.001Z

Today went about as well as Thursday and Friday

I couldn't even be bothered to finish the last few races.

I've really struggled to find something to trade these last 3 days and I don't remember it being this bad for a long time. Has everyone buggered off to BetDaq or something?

When I'm not "on the crab", I lose my rhythm, get bored and take more chances than I should.

Things will pick up again soon I'm sure. In the meantime, I'll have a few days off and do something more interesting with my afternoons as I can't face the prospect of another paltry day's profit at the moment.

Pot luck

2011-11-25T16:49:00.001Z

Well, I've found the last couple of days' trading to be very torrid indeed. It always worries me when I see graphs like this

It's all over the place!

For me, trading pre-race on days like this is a bit pointless because I usually end up breaking even at best. I can't read these moves at all and most often it's "pot luck" if I make a profit.

At 15:50 I was only £30 up after 3 hours slog but the 16:00 at Wolverhampton saved my blushes; I decided to call it quits after that.

No records broken today but it's a week's groceries paid for so I can't grumble.

Top of the pops

2011-11-12T16:32:00.001Z

I haven't looked but I think today's effort just edged my personal best

I traded with a bank of £2500 today, so a bit more than my usual £2000. Just recently, I've been upping my pre-race stake where feasible and am now into £10-a-tick territory. It's been ages since I last upped the stakes but it feels right and anyway, I want to make more money! (don't we all?)

Autumn blues

2011-11-10T11:29:00.001Z

October was my best month ever, if only by a few quid. Quite remarkable really, as I've been taking my foot off the pedal since the evening racing ended. Two back-to-back £400+ Saturdays helped; the £500+ day continues to elude me.

I've had to dig myself out of an emotional black hole last week as it suddenly dawned on me how solitary I've become. After many stressful years working in IT, I was glad to get out of the "rat race" and away from the politics and egos. The trouble is, I've gone a bit too far the other way now though, and it caught up with me a bit last Monday.

I've been away from facebook for a few years, as I firmly believe that a private life should remain just that. But since most of my friends live their lives through that medium now, if I'm not on it, I'm not part of it! Also, I chose to workout alone in my garage this year instead of going to the gym and mixing with actual physical people. There's been a bit of unrest in the family too which spurred me to cut down on visiting so as not to get caught up in it. With the little one at school full-time now and the wife at work, it pretty much means I don't see anyone from one day to the next. The trading has been boring me silly lately too, and I've had little interest in looking at other blogs or visiting The Toy forum, and updating this blog hasn't even crossed my mind lately.

The question of "what do you actually do again?" comes up time and time again, and I'm getting sick of explaining. As one of the few Dads that delivers their child to school in the morning, I often wonder if the Mums think I'm a dole-grabber. All the money I paid into the system over the years has presumably gone to line someone else's pockets, because the buggers won't give any to me. I ~~got a mouthful from~~ was even challenged by my step-daughter the other day about how her Mum goes out to work and supports me while I sit at home all day (one quick flash of October's profit sheet on the iPad soon put her straight). She right about one thing though: I do hang around the house all day. But what am I gonna do? Give it all up and get a proper job just so I can become part of the system again, never have any free time AND take a pay cut......hmmm no....not yet at least.

Anyway, I'm attempting to rectify my mood a bit: I enrolled as a helper at my daughter's school which will get me out of the house one morning a week. I've also signed up to be a "Reading Buddy" so I can mentor some kids and give a bit back to society (I even signed up the aforementioned step-daughter!). I've also been out for a few brisk walks in the last couple of days, albeit one was to the chip shop! ;-)

mmmmm....

Just by making a few changes, I'm already feeling better and am looking forward to "spreading myself around a bit" so to speak.

X-Factor

In other news, I continue to be shocked and amazed by the way markets can twist and turn as certain events unfold. Now the hairy Cocoza (I'm not wasting my time checking the spelling) has been booted out for sniffing the white stuff in some slappers bog, the market has been sent into a tailspin by the news that one of the rejects will be brought back in. Jeez, I wish I'd camped outside the X-Factor studios to get the scoop on that one, as just look at Amelia's price now

Bloody 7s in from 1000!! I thought it was a bit suspect that she didn't trade at 1000 immediately after she was booted - her price loitered at around 400 - although she obviously went onto do so as the competition unfurled.

Now she's back in with a chance to rejoin the show pending a public vote, and could very well go on to win the thing as she was IMO way better than the others, with the exception of Marcus and Little Minxes (or whatever name they go by these days).

The whole show has been a sham this year for the following reasons:

the drug-addled, bed-hopping Cocoza being allowed to prey on vulnerable housemates and fans
Cowell leaving Louis on the panel even after he kicked himself off
Louis being forced to bring back a "judges house" reject because that crazy Chinese woman didn't want to go to the live shows
the whole mixing-and-matching of the boy bands at boot-camp, the judges houses AND even on the live show - who are these faceless bands? At least JLS came to the competition complete, prepared and oozing class
and finally, the public being encouraged to vote some idiot back into the show that they've already spent money removing

Bah - I'm going for a lie down......

Nothing day

2011-10-18T22:54:00.002+01:00

Quite literally a nothing sort of day, with everything I made

being robbed back off me again tomorrow

Before I started this afternoon's session, I checked to see what my PC would be this week. Now is today's profit a coincidence, or did something happen on a subconscious level? Perhaps I've been watching too much Dynamo!

Botting

The botting venture continues to flounder. Conscious that I've only got 3 months left of my subscription, I've been furiously writing and re-writing my triggers in between races and testing them out in-play. I've lost count of the times I've started from scratch, building them from the ground up.

My ultimate goal is to take some of the in-running strategies I use every day and approximate those in trigger-form. The thing is, in-play trading has become a very intuitive thing after months of doing it, and programming intuition obviously takes more than a few routines slung together! Therefore, I'm trying to keep the strategies functional enough to make me some money, but also simple enough to ensure the logic remains straightforward and bug-free.

Starting with a £100 in test mode, I was upto £146 at one point in the afternoon and was already planning my retirement. But a few automated trades later and my virtual profit quickly evaporated, leaving a massive £4.66 profit for the day. Breaking even for the day is good progress though, as I've lost many starting banks in the past trying out different things; thankfully it's not been my own dosh on the line so far!

Once I get the first bot in place and earning, I will then introduce some variants to execute alongside it, to cover different scenarios...

Not that sort of Variant!

Stra-bonus

2011-10-03T22:18:00.002+01:00

A bit of a strange one in the 14:50 at Warwick today, when Rios Girl traded at 1.01 for 17k and finished 10th. Looks like there was a mix up during the photo due to the similarity in colours of Rios Girl and the eventual winner, Straboe. The Rio price pinged all over the place so I whacked a few speculative bets on at big prices, which were quickly taken, and managed to green up for a tidy amount before the market suspended again

If only it were always this easy!

I had a comment on my last post, where I was predicting the imminent demise of everyone's favourite betting exchange

Betfair's not going to dissappear overnight despite all the current bad press, mets. Even when it does eventually collapse that'll be due to something else there to replace it so don't think you need to worry.

Yes, I know (hope!) you're right, and I'll try and be less of a doomsayer from now on! ;)

Autumn shakeup

2011-10-01T21:41:00.000+01:00

The second half of September was a tough one for me. The returns from the pre-race trading have been getting thinner and attempts to make up for it in the in-running markets have been less-than-successful.

I was intent on winding down for the Autumn and Winter and perhaps only trading 3-4 days a week, but it hasn't happened. It's always in the back of my mind that the "writing may be on the wall" for Betfair amidst the current hoo-ha...

falling share price
serious data breach
Tote foul-up
increased downtime
harsher Premium Charges
top execs leaving

...and could spell the beginning of the end for us Betfair journeyfolk. That list is just too much bad stuff over a very small timeframe. So I'm just "knuckling down", trading any day I can and "grinding out a day's pay" *.

* that takes all the romance out of it, doesn't it?! ;)

The way I see it, if my Premium Charge rate is going to be hiked after £250k, then there's no harm in getting there as fast as I can while it's still a 250k threshold and not less. It's a good incentive to get the mortgage paid off sooner!

Having said that, I need to curb my losses as I'm still giving away loads more money than I should; I haven't updated the Betfair lifetime results spreadsheet for a few weeks but I just know it's loads. Today, I got upto 90 quid twice before being bashed back down again

losses easily amounted to £150+

£150 for a Saturday is pretty disappointing to me these days (but then I am quite hard on myself!). The funny thing is, I managed £150 last Saturday and Betfair was down for half of the afternoon lol !

Just going back to the data breach (that I only just found about out via Scott Ferguson's excellent blog), it's prompted me to change my Betfair password immediately in case someone logs in and tries to blow my wedge in a single go!

At the end of the day though, even though Betfair are taking a hammering in the press and on various blogs and forums, it's still the best thing around and when it works, it works brilliantly. I haven't fallen out of love with them yet, but I think that's only because I haven't been screwed over in a big way....yet!

Bot botheration

2011-09-16T22:31:00.000+01:00

I managed to raise some enthusiasm this week to continue creating automated trading scripts for the horse racing markets using MarketFeeder Pro.

I bought a 6 month subscription for £100 with a view to writing a bot to slowly recoup this (and more if possible). With only 4 months left of my sub I need to get a shift on!

My previous attempt at implementing an automated lay system using MF Pro proved fruitless. Nothing to do with the tool I might add - the rules were easy to implement and I had a couple of good days in test mode - but when I switched it over to live mode one afternoon, it proceeded to find about 5 winners in about 9 races and blew most of my £50 starting bank. 5 winners from 9 - that must be a record?!

Creating a winning bot is no walk in the park...not to me anyway. Anything that has even the slightest amount of complexity to it, usually ends up becoming a major pain in the backside to devise and implement.

The examples on the MF Pro site did come in very handy and gave me a good start, but even implementing a Fill or Kill function takes 3 triggers, and a function to work out how long is left in a race (I'm glad they wrote that function and not me!) takes 5 triggers. So I've got 8 triggers in this cramped little pop up window that I can't collapse and which get in the way of my own triggers that I'm trying to add in there too. I hope they tidy up the UI in the version 7 as it's a bit clunky in places.

Anyway, I reached a point at about 4pm this afternoon where I was ready to let my shiny new bot loose on the win markets (in test mode) and lo and behold, it came up two decent wins and a bunch a scratches in the space of an hour...

"Great, huh?" I said the misses as she passed the office door,

"I'm onto something here" I then exclaimed, smugly.

Through some further examination of the logs though, it soon became clear that I wasn't really on to anything at all, at least not anything intended; it turned out that by programming one condition wrong, the bot was now doing the opposite of what I designed it to!!

So now I've got an anti-bot that's a potential money spinner, while my original idea seems to be a dead in the water

I'm at a wedding tomorrow so what I think I might do is run the original bot and the anti-bot in separate instances of MF Pro (taking care to reduce my refresh rates of course) and let them duke it out while I'm quaffing champagne and devouring canapés* at the reception.

* more like Fanta and sausages on sticks if I know my mate

ugh!

Coasting

2011-09-09T18:36:00.005+01:00

I suspect, like me, most full time horse racing traders have been pretty "flat-out" during March-August. Only now, with the reduced schedules, can I take a step back and breathe a sigh.

This time last year, I was still hungry for opportunities to trade, but things have improved so much since Jan that I'm now looking forward to the reduced schedules and the weather cancellations!

With the little nipper starting school next week, I want to shift my priorities to my music studio so I can get some more writing done without any distractions.

As other have commented on this blog, it's hard to put down the racing when the money is flowing in nicely. I did as much as I needed to today but still pulled in enough to pay a few bills

These 70 / 80 quid days are fairly common for me and add up nicely over the month. Today didn't really flow and I wasn't very active either so I didn't expect much more.

The Results Summary Spreadsheet that I talked about in my last post, brought home that I don't have many losing days any more; from memory, I think there's been only one since June. Keeping losses under control was a mantra I followed from the very beginning, and I never managed to get more that -£75 in deficit throughout my whole journey. I've got a lot better at stemming early losses, as making up losses never sat with me too well; as long as I don't go more than -£30 down early on I'm usually fine and come out ok by the end of the session.

There's plenty to do over the coming months: I want to improve my horse racing and golf databases, and continue the development of my EPL trading tool. I'm not setting any deadlines for these and I tend to just do a bit when I feel like it. Coding never was the most enthralling endeavour!

The run up to Christmas is exciting, and the first Christmas-challenge blog of 2011 has sprung up already (and I thought John Lewis were premature with their Christmas run-ins!! ;) I look forward to reading about his exploits. There used to be a lot of fun trading blogs about a few years ago but they're mostly lying in my defunct folder in Google Reader now :(

Finally, I'm glad Google have decided to revamp Blogger a little bit. Certain things like be able to import images within the body of your text - as opposed to sticking it at the top of the post every time(!!!) - is a nice improvement. Google seem to be trying to get all their products to appear in line with the style of Google+ but they made a real "balls up" of their Calendar product, and I switched back to the old look immediately. It's all very well changing the appearance of something, as the eyes will soon get used to it, but removing useful functionality (e.g. the new calendar doesn't highlight the day you are on!!!!) is a real pain.

EDIT: The new Blogger interface doesn't put any line breaks in if you compose in HTML view....sigh! Already switched back to the old interface for the time being :/

Results Summary spreadsheet

2011-08-22T20:51:00.004+01:00

Kudos to Matt over at Mind Games for helping me load my lifetime Betfair profit-and-loss log into his excellent Results Summary spreadsheet.

For a couple of quid this thing is the biz. I've finally got an idea of how I'm doing on other events besides the horse racing and the answer is...rubbish!

I'm pleased that I haven't got too much to claw back on the football and golf, as I'm intending on becoming consistently profitable in these sports within 12 months.

What did surprise me was how much I typically lose on the horse racing every month in order to make an overall profit. Take my total so far for August and you'll see that £3,270.26 of positive trades were eaten into by -£1,078.00 of negative ones

August to-date

with my strike rate averaging around 60%

last 4 days

It'd be interesting to hear from other pro traders re their typical losses across the month as a percentage of their overall profit, as I think I'm letting too much of my hard earned slip through the net.

World Domination

2011-08-18T11:59:00.004+01:00

Well, my US PGA Championship golf picks landed out-of-bounds. Despite playing well a week before in the Bridgestone Invitation, Ishikawa managed to hit an 84 on his first round. Great. Ryan Moore drifted like a barge too, Choi and Snedeker were scratches, and I had greens on Mickelson and Jiminez for the win...but neither of them did much in the end.

I hexed John Senden by backing him at 120, prompting a drift to 150+. I thought I was fortunate to get a scratch on him but he ended up -4 and trading in the 20s by the end of day 2...ho-hum!

I backed a couple of top 10 hopefuls at the beginning of day 3 but they both had poor rounds and soon drifted too. Tenner loss overall.

I'm no further forward with my golf stats database since last Wednesday, as I've now become distracted with building Football Brain as I've now christened it - an EPL monitoring system that will take into account historic data, in-play stats and lineups, and player ratings which will all be processed as an EPL match unfolds to give me a real-time forecast of each game. It's quite an undertaking as it involves lots of data processing, but I'm convinced I can build it.

The manual horse racing trading continues to go from strength-to-strength, with £200ish days becoming more common now

I'm really incentivised to make consistent profits on other sports, a la Handy Andy, who has developed a successful football trading strategy alongside his horse-racing activities. I don't want to have my eggs all in one basket in case the horse racing rug is pulled from under my feet.

The angles in tonight's Thun v Stoke game are Thun's plastic pitch and the altitude. Think Spurs against Young Boys away last season and you get the picture. I'm looking at the 2-0 and 3-0 as possible trading options, with the 3-0 at 50 on Betfair currently. I might even consider revisiting my dormant Twitter account so I can post up these pearls of wisdom more easily ;)

US PGA Championship 2011 picks

2011-08-11T13:38:00.006+01:00

The WGC Bridgestone Invitational golf tournament last week left me -£6 worse off. I read a lot of column inches in the lead up to the tournament and was certain of achieving some profit. At one point I was 26 notes in the red but some good trading during days 2 and 3 helped me reduce the liability. At this point in my fledgling golf trading career, I'm happy to just get back to 0.

Golf trading is something I've been wanting to get my head around for quite a bit. I'm not a follower of the game by any means, and didn't see a single ball hit at Bridgestone, yet it doesn't mean I shouldn't get involved. The way a 4-day tournament plays out usually sees the lead change hands many times, and there are lots of scalping opportunities. Unlike in-running horse trading, the golf has a nice slow pace to it and i'm happy just to get some back bets matched and lay my stakes at lower prices, leaving the profit on the player if the lays are matched.

I'm not going Billy Big Stakes on the golf until I've got some decent stats together in my database, which I've been busy importing this week. I was hoping get done before the start of the PGA Championship but, despite burning the midnight oil last night, I don't have enough data enable me to make solid predictions yet. So at this point, I'm just going to guess!

Actually, it's more like educated guessing, since I've been keeping an eye on the golf markets for a whopping two whole tournaments now, and have noticed a few trends. Day 1 is more guessy than 2 & 3 anyway because you can't really get an idea of a player's chances until they've completed at least a round. Most of the value has been sucked out of the market by Day 4 and you have to use decent sized stakes to get anything back.

We'll see what happens :)

WGC Bridgestone Invitational 2011 picks

2011-08-04T13:32:00.004+01:00

Current Odds bets Order by Matched Date

Hunter Mahan 32 £4.00 £124.00
Bubba Watson 55 £4.00 £216.00
Zach Johnson 55 £2.00 £108.00
Justin Rose 85 £2.00 £168.00
Retief Goosen 120 £2.00 £238.00
David Toms 110 £2.00 £218.00
Darren Clarke 110 £2.00 £218.00
Heath Slocum 410 £2.00 £818.00

Graphs "Я" Us

2011-08-04T01:46:00.004+01:00

Been tinkering with the Betfair C-SharpAPI6ExampleV1.1 code again this evening (this is the sample code you can freely get from the Betfair Developers Program website once you sign in).

I've been looking for way to automate the grabbing of graphs from the Betfair site so I can gain some perspective on certain tournaments, mainly golf ones at the moment. With the WGC Bridgestone Invitational 2011 starting this week, I once again have absolutely nothing to go on from previous years in terms a player's chances.

So my tweaks to the core code have yielded quite a nice solution. You basically fire up the app

Select "Show Active Event Types" and drill down to the event that you want

and it spits out all the runners' graphs for that event. Simply rename the directory to something a bit more meaningful - in my case WGC Bridgestone Invitational 2011 - Day 0 - lob the directory somewhere that Picasa (other photo viewers are available!) can see it and you get a snapshot of the event as it stands with the each graph labelled with the "runner's" name and ordered alphabetically

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to reproduce the whole code here but if anyone is interested, drop me a line via the email address printed on my blog's banner and I can email you the frmMain.cs file.

That's 3 hours of my life I won't get back - I'm off to bed!!

Settling in

2011-07-27T23:51:00.005+01:00

Well I managed to get the new iMac in without too much bother

and the Mini is on the other side of the room to run my bot and so I can write some more data import code

Not my usual mug you understand

Porting my routines over to the Mini has broken them, partly because SQL server names are now different but also because (I think) I wasn't running the right Visual Studio 2005 service pack. I downloaded about a gigabyte of updates and patches this evening and they seemed to have installed ok, so it should just be a case of picking it up in the morning where I left off.

The beauty of running a virtual machine is that you can copy over the image and run it in another vm on another machine right away. I copied over my Mini's vm image to my iMac last night and was glad to see Windows 7 boot up without any bother.

The iMac screen is physically closer to me than my previous screen (there's no room behind to push it back any further) and it took a little while for my senses to adjust to the new distance whilst trading this afternoon. Whereas before I had 10 in-running ladders, I now only have 8 because the reduced distance between my eyes and screen means I can't scan all 10 ladders without moving my head (it's a bit like watching a movie from the front row).

I got on okay with things in the end and was impressed by the speed and stability of the new machine. The Toy ran effortlessly within the VMware session. The iMac gets quite warm at the back when it's working hard - the metal case must be acting as a heat-sink I suppose. There's a big slot in the top for the warm air to escape from....I just hope the thunderflies don't get in there as I've already had some get in and then die in 3 other screens and they're unsightly. I was typing the other week and (no joke) I was wondering why I couldn't delete this stray apostrophe from the text......only it wasn't an apostrophe grrrrrrrr :(

The markets were quite kind to me today and I was pleased with my achievements. I messed up the big race of the day by trying to trade Canford Cliffs with larger stakes than I'm used to and never really got on the right side of anything, ending up 25 notes down. I haven't really noticed a huge shift in the markets since the new PC was introduced, but then I'm still a relatively small fish in the large pond and I suppose the changes are more noticeable at the "top end". Bottom Feeders (see glossary) like me are grateful for the scraps, and damn tasty scraps they are too!

On the crab!

Compulsion

2011-07-24T13:27:00.009+01:00

I actually feel like I'm getting somewhere with my data imports. The Betfair data extractor I've written is working fine except for one niggle around the totalmatched field which, depending on what time of day you query the API, may or may not break the delimiter I've set on the columns. I'll have to write some more clean-up code to eliminate the manual effort I'm forced to do.

The Betfair data and MFPro action logs (ie the logs which actually detail what bets have been placed) are then imported into a SQL database via this SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) job that I've set up. I love the graphical nature of SSIS and really got to grips with the technology while I was in paid employment. The fact that I'm now using my skills in this fashion is really quite ironic!

SSIS chain of events

Finally, some meaningful data in a SQL view - the pain was worth it

My bot is now using real money and by the end of yesterday was 4 points up - whoopee! Sitting here writing this, I've just heard the software make that comical "wah wah wah" noise so not exactly the start I was hoping for in the first at Carlisle. Now I'm using real money, I'm compelled to gather as much data as I can so I can fine-tune the bot and make it as profitable as possible. Test modes are all very well but unless you're losing real money, it's hard to get motivated to find winning ways.

If I can get the bot winning, I'll be keen to interface it with BetDaq as quickly as possible because, like many others, I'm appalled by Betfair's new Premium Charge structure (despite not having to pay it yet). Betfair's website is shockingly slow now with all these panels popping up everywhere, their API was down yet again last Saturday and the whole ethos of the company now smacks of corporate greed.

There have been many requests on the Geek's Toy forum for a "purple" version of the software but The Geek is keeping quiet on the topic. There was talk a few weeks ago on the forum of a sell-out and The Geek was being very cryptic (perhaps because of a non-disclosure agreement?) so what the future holds for the software in general is anybody's guess. I still love using the software but in this fast-changing industry, fickle users will migrate to something else if the "grass is greener"...or purple-r! The Toy is classier than anything else out there and I've tried them all now; if I had to use BetAngel or something else just to get BetDaq access I will be gutted, especially as I would rather not line the pockets of certain well-publicised characters in the API software industry.

BetTornado
I've changed my set-up now in case The Toy / my internet / my PC goes belly up. I used to run another copy of The Toy on my netbook with a 3G O2 dongle. It helped me out a few times but I wasn't happy with the time it took to load a market ladder using the netbook - it could take anything upto 30 seconds which is too long in this game. With the O2 dongle having come to the end of the contract period, I decided to ring up Vodafone to see if I could use my iPhone's data tethering feature with my current contract. Surprise surprise, that feature was an extra £10 per month but what it means it that I can use my iPhone as a 3G wireless hotspot and then run BetTornado on my iPad so I quickly exit a trade. It works really well and is nice and quick, the login takes about half a second and markets load in a second of two.

The BetTornado app on the iPad

Hotspot set up on the iPhone...what is a hotspot not?

BetTornado: another MASSIVE green!

I've not yet manually traded with the 'Tornado but I can see it being really handy to use in front of the telly when the footy is on.

More Apple free-advertising
After a sticky start, the Apple Mac Mini has been earning her keep in the last couple of months. I've been running Windows 7 on VMware Fusion, and The Toy has been running like a dream. Now that I'm botting more actively, I managed to convince myself that I need a more powerful Mac to trade on so I can run the bot on the low-power Mini...it doesn't take a lot to persuade me to empty my purse at the Apple store! The new Minis (released last week) didn't float my boat so I decided to order an iMac instead

Well if you don't spend your money on anything else, you might aswell have some nice gear - right?

Gruss vs MF Pro - there's only one way to find out...FIGHT!

2011-07-15T10:24:00.011+01:00

I've been busy lately trying to work out whether I like MarketFeeder Pro or Gruss better as a basis for my botting activities; they both have their pros and cons. MF Pro has an effortless way off adding concurrent horse racing markets to monitor by selecting a couple of checkboxes and hitting "Go!"

and they all appear in a list

where you can monitor them for however long you want by fiddling with the settings

you have to reload the markets again for some settings to take effect (eg the refresh rates)

Gruss seems to make a "pigs ear" of this process by loading "quick pick" lists into seperate tabs

and then forcing you to key in the monitoring start time for each tab (or "page" as they call it)

which on a daily basis is not only time consuming, but means there's more room to make typing errors.

On the other hand, MF Pro makes a "pigs ear" of the excel integration by loading each market on the separate worksheet (today there are 40+ races!) and giving them each a meaningless label (I think it's the market id) instead of the racetrack and time; it also doesn't log your bets anywhere on the spreadsheet except when they're active, in which case they appear momentarily on a separate sheet; finally, when MF Pro is interacting with the sheet it affects its responsiveness quite markedly.

After much deliberation though, MF Pro won the fight, especially as I have no real desire to start re-writing my triggers as macros in order for Gruss to execute them - there's too much room for error and besides, I already know they work in MF Pro.

My one concern with MF Pro is that you are confined to writing triggers based on preset criteria, but there is an option to import only the selections you want to trade that day

so my idea is to have already ruled out (ie deleted from the import list) certain selections based on other criteria, before MF Pro gets hold of them. I'm intending on using data from various freely available sources a la Cran to create the hot list

back-of-a-fag-packet view of the "Grand Design"

I'll try and make at least part of the import job code available as soon as it's written - I'm still hacking at the C# API sample code from the Betfair Developer Program site at the moment. Thanks to Cran and MF (Millionaire Fund?) for the guidance.

Taking it easy

2011-06-30T17:04:00.008+01:00

Things have been pretty intense since the beginning of the year (when I officially went full time) and haven't really had more than about 2 consecutive days off all year.

So in the latter half of this month I decided to take some time off from the ladders and do some nice things like visit the seaside and go out for a nice Sunday lunch at my favourite country retreat, followed by a meander through the countryside

bloody countryside...

I've also endeavoured to get my bot up-and-running using the Market Feeder Pro software I was getting to know earlier in the year. There are a million things you can do with the triggers - think of a strategy and it can probably be achieved without programming. I've so far managed to implement about 5 in-running strategies now using the test mode (ie no real money used), and none of them have brought me the riches I was anticipating. Things happen very quickly in-running, and my bot seems to be behind the action, chucking in bets long after the opportunity has vanished. Of course, this has meant that lots of virtual money has been thrown down the virtual drain.

I'm wondering whether the software is not fast enough for my needs or is it just that my triggers are inefficiently written? It's obviously one of those things that I can only figure out for myself as sharing the strategies obviously isn't the smartest idea.

I'm willing to give Gruss a try, but it's lack of a test mode worries me. I don't want to throw real money down a real drain while testing whether my strategies work more efficiently in that software.

Incidentally, a few years ago, when I was dipping my toe in the Betfair markets, I came across a horse racing lay system and coded a bot to find the selections for me according to the rules of this system. It took me ages to get my head round the API and although the bot did its job, it was a bit flakey. Anyway, I implemented this same system in Market Feeder in about 10 minutes using a couple of triggers. I'd say MF Pro is ideal for pre-race strats and for watching and reporting on markets, but the jury is still out on its in-running capability.

The time off was nice but the profits have taken a bit of a hammering - first 18 intense days of the month...

versus the last 12 days...

1.8k for the month is still pretty respectable though and brings me a decent lifestyle. In retrospect, since the announcement of the Premium Charge changes this week, there isn't any hurry to reach 250k anymore!

Regarding the PC, obviously it has long-term "career" implications for me as it does many others. It's a bit shocking how suddenly it came into force and how mercilessly it has affected big-hitters like Peter Webb, who made a cool 1.7k on Saturday racing. Unless he finds a way to play the system, I shouldn't think he'll be too happy handing back a grand of his winnings in the future.

I'm a long way off the 250k threshold but as other traders have commented, the goalposts could move again without warning. Whilst 250k gives me some decent "headroom", who's to say that Betfair won't eventually decide to move the 250k limit down to 100k before too long. That will affect a lot more people, me included - I'm expecting to have reached 100k in the next 3-4 years. I never really expected to be trading for more than about 5 years anyway as I figured that if the PC didn't catch up with me, some new tax ruling would hammer another nail in the coffin. It seems the Betfair "golden era" is very much over now and, as someone else said, anyone thinking of making a decision to leave a job and try and make it on the exchange should probably think again.

Still, as someone who decided a while back that living in the moment is the best policy, I'm not going to worry about the next 2/3/4 years as anything could happen in that time.

Why don't you....

2011-06-18T19:46:00.007+01:00

...just switch off your television set and go out and do something less boring instead?

Essential 80s viewing

In my case today, it was more like "close down The Toy and go and do something more useful instead".

£50 up early on, back to a tenner, £100 up a bit later, back to a tenner. Ho-hum. I'm going to have to start seriously monitoring how much money I'm forfeiting as I enter my profit into my spreadsheet each day; it's not something I account for at the moment and I think things have got worse on that front just lately.

Not much doing for me at Ascot this week. Day 1 on Tuesday was a non-starter and I was chasing a silly in-play loss from another meeting for most of the session. Days 2,3 & 4 were steady but nothing to get excited about. So just another fair-to-middling return for the week

I'm off to the sea-side tomorrow and will probably have Monday and Tuesday off too, to recuperate. I don't want to see another ladder now until Wednesday!

My golf trades were damp squibs in the end. I set up Market Feeder Pro (cool Betfair tool I blogged about a while ago) to email me market updates triggered by certain price movements. Well, KJ Choi drifted like a barge early on and activated my stop-loss and I was out faster than Duncan Bannatyne after a bad sales pitch!

"Musical bog roll holder? Sorry Mets, but AAAAYM OOOOOT!"

I haven't used the 'Feeder in anger yet, but this market watch facility alone is very useful when you haven't got time to be sitting at the computer. I'm intending to employ it during Wimbledon to notify me of certain match odds, and because I'm using GMail's push email, the notifications appear on my iPhone practically instantly. As my automated trading venture evolves, the Mac Mini will probably end up being on 24/7 eventually as it watches markets, gathers data and puts on bets; it has a low power consumption though so as far as my Southern Electric bill is concerned, I should be ok! This virtual utopia is still a long way off mind you.

Golf US Open 2011 predictions

2011-06-16T10:30:00.004+01:00

I've made my choices, so get your money on and then sit back and watch the green come in ;)

Bit of a "finger in the air" job in choosing - there are lots of differing opinions on the interweb!

First and foremost, I want to get my stakes back so when (if) the prices come in enough I'll lay off my stake. I'll look to hang on to Mickelson until 54 holes when I can hopefully trade out for a nice bit of green.

Feeling better

2011-06-11T20:12:00.008+01:00

I had quite a few responses to my last post about my post on feeling stressed. Thanks for your concerns, it's comforting to know that there are people in the same boat as me who can empathise with such matters.

In summary, the main points that people made were:

- trying too hard can be counterproductive
- an edge wins over in the end
- get a health check

This week I've attempted to be kinder to myself and have taken it really easy on the trading front. I had Tuesday off because there were too few cards for me to be sitting there like a lemon all afternoon / evening. Weds-Fri I only started about 4pm until early evening. Today was a full day but then Saturdays usually are.

The takings have been a bit patchy but I've managed a bit more beer money without too much stress

Today was interesting

despite a -£100 loss in-running which knocked me into the negative zone for the day, I found it quite easy to build the profits back up again with the mentality that good always wins over evil...er I mean that my edge wins over in the end!

Taking the odd big loss, although wasteful, is part-and-parcel of the in-running game. No matter how much you try and formalise your selections to either back or lay, something can and will go wrong from time-to-time and then losses have to be curtailed at the earliest opportunity. The in-running markets can be savage, but I still prefer them to the pre-race markets which I seem to be finding harder and harder to read these days. It used to be that in-running trades would supplement my pre-race profits but I think the tables have turned now and I am more consistent in-running.

What lies on the sea bed and shakes?

2011-06-05T20:57:00.005+01:00

A nervous wreck of course!

Where did everyone go?

Since last Sunday's in-running misery, I've fought back hard this week (as in Premium Charge week, Mon-Sun) to regain my losses and then some. By Thursday, I was on for a 1k+ week but Friday was appalling and Saturday was only saved in the last hour.

But I had to have an enforced break today because my nerves were well and truly jangled. This "trying to better last week / month" approach I've been taking has been killing my normal sleep patterns, to the point where I'm making trades in my sleep some nights and waking up tense and tired the next morning.

I saw an optician this week and she said something about getting my blood pressure checked as she'd noticed something when she shined that blinkin' million lumen light in my eyes!

I wouldn't say I've stressed out per se, but this jaw-clenching tension that I get some days (usually the days where I've sat there for 5 hours and made bugger all) is bound to have a physiological effect if I endure it for long enough, so I need to be more aware of when it's happening and try some relaxation techniques...

Stick needles in me? No flippin' way!!

Hard lesson

2011-05-29T17:42:00.005+01:00

I was only saying to the missus earlier that I might take the plunge and buy an iPad 2

It would give me something to mess about with even though I've got every sort of computing device going already.

So to lose nearly the cost of an iPad in one race is a bit disturbing

A hedging error in-running, brought on by desperation, turned a -£100 loss into more than thrice that.

But the difference between now and, say 12 months ago, is that I didn't sulk or beat myself up about it - I just carried on clawing it back. I was pleased to claw back a ton to reduce the deficit. With the Bank Holiday tomorrow, I intend to get back much of the rest.

It put a dent in my week's profits that's for sure

See-saw

2011-05-26T21:28:00.006+01:00

Another one of those see-saw days illustrated by the following chart

At about 7pm, the profit switch flicked over to the "ON" position and the money came.

I haven't quite worked out why I had to win £280 and lose £150 in order to make the £130 profit (I don't mean the Maths!). I think I've only ever had one 100% positive day in all my 500+ days trading on Betfair. Perhaps accepting losses is just a bad habit I've got into?

Since yesterday, I've started hiving off my profits into the Aussie wallet again so I'll have a decent bank for Royal Ascot, which isn't too far away. I don't know where the Spring / Summer months are going but we'll soon be on the run-up to Christmas again at this rate and I'm not happy about that!

In other news, does anyone get annoyed by Tommo's commentary on Timeform? I'm starting to get irritated by his exageration of certain horses' chances as he calls them home. The Timeform pundits are forever correcting his calls after the race. Admittedly, it's not the easiest job in the world and I still don't know how they do it - especially with large fields in sprints - but there are certainly some racing commentators I'd choose over others when I'm trading in-running...and Tommo is not one of them!

Stick to presenting, Tommo!

Eurovision 2011

2011-05-14T23:45:00.007+01:00

Well, the Eurovision trading went ok, with a few more quid earned

I think I managed to forget everything I learned last year but then again, a year is a long time and I don't tend to make notes. No I tell a lie, I don't ever make notes!

With £5 million groats matched on the event, it's nothing to be sniffed at. For the uninitiated, there seems to be 3 stages to the trading: firstly, the speculative trading that happens throughout the semis and right up until the final begins on the telly; then there's the in-running trading that goes on while the songs are playing; and lastly there's the "dix points" bit at the end which is a different beast altogether.

I'd made most in the "middle bit" while the songs were on. The trading at the end, during the scoring, is so swingy about the favourites it reminds me of trading the tennis. I could have done better and made a few mistakes but it's treble what I made last year so that's progress.

The horse trading continues to be kind to me. Dare I say it though, I've been suffering from boredom recently and have therefore been trying to take some more time off so I don't find myself trading 7 days a week. I'm not really "growing" at the moment ie I haven't managed to scale up my winning edge to Adam Heathcote proportions which has contributed to the boredom. There are far more interesting things to be getting on with than watching the ladders and I suppose I'm plateauing, but in a comfortable fashion. In other words, I'm doing enough to get by at the moment.

I ran into a bit of trouble on Wednesday and Thursday. Just to explain, I trade with a 2k bank and only withdraw the profit I make that day in order to "reset" the bank for the next day. It's an OCD-related thing, I have to start the session on a whole amount! :D

I withdrew Tuesday's winnings to my bank to reset my balance to 2k but forgot about the dent the Premium Charge was going to make on Wednesday. I traded on Wednesday with a bank of £1875 and felt like I was playing catch-up the whole session to get my balance over 2k so I could allow myself a withdrawal. The result was a crappy Wednesday

The same thing happened on Thursday too

So on Friday I deposited some money back into the Betfair account to round up the balance to 2k and, voila, no more obsessing about the min 2k balance and the money flowed in

Just by artificially removing this simple distraction, I could concentrate properly and make some decent money once again! That's another lesson learned this week.

Man Utd v Schalke

2011-05-02T18:06:00.004+01:00

I couldn't resist a lay of Man Utd's qualifying odds for this week's CL game

I was a Man Utd fan as a kid. It was one of those things I went along with because my Uncle supported them, but these days I have no such allegiances with any team in particular.

Perhaps Utd's loss to Arsenal is an indicator of a less-than-straightforward run-in. A nice early goal from Schalke should shake things up a bit. One can but hope!

Chasing my tail

2011-05-01T08:37:00.006+01:00

Had a very poor Saturday yesterday

I couldn't get to grips with the pre-race stuff - especially at Newmarket which seemed to be all over the place - and the in-running trading wasn't too kind either.

Saturday's have, in the past, always been my "banker" days where I can be assured of some decent green. The last two have been very dissapointing indeed. On the other hand, I've had some good midweek sessions that have come as a surprise. There's really no logic to it - when the money wants to come, it will come. The rest of the time I just try and keep my losses to a minimum.

This mentality has kept my feet on the ground and ensured a decent April

I can't grumble at my results, although I realise that I'm still operating at a fairly low level in terms of bank size, stakes and activity in the markets.

I'm not standing still however; my bank is now 2k which gives me a bit more flexibility, and my stakage has been creeping up a wee bit in the last 2 weeks. I have to be careful though not to change things too drastically and risk upsetting the applecart.

Siberia - the place to be!

2011-04-28T18:16:00.004+01:00

I ramped up "Scooter - Ramp" on iTunes this afternoon to get me fired up for the session. It seemed to do the trick

Sometimes, it's nice to block out all that "horse talk" for even just a few minutes. Go on, give it a try and crank up those speakers :D

Cow muck

2011-04-26T21:48:00.004+01:00

Today was cow muck.

Ol' banana fingers here goes to type in a £2 stake but doesn't clear the 5 that's in the box already. £52 plonked on a nag just as it falls out of the leading pack. Result = £52 gone.

"What a slip up!"

Next up was an in-running lay of some Ruby Walsh nag for a nice 20 English groats. I was already planning what I was going to spend this fortune on when...what's that? The leading 3 horses have all tripped over each other? Result = Walsh wins, Mets hands back the groats plus more besides.

What else have we got? Oh yes, the £200 lay I put on a horse at Fairyhouse just as "Billy Big Stakes" comes crashing in with a back for 97k....what the hell? Not a couple of grand, 97 grand!! Result = -£25 red across the field.

It wasn't this hard yesterday

The jury is in

2011-04-25T19:53:00.007+01:00

I've decided that I like the "Windows running on a Mac" experience. The software was playing nicely today and I had no performance issues. After a bit of tweaking, I've even got the cursor movement to "feel" a bit more natural now too.

The racing was lovely with lots of opportunites both pre-race and in-running

It was business as usual - unlike the previous two days, I got off to a nice gentle start and the money flowed in nicely after that. Impatience can be the undoing of me, and many others I suspect.

It was nice to get out for a bike ride with the family this morning round our local park, a great way to clear my head and relax me going into the session. I've not been very good at preparing properly for my sessions. Usually I'm scoffing a last minute bite while franticly powering up my computers, logging into The Toy etc; none of this sits well with my OCD and I'm therefore going to try and be a bit more organised in future.

Mac rage

2011-04-24T20:53:00.008+01:00

This was my first weekend trading on the Mac Mini - the jury is still out on that one. Windows 7 was running like a badly oiled machine midway through the session and I had to reload the virtualisation software and then Windows before I could continue. I wasn't sure why it got so sluggish as it ran fine yesterday.

The thing I haven't quite got to grips with is the mouse movement on the Mac. Natively, OS X does funny things to the mouse cursor, like slow it down over buttons for instance. Steve Jobs probably thinks that's a useful feature or something, but I couldn't live with it and had to download some "mouse-correcting" software just to get it behaving approximately like it does in Windows

SteerMouse stops all that Mac cursor craziness!

I noticed in the latest release of The Toy (the one with the training mode) that The Geek has introduced a couple of new keyboard shortcuts to the fold - Z to cancel all bets on the lay side of the selection and C to cancel all the back bets. I've been meaning to investigate the keyboard shortcuts for aaaaaages and quite possibly the most useful one for me is the market sort by hitting the spacebar. I was doing this via the menu system before but now whacking the spacebar save me loads of effort. It's just a case of factoring these keystrokes into my action now as I generally have my left hand over the numbers at the minute to quickly change the stake amounts. Sooner or later, these extra keystrokes will become second nature, much like when I used to play COD4 online where I'd be jump-strafing while simultaneously killing 3 enemies with headshots and 'nading 3 others...

Anon: keep dreaming...

I don't think I'll be paying too much premium charge next Wednesday, as this week has been very patchy and today was no exception

Hardware and software issues don't help, but more than that I've been behaving impatiently the last few days. My in-running staking plan has gone a bit barmy as I've sought bigger spoils, and I've suffered some heavier losses in the process. I'm careful to keep my daily losses to a minimum, so I'm not left with an uphill battle the next day.

I don't get "bent out of shape" over a £20 loss in the name of R&D, but obviously it's imperative not to let these R&D days get out of hand as it's a fine line between an R&D day and a sloppy-ass day!

Anon: "Bent out of shape"? "Sloppy-ass"? What's with all the Americanisms?!

There's a plethora of racing on tomorrow, and once again I'll be like a kid in a candy store, looking to squeeze ever drop out of the session. I'll try and be a bit more careful tomorrow and start as I mean to go on.

Not so well

2011-04-20T23:27:00.006+01:00

It must be one of the first occasions where it's taken me longer to think of a post title than to write the post!

Sometimes there is only so many ways to write "I did well" or "not so well". Today I did not so well after getting a bit of an in-running kicking

Another one of those claw back days I'm afraid but it could've been worse. I was only thinking earlier how nice it was that I haven't had a losing day in a while.

At -£125 down I was starting to think about shutting up shop and had set -£140 in my mind as a cut-off point. When I'm down a few quid I quite often find my mouse hand operating independently from my brain and further losses can occur if I'm not careful.

A nice £44 a bit later gave me a fighting chance, although that could've been £80+ if I'd greened up a bit quicker on one horse in-running. A bit later on I was £20 up on one horse pre-race just before it was withdrawn, and was about to green up in another for £50-£60 in-running when my horse's fortune changed mid-race. I ended up with 7 sheets - bah. Ah well, when it's not going your way what can you do?

I'm a bit perturbed about there not being any racing on Good Friday - I totally forgot about that since last year! I was looking forward to some good Bank Holiday action too. Looks as though I'll have to spend ALL arvo round my sister's drinking beer instead of just some of it ;)

With Good Friday this week and the Royal Wedding next, I'll have taken at least 6 days off this month altogether...it's unheard of! What with getting off to a good start for the month, helped of course by the Aintree meet, it's quite nice to wind down a bit at the end of the month before the next one begins. I'm always at my most intense at the start of each month because I look to get a good boost to take the pressure off the rest of the month.

On the up

2011-04-15T20:09:00.009+01:00

"Just the one, Mrs Wembley"

I didn't feel like I was getting very far at the start of today's session, and quickly found myself -£35 down and counting. Still, I quickly turned things around and ended with a satisfying total for the afternoon / evening

As "Trader" over at Greed All Over points out, the evening racing feels "like continually being on call for the next 6 months or so". Certainly, with four meetings this evening it would've been an opportunity missed.

I'm trying to be careful not to trade every race every day at the moment, as scrapping for every bit of money is tiresome and not really necessary - I'm not that desperate for money!

I gave myself Monday and Tuesday off this week as I sorted out my "trading room" to accomodate my new Mac Mini

"oooooh, shiny"

The Geek's Toy is running in Windows 7 on a free trial of some virtualisation software I'm using called Parallels. I gave it a quick go yesterday but I think I need to tweak some of the settings as my mouse was acting a bit sluggishly and I can't be having that when I rely on accurate mouse clicks so much.

Obviously, it's important not to change a winning formula, so if I find that running the software in this way inhibits my performance then I'll just keep on the using my existing Windows box for trading and use the mac for my musical endeavours.

If you could see the amount of wires I'm using, you'd be horrifed!

Aintree Day 3

2011-04-09T20:32:00.006+01:00

It's been a great day today. I awoke with a smile knowing it was "National" day. By 11 this morning I'd scrawled all over my Nan's Daily Mirror and narrowed the field to 13 based on some common winning trends of the last 10 years that I discussed in this post.

RIP Dooney's Gate :(

Ballabriggs was amongst the 13 but I didn't bother with him as his place odds were a bit on the short side.....DOH! I was only staking small amounts so I went for outsiders and ended up with these selections

And what did I get for my trouble? As cockney Gary from the Beeb would say: "naffink" !

Oh well, at least I went about it intelligently this year. Funnily enough, my wife, Nan, Mum, Dad and sister's Mother-in-law (!) all had a punt and we up came with nothing in the top 4 between us!!

Coke and Kalms were the order of the day as I got stuck into the trading side of things. Actually, I think Coke and Kalms cancel each other out do they?

Always read the label

I attacked the markets and found the trading conditions very well suited to my style - some of the in-running stuff was very nice indeed - and I was pleased with my total for the day

I was actually over 300 up but this total takes into account the -£24 lost in the place markets putting bets on for other people.

I found trading at Aintree was very good indeed, except for the National itself, which was a bit of a disaster. Basically, I was going to put some family bets on in the win markets using my spare BF account, but my funds didn't transfer over in time so I had to put them on using my main account.

Well not only did I find the pre-race conditions unfavourable, but in-running, these family bets were getting in the way of my hedging! I was hedging their bets accidentally as I traded the same horses and then had to quickly put the right back bets on again in case they came in. This happened on 3 horses and was a distraction I didn't need. Another lesson learned for next time! So I ended up breaking even on the race, which isn't the end of the world but I wanted to do better given the amounts of money sloshing around.

Oh well, there's always next year :)

Aintree Day 2

2011-04-08T20:57:00.005+01:00

Well I came up a bit short on yesterday's total

I didn't have any trouble at Aintree which is where a bulk of this came from. I was very poor at the other meetings and gave away loads. I didn't even realise I was doing it either until I looked at the PnL half way through.

The Aintree markets were right up my street, they had a nice loose feel to them and I got on the right side of some good moves. I expect the money will be a bit more "clogged up" tomorrow if last year is anything to go by.

It's very exciting that practically the whole nation gets behind the big race. My neighbour stopped me earlier asking for a tip. I told him I'm still "narrowing the field"...which I am. I'll take my fancies round my Nan's in the morning and pore over the Daily Mirror to make sure I haven't missed anything. Then I'll stick a couple of bets on aside from my usual trading to make it more interesting. As appointed Chief Bet Placer of the family, it's me they'll all come to with their 50p e/w stakes on some 200/1 shot they fancy cos it's got a nice name! It's little wonder the bookies rub their hands together on National Day.

Of course, we'll be treated to more fine presenting on the Beeb from John Parrot and his annoying "cock-en-ey geez-a" sidekick Gary. Was it last year or the year before that they used some rather foul language "off air" without realising their mics were still on?!

I treated myself to a new toy today

I bought a Mac Mini 2010 with an extra 4GB of RAM to prop up the rather pitiful 2GB it's supplied with. Typical Apple, selling you a machine that is only half upto the job and then offering you a load of expensive upgrades at the checkout. Anyway, I got this on eBay for a decent price after making a rather speculative Best Offer of £525 which was then accepted. I bought the RAM upgrade from Crucial for 35 notes.

Apple will probably be bringing out a 2011 refresh anytime, potentially with the i3 CPU they've just stuck in their new range of Mac Book Pros, but I couldn't be arsed to wait for that and anyway, it won't retail for less than 650 sheets (maybe a bit less on Amazon)...and I bet they won't upgrade the RAM!

I owned the original Mac Mini - they're whisper quiet and use little power. I plan to run Windows 7 on a virtual machine and use the Mac as my main trading box in the future. My current Windows 7 box, which was originally a gaming machine, has a 400W power supply and a GeForce graphics card so it's pretty juicy and a bit noisy. The Mini uses about 20-30W of power on average with an idling power usage of just 11W!

Well, we all deserve a little treat now and again :)

Aintree Day 1

2011-04-07T20:15:00.006+01:00

I'd set my expectations high on day 1 of Aintree but only ended up with a fairly modest haul in the end

Being more of a scalper than a swing trader, I have a tendency to jump off a move after one or two ticks, rather than let the thing "pan out". The reason is, I'm always grateful for any green - I think I've got a hamster mentality

"Say what?"

My daughter's hamster will gladly hoover up any bit of food you give it and store it in it's pouch, because it's got a short-term view that this will be it's last meal. If it looked out of the cage it would see a chuffin' great bag of food sitting there! Similarly, I'm hoovering up all these little bits of green without really have a long term view of the market.

It's a bit of a bad habit I've fallen into really, this jumping from one horse to another hoovering up the available scraps - it doesn't really require much thought or analysis. Yesterday must have been a swing trader's Christmas and Birthday rolled into one, but I couldn't capitalise on it because my swing trading ability is pretty poor

I typically won't trade the fave for this reason, I can't read the damn swings very well. On the other hand, my scalping ability is pretty well honed and I have a good idea now what works and what doesn't.

I'm sure if I can advance my interpretation of the market movements, then things will move up another gear.

Visually impaired

2011-04-02T00:02:00.007+01:00

There's an old saying: "Don't ever trust a boiler fitter with your satellite dish". Well, actually, it's a new saying as I've just made it up on the spot but I'm sure it will catch on! Yes, I had a new boiler fitted yesterday and I suspect (although I can't prove anything) that the boiler man broke my dish with his ladder as he repaired the gaping hole he'd made in the side of my house. So, until I get it sorted I'm trading without my usual ATR feed.

It's not a huge problem as I trade in-running almost exclusively to Timeform's commentary (it's quicker than ATR's commentary by at least a second) as my style of trading leaves little time to be staring at the runners for too long. I never did subscribe to the Racing UK channel after they messed me about with their stream - screw 'em! They can kiss my chuddies!!

It's been a good start to April

I traded all the meetings today right up until the 21:25 at Dundalk. It was a nice stress-free session and the money came nicely. It still only a fairly paltry 6 quid per race average but it's getting there.

March was a good month and I'm confident I can keep the momentum going throughout the spring and summer. I had a few days off in March and it has kept me motivated and fresh; I'll be doing the same this month, especially on the 29th April for the Royal Wedding (yes I'm a Royalist).

I'm excited about the Grand National next Saturday. Ever since I was about 8 or 9 I can remember having a flutter on this event. My Grandad always watched the racing on a Saturday but he'd only usually have a bet on Grand National day. Once we'd all pored over the paper for a few hours, we'd make our selections and he'd put them on at the bookies. He always had his own shortlist of 3 or 4 and would usually end up with something out of it. I never knew his selection process which, as a child, added to the whole "mystique".

Obviously things have changed a bit in the last couple of years, and I now find myself approaching the event with my trading head rather than a punting head. It takes all the fun out of it really but this is business. There was a pundit on the telly last year that reeled off a load of facts about past winners. Indeed, if you care to dig a bit deeper there are all sorts of filters to apply to this year's field. There is even a tool to strip out all the chaff from the field for you, although the website confusingly suggests that this is for the 2010 field, even though the runners appear to match up with Betfair's Antepost betting?

I expect I'll just trade the race this year unlike last year when I finished early to go round to my Nan's. It's times like that where I wish I could split myself in two so at least one of me could enjoy the event for what it is. I'll try and post up my "winning" selections by the end of the week for you all to laugh at!

gastropod mollusc-like (sluggish)

2011-03-26T22:18:00.009Z

I've been feeling a bit sluggish this week. Dunno whether it's a virus or what, but I haven't had much motivation, least of all for full-on trading.

I took Monday off, a self-enforced break and the first for a long time. My return on Tuesday was rubbish

The big loss was in-play, one of my lays went a bit wrong.

Losing days are damaging to me for so many reasons...

Firstly
It's money not earned. Following a bad day at the races, I always have this image in my mind of me going outside and throwing a clutch of £20s down the drain...not exactly positive reinforcement! As I skulked around the house after this particular day, my wife gave me the "look at the big picture" speech which is the only thing she can say to cheer me up when I'm like that, bless her. I went to the cash-and-carry that evening to buy some bulk items for a family party, and moped around thinking about how much it was going to all cost. It cost me £70 - that's 70 sheets I would have still had in my bank if I hadn't have turned the PC on that afternoon.

Secondly
Days spent losing are followed by more days wasted trying to get it back. So if I sustain a heavy loss on Monday, it might be Thursday before my bank is at the point it was on Sunday night, at which point I can carry on increasing the bank.

Thirdly
Guilt. That whole "I am the man of the house and provider for the family" ethos gets a good kick in the nuts on a losing day. "Hi honey, I'm home...WITHOUT ANY BACON". It's makes you feel like poo.

A bright side

The point I'm making here though (to myself), is a little bit of perspective is needed on a losing day. It needn't be all "doom and gloom". I haven't lost my family and home in a tsunami, nor a daughter to some crazed taxi driver. I'm not bankrupt. I have my health and many nice material possessions. And I have more freedom now than ever before.

It's important not to put off being happy and grateful until the "going is good" again, and it's VERY important to look at that big picture your wife goes on about. Besides, any trader that's worth his salt knows that another decent day is just around the corner

Battle: Cheltenham 2011

2011-03-18T18:06:00.011Z

Well, where do I start? It's been a profitable week and I'm pleased with my total over the last 4 days...

I feel pretty washed out today, and am popping 'Tesco Extra Power Pain Relief' tablets like sweets to keep the aches a bay. I've worked pretty hard the last 4 afternoons and I think I'm feeling a bit run down now.

I'm still boggled by some of the single race totals that people post up, particularly Peter Webb and Jack Birkhead. I've said in the past that Peter Webb appears to do no wrong and his posts leave me a bit cold, but nevertheless his profits are excellent. Somehow, he manages to trade two exchanges simultaneously? I've seen that film Multiplicity but I didn't realise it was ACTUALLY possible to clone yourself ;)

It also made me laugh when Peter wrote:

"it is clear than two or three horses a race are being manipulated and that is spoiling it for other exchange users"

Bahahahaha! Yeah, because everyone plays sooooo nicely the rest of the time - NOT!

Tuesday
Decent enough start to proceedings

I threw about a 2.5k bank at it and found the going pretty good. After so many naff meetings over the Winter, it was nice to trade some nice stable markets with some decent stakes for a change.

Wednesday

Upped my bank to everything I had (about 3.5k). Had to cut my session short as I'd agreed to go and see Battle: Los Angeles * with my wife and couldn't go back on it. I've had Cheltenham in my diary for weeks so I knew it was on but made the arrangement without thinking. When I think about how many other Wednesday afternoons I've sat there trading some crappy Southwell meeting for bugger all, it was a bit silly not trading every scrap of the most prestigious meeting in the National Hunt racing calendar!

I got caught for -£60 by a big sudden move in the last one and managed to reduce the loss by a little. I wouldn't say I was being complacent, I just took a risk opposing a trend and got bitten.

_{* The film was worth seeing for 3 and a half notes (Orange Wednesday) and had the right balance of everything I like in a film:

- Alien invaders
- Futuristic weaponry
- Fantasy destruction of major cities
- Simple plotline

:D}

Thursday

I found my stride on Thursday and was looking at a 400 quid day, but missed it by a few quid cos I couldn't get anything out of the Wolverhampton evening meeting. Oh well. The Cheltenham markets seemed very straightforward on this day and I had no trouble in getting 50 or 60 sheets in some races.

I'd laid Identity Parade before the last fence in the 16:25 at Towcester - not something I do very often - before it fell. I sat there for a brief second, counting my green, when the inevitable happened and it brought down the only other runner. Race VOID. Just when you think you've seen it all!

Friday

I was looking forward to today despite feeling under the weather and thought, after trading upto a ton pre-race in the Gold Cup, I was on for another record day. Sometimes though, I get a bit indifferent after a big win which comes down to the fact that once I get to a decent total for the day, the money starts to become less important and I sort of switch off a bit. I went on to lose about 60 quid before the urgency kicked in again and I was making it back with aplomb.

So in conclusion, I really enjoyed myself and have a target to try and beat next year. Lots more goodness to come during the Spring and Summer, and it really feels like we're starting to leave the long Winter behind. Hurrah!

Back down to Earth...

2011-03-14T17:55:00.005Z

...with a bump!

Nothing doing today...

I was experimenting in-running and took a few early hits so it ended up being a damage limitation exercise. I'll gladly accept a loss of this nature on a "research and development" day but obviously you've gotta not let them get out of hand otherwise you'll be forever chasing, and that's pretty exhausting.

I don't know what the next few days will bring. I'll settle for a couple of hundred quid across the 4 days, which is pretty meagre, but I'm no good at chasing big targets. I usually know early on if I'm ON THE CRAB as the money flows in effortlessly.

The witching hour

2011-03-14T00:19:00.008Z

Bit late to be posting but I can't settle - that late evening marrow bone snack is repeating on me...

Had my second best day ever on the gee gees, which is a bit surprising after yesterday's carry on.

I gonna celebrate and treat the family to some 3 ply toilet paper....no more Wilko budget bog roll for me! ;)

Most of it was from in-play trading, which seemed quite straighforward today. It got pretty hairy at times, and you do need to have your wits about you, but I think I'm onto something. Eventually, I wanna be making this daily, and more. I wanna roll wit' da big dogz!!

Quite how things will play out when the jump racing ends though is anybody's guess. Things have gone well in the last 3 months but there is always the danger my strats won't translate well to the flat racing.

I've added a Twitter feed to the blog. Why? Because I was bored during yesterday's downtime more than anything. I've been trying to think how I could make social networking work for me. I'm not really a big fan of it to be honest, and don't like plastering my life all over the internet, but at least Twitter is fairly unobtrusive. It's not like you need Twitter in order to follow people's tweets, as you can subscribe to the feeds in Google reader (though they don't come through instantly), but I can see the benefit when I've got (in Twitter's words) a "short, timely message" to write which doesn't require a full blog post. We'll see.

Living on the edge

2011-03-11T17:55:00.006Z

I upped my stakes in-running today. Admittedly, I made a few mistakes and was fortunate not to get stung.

It's easy enough to get caught up in the heat of the moment, especially when there is a lot of activity in the market towards the latter stages of a race.

I've been concentrating on a couple of new in-running strategies (well new to me). I think I'll be leaning more towards in-running trading in the future, as the frenzied action suits my style of play. I find it exciting, and greening up some decent amounts is ultimately more satisfying than "scraping a few quid" pre-race. I've probably peaked at pre-race trading now, and I find it too stressful to be bothered looking for new strats. All that second-, third- and fourth-guessing wears me out. I suppose it's human nature to try and find easier ways of achieving the same end result. The path of least resistance and all that!

I re-read one of Adam Heathecote's posts from last year, where he showed a screenshot of him making £1.8k in the Gold Cup. To this day, it still boggles my mind how someone can profit by that much on one race. That said, I think he remarked in another post that he will stake upto 6k on the big races, which goes some way to explaining it I suppose. This snippet was also interesting

"I traded roughly 4000 horse races averaging between £70 and £75 a race. I didn't realise when I started it was possible to do that but it definitely is if you reach the peaks..."

I wish he'd start posting again, as I always found his insight into market behaviour quite fascinating.

'e fell o-ver

2011-03-07T21:26:00.009Z

Traded a bit of the Blackpool v Chelsea game this evening. Switched the radio off at 3-0....he thinks it's all over....

Dodgy penalty decision for Chelsea's second if you ask me. I was only watching a grainy internet stream while listening to Five Live, but I could see enough to judge that it was less than deserved.

With arguably Blackpool's two strongest players out tonight, I didn't expect to be opposing the Chelsea victory in any shape or form. At 0-1 though, Drogba and Torres were looking decidedly flat, which made the draw odds tasty enough to scalp for a few quid. I'd built up a pretty decent amount on the draw but sadly it wasn't to be.

I did a £50 lay of Augsberg in Bundesliga 2 when they were 4-2 up with 30 mins to go. Well you do, don't you? At 1.04, it was only ever gonna cost me 2 quid.

Denied

These little side bets keep things interesting, but I'll only ever tend to risk what I've made in other games. I'll never get rich off the footy with my conservative approach, but I'll never get poor neeva!

Anyway, I haven't really got the patience to sit there watching the odds move at a snail's pace, especially since I've been doing the in-running horse markets.

The horse trading continues to serve up some decent daily returns and I'm pleased to be regularly exceeding my, in hindsight, rather modest £30-a-day personal target.

I had a family function to go to on Saturday. It always adds a bit of pressure knowing that someone will inevitably ask: "so how'dya get on then?"

Cue the 75 quid drubbing in the first race...

I fought back with some aggressive trading and had recouped the lot within half-an-hour, and got on with the job after that.

I say aggressive, but I didn't take any more risks than usual - I just upped the workrate to an almost frenzied state. I couldn't keep going at that exhaustive rate for the whole session that's for sure! I had to "save face" though, this is my living after all.

Hamstrung

2011-03-01T21:40:00.006Z

A 4-day BT outage has pretty much hampered all chances of me earning a bit of decent profit on the horses recently. I feel sorry for the Indian call centre people, getting arsey customers like me reading them the riot act because some muppet in this country decided to perform an upgrade without telling the customers going through that particular exchange.

In the meantime, I've been trading with the 3G BT dongle that I use on my backup netbook. This has of course meant that I've no backup and have therefore wimped out of any pre-race trading in fear of a PC crash or dongle outage. My PC randomly crashed one day last week which hasn't happened in ages, so I can't take any chances.

Trading purely in-running with a small bank has confirmed one thing, I can't rely on in-running profits alone to see me through. The pre-race trading appears to focus my i-r capers a bit more; lose a bit pre-race and I can look to make back the deficit i-r; make a bit pre-race and it acts as a buffer to take a few chances i-r. The two go hand-in-hand.

I suppose we all settle into a groove, a way of doing things, and when that pattern is disturbed then it can be very upsetting.

Missed the big move on Man Utd last night from 4 to 3.65 after my friend PeteG tipped me off about the Utd price being a bit high. I was a bit too hesitant and the price was gone before I could blink. I tried getting on board a bit later but I couldn't get matched at the price I wanted. I monitored the market throughout today and put some money on about lunchtime and then go caught by an upsurge in the price at about 12:30...

leaving me about £90 in the red. I calmly went and collected the nipper from playschool and waited for it to play out. I couldn't imagine Utd trading above 4 unless Ashley Cole had been firing his pellet gun at Rooney without me hearing about it ;) By 13:30 the price has settled down again and I'd managed to scratch it for a £4 loss, so I could relax again after that.

Managed to make a few quid in-play while listening to the match on Five Live. As much as I'd have preferred to watch the game on the telly, I can't bring myself to pay Sky all that money a month for the privilege - I pay them enough as it is (for multi-room etc).

My internet connection still isn't right, as although I'm back online, it feels like I'm on dialup again. I hope it's rights itself by the morning so I can get into a decent rhythm again tomorrow arvo.

Trading constipation

2011-02-25T21:20:00.007Z

Well today was a struggle...

A good 3 hours work there - not! It felt like there was a blockage which was stopping me making some money, a bit of trading constipation as I call it. I used to get a lot of days like this when I started out, usually a case of giving away as much as I make. These days, it's rare to make such a pitiful return but I just put it down to a lack of opportunities and move on. One man's opportunity is usually another's misfortune and it couldn't be more true than on Betfair.

I've managed to claw back Sunday's losing day and some more besides. It was a bit hard going on Monday and Tuesday knowing that I was just catching up with Saturday's end-of-day total, but by Wednesday I was through the worst of it and on my merry way again.

I opened another Betfair account at the start of the week so I can keep my pre-race and in-running banks seperate. I cleared it with Betfair first and they confirmed that they're ok about it as long as you're not trying to evade the Premium Charge or profit from their referral schemes in a sly fox sort of fashion. I'm just waiting for a bank transfer to complete and I'll be off and (in-)running.

I'm getting a bit burnt out again and may give myself Monday off with it being the last day of a rather short month. I've worked particulary hard this month and last, and have managed to stash a good lump of dosh away in my Aussie wallet to (hopefully) see me through the Spring and Summer festival season. Roll on March! Let's see, what have we got coming up...me buffday*... Cheltz** ...and of course - Spring! Lighter evenings and some milder weather - hurrah!

_{for my foreign readers that's *birthday and **Cheltenham}

A glass is completely empty

2011-02-20T17:37:00.009Z

Honestly, the last 3 hours has been a complete mess. First race in and I'm done for -£200 at Kempton...

"Ace!"

...then Betfair went down again (for probably the third time in as many weeks) which hindered any sort of comback...

"Cheers!"

...leaving me down overall for the weekend...

...and just below my 10k milestone I thought I was well and truly beyond...

"Do-do-do...come on and do the Conga..."

By the way, the in-play loss was my own undoing and not an API issue. Shiz happens and people get done for much worse, so I'll just move on do a West Brom ie try and tighten things up at the back!

Ideally what I need is a way of limiting my in-play liability to say £100. I've got onto The Geek and others to see if there is any way around it via The Toy. I hate the idea that my pre-race trading bank of 1k is at risk every time I trade in-play but swapping out a load to my Aussie wallet before every race is unrealistic.

If it's a limitation of the software then I might have to look at using something else in-running. Another alternative is to have another copy of The Toy open using a different account, but then I'm sure Betfair will be on my back about Premium Charge evasion!

If any readers have any better ideas then I'd appreciate your thoughts.

Realistically, I should make the money back, and more, by the end of the week but having to undo mistakes is a real pain in the backside.

A full pot

2011-02-18T18:08:00.007Z

I was ON THE CRAB again today...

and with 3 smashing days on the trot, it's been my best week so far...

It's meant that I've just broken the 10k barrier in earnings from Betfair.

Now although I wouldn't have discussed my earnings from my last job with strangers on the internet, I feel in this context it is important to highlight this particular milestone. I've come a long way from humble beginnings in late 2009, and it was touch-and-go whether the dream would actually become a reality, but I've just followed in the path of many others who've decided to walk away from industry and make it on their own.

I never comment much on the psychology of trading. There is obviously a lot of phsychology involved. When I first traded using the old Racing Traders software, Bet Trader Pro 4 or something, the feeling I got when I put my first £2 stake on the ladder was a mixture of ecstasy and sheer terror! I thought "I'm doing it, I'm putting my own money into the market and I have no idea what is going to happen next!". Then you overcome the terror, increase your stakes and move on. I still get scared at £10 a tick. One day I won't be, I'm sure. I think we're all naive in everything we do, no matter how "experienced" we might think we are. How many times have you looked back and thought "I'd do that differently if I had the chance"?

I think every bloody Betfairian has read "Trading in the Zone" by Mark Douglas. I read a few chapters and got a bit bored. It didn't change my life, I already knew my attitude to taking risks and I don't need a book to tell me otherwise. Why do you think it's taken me this long to reach 10k? ** It's from knowing my limits, focussing on the big picture and being realistic about my ability. Some kids at school always knew how to work out those difficult equations in an instant; then there were the kids who didn't have a clue and were more interested at flicking elastic bands at your head; lastly, there were the bunch in between who also liked flicking elastic bands but knew that it was important to get the equations finished first. I always got there in the end ;)

_{** In fairness, most of the 10k has come in the last few months so I know I'm "growing" at a good rate now.}

As I said at the start of the year, I need to try and explore other markets and find winning strategies in those too. I always have a look at the footy on a Saturday while I'm sitting here "doing the racing", even if I don't get involved. There's always cricket I suppose, but it involves having some sort of enthusiasm for it, which I don't. Same with rugby. I'm undecided about tennis. Perhaps golf would be an interesting avenue to explore, since I'm a reformed player anyway! I've made a bit on it in the past, but I think it was more luck than judgement. The thing is, it's hard to just get into a sport - it either captured your imagination in the first place, or it didn't.

There's the Eurovision to look forward to in May; I made a bit of dough on that last year and am keen to get involved again as I like watching it anyway. I've got Britain's Got Talent in my sights too. And the X-Factor of course, which will be later on in the year.

Now, where's that elastic band....

Deadliest Catch

2011-02-17T17:48:00.007Z

I watched a series of Deadliest Catch recently about Alaskan king crab fishermen. Blimey, those blokes have got guts! There are 1000s of boats out fishing in-season, looking for clusters of these crab, and the crew would often say they were "on the crab" if there were 30+ of the things surfacing in each of their pots.

At $30 a piece, a 30+ pot would understandably be regarded as a lucrative haul.

I've been "on the crab" (a worthy addition to my Glossary me thinks) every day except one this year, when I let frustration cloud my judgement and lost about 40 quid. I mean every day too, as I've not missed a day since 28th Dec (apart from 31st Jan when BF went down). The last couple of days has been particularly fruitful, where I even managed to profit from footy (which I'm sure I'm down on overall, given that I still treat it as a bit of a sideline and have tossed loads of dosh away on silly bets).

Whenever I trade for long periods without a break, I find I start getting the "twitches". It's a bit like the nervous system is saying "hey, give yourself a day off". But missing a day at the moment, when things are going swimmingly, is akin to not pulling up one of those crab pots. I could sit down and make £30 or £130 that day; I just never really know what's going to "come up in the pot".

"That's enough of the crab analogies now, Mets!"

Ok.

Actually, I did finish my session early yesterday to go for a swim. When we got to the pool, they wanted us to pay £40 - £20 for me and £20 for the wife - instead of the usual £7, because her membership had lapsed. 40 quid for a swim? WHAT IS THE WORLD COMING TO??!!

It's interesting to see that Mark Iverson has also been on one of Centaur's courses. His review was a bit more diplomatic than mine but then again I vowed that I wouldn't care as much about what people think of me when I started working for myself, as there is very little to lose by speaking your mind when you don't have to fear upsetting a boss. If people (eg politicians) were a bit more straight-talking in this country then perhaps it wouldn't be going to the dogs. After all, the Italians don't seem to have trouble expressing themselves...

Go Com-paaaaaaare!

2011-02-11T17:37:00.009Z

Having spent most of this month moaning about one thing or another, I thought I'd post something a bit "lighter"!

I've been shopping around for car insurance in the last few days and I've been trying to decide what I should put as my career. These comparison sites give you a fairly generic list to choose from and as most of us know, choosing carefully (I still recommend being truthful!) can help bring down the premium by a few pounds.

Interestingly, the Go Compare site provided me with a number of options. Let's see...

Househusband? Yep.

Gambler? Of sorts.

Trader? What are the choices?

Ah, Toy Trader! That's surely it!!

Racing Poo-K

2011-02-10T16:22:00.008Z

What a day. I'm spitting feathers here. It took me 4 phone calls and 4 emails to get to the bottom of why the Racing UK online player has an 8+ second delay on the feed now...

Yes, you heard it here first folks - adaptive bitrate streaming.

Soon after this email arrived, the phone rang and I got into a heated debate with Sean's boss (still waiting to get his name and job title), a sarcastic Scottish fellow who came on the line very bolshily and spouted how I was in breach of terms for using the stream to bet in-running.

I had a look at the terms after and couldn't see what he was talking about.

I said "I'm getting an 8-10 second delay this end" to which he replied "I'm only getting 7 at my end" !!

He went on to say that RUK disapprove of in-running punters and that business decisions wouldn't be decided by the likes of me.

Is that really RUK's stance, or just his? It was curious stuff, I wish I'd recorded the conversation as it would've made interesting listening. I heard Nick Luck talking about a horse trading shorter in-running just a bit earlier, so "exchange talk" doesn't appear to be prohibited??

I'm apparently "1 in a 1000" who is disgruntled with the change and "the rest were crying out for an improved stream" - who are all these hordes of people I wonder?

I'm not one to go looking for conflict but I wasn't prepared to be fobbed off on this occasion. As Mike "Porky" Parry (ex-Talksport) would often proclaim..."I am the seeker of truth and justice".

It pretty much set the tone for the first half of my trading session. My head was all over the place and I was still smarting from my telephone conversation. It was 3:20 before I got my mind back on the job...

Anyway, I've cancelled my RUK subscription for now and in the meantime will probably just rely on Timeform radio for the races that aren't on ATR - their audio seems to come from RUK anyway and the delay is negligable.

Perform Group

2011-02-10T09:54:00.005Z

It seems I'm not the only one with a gripe about the Racing UK stream as Kie over at My Trading KO goes onto say...

"Had exactly the same problem. I've cancelled my subscription with them now, its just utterly pointless! Cut your losses i reckon, it will save you £10 a month and possibly a lot more by basically gambling with their stream."

It looks like the Racing UK player is now in the hands of Perform Group. They've seemingly taken over the broadcast of the web feed using their shiny but allegedly super-slow e-player (I have to be careful what I say without being libelous).

I've logged a complaint to their customer services who are supposedly going to get back to me. Where have I heard that one before? I've got the list of Execs firmly in my sights if they think they can just fob me off! I want answers!!

Racing UK woes

2011-02-09T19:36:00.003Z

I wrote another email of complaint to Racing UK today...

Hello, I've got a complaint about the web player (I didn't know what to select in the dropdown so I chose the closest thing). Since the website and player was changed, the player is now useless to me as an in-running punter. Whilst I could deal with the previous 2-3 second delay, there is now an 8-10 second delay. It's barely acceptable during the 1-3 milers, but for the 5f, 6f and 7f races it's a waste of time me switching the player on. Can it be put back to how it was before please? I know it's nothing to do with my internet connection as everything else is running fine. Also, the stream used to come through in a second or so but even that takes 4-5 seconds to start up. My telephone number is ***** ****** - happy to discuss. If it can't be put back then I'll have to cancel my subscription and make do with ATR and Betfair radio something. I wish it hadn't been fiddled with as I was totally happy with £10/month for the old player/feed. Please can someone get back to me as my last email (which I sent at the weekend) was totally ignored!

I think that says it all really. 8-10 seconds - what the hell is going on?! I'm going to ring them tomorrow anyway, as I doubt I'll get a satisfactory email reply. Someone at Racing UK has made the decision to tamper with the player and I need to know who!

Yes I could subscribe to the live channel itself I suppose but that's another tenner a month and I'd have to chop and change channels instead of what I do currently, which is have ATR on the TV and Racing UK streaming, so I can just mute one or t'other. Also, I'm not sure what the delay is like on their TV feed - anyone know? 2-3 seconds is fine for me in-running, any more than that and the betting becomes a lottery!

It would be interesting to hear if anyone else is experiencing these difficulties. Why couldn't they just leave things alone grrrr!

A desperate plea

2011-02-07T11:19:00.002Z

No, not from me but from John O'Dywer at his Betfair Profit and Loss blog. His latest post (which has since been removed from the website) highlights how dire things can get when you risk your entire bank on a "nailed on" outcome...

Basically, I've messed up big style. I have won consistently on Betfair in the past, making around 27k in total from February to September last year and was even lucky enough to go to Flushing Meadows in New York and Wimbledon for the tennis, but in the last month it has gone very wrong because I have taken far too many risks. And because of this I have lost my bank and now have no funds left to work with. :-(

I am writing this to ask if anyone out there would be so kind as to lend me some funds to start again so I can build it up slowly into the numbers I made last year. I am very confident, and if you could do this, I will not only pay you back, but I will give you a massive slice of any profit I make in future on Betfair - which I expect to do.

I know this is asking a lot as you do not know me, but I will totally make it worth your while in future if anyone could do this.

My email address is john.odwyer@mypostoffice.co.uk

Thanks,

John

Frightening! It makes me want to shut up shop and quit while I'm ahead.

But as much as I feel for John in this horrific situation, isn't lending money to a trader/gambler a bit like relying on a dog to keep an eye on your dinner when the doorbell rings?

Technical difficulties

2011-02-05T17:00:00.003Z

I had another profitable day today...

so why am I sooooo flippin' mad??!!

Well, let's start with the Betfair outages. We all know that they've got us over a barrel so it's not like many of us can revolt or anything. Why they're messing around with things on the busiest day of the week is anybody's guess. Haven't they got any failover? They were hopping mad on the Betfair forum. I had to reduce my stakes significantly to reduce my liabilities and it hurt my profit potential immensely :(

I also had to contend with the Racing UK stream dropping out all afternoon. Refresh page, back it comes, drop out, refresh page, back it comes, drop out etc etc. I've emailed a complaint. I might only pay a tenner a month but I haven't had to use the thing much in the last few months because they hardly show any bloody racing on it - ATR have been showing most of it! Days go by where I don't have to fire up that bloody player because they're not broadcasting anything and so when I need it, it needs to work!

Then there was the interference on my Sky sender, probably caused by next door's microwave...or solar winds...or something....

Let's not forget the £100 lay of Arsenal I had (cheers Pete for the tip) which I got off for a tenner win at 3-4, only for the equaliser to go in seconds later. That's £83 lost...no not a tenner won...£83 lost.

Yours ungratefully,

Mets

If it ain't broke...

2011-02-04T17:43:00.006Z

Ok, a while back I was bemoaning BT broadband because I was getting random dropouts at critical times during my trading sessions. Well I take it all back, it's actually been pretty rock solid now for 6 months.

The trouble is, we currently get our broadband through my wife's business line at the moment but we've decided to cancel the line to save costs. Here's hoping that BT will do a straight swap of the broadband package over to our landline account to avoid disruption. It would be preferable to have an overlap instead of them decomissioning the broadband and me having to wait for reconnection. I don't want to miss any trading days at the moment while things are going well...

Whilst I'm on the subject, I'm finding it hard to give myself a day off at the moment. I always thought once I went full time that I'd be taking days off at my leisure but I'm not inclined to at the moment for a few reasons:

1) I don't want to interrupt a good run of form
2) Like a squirrel, I must gather as many "nuts" as possible to see me through leaner times or to cover family holidays
3) The weather is crap anyway so it's not like I can go far without being frozen, blown about or soaked through (today it was blown about!)

When the lighter evenings come again, I'll have to get into a decent routine whereby I'm not trading from 2-9 and missing out on the very thing I've strived to aquire - more recreational time!

squirrels gathering nuts in a flurry, will cause snow to gather in a hurry

Are you gonna go my way?

2011-02-03T17:03:00.009Z

I couldn't get a sniff of profit at Towcester today, I must have lost 40 quid pre-race all in all. It was almost as if, as soon as I looked at the market, it went the other way. The graph below shows an example of one horse I was about to lay....and then it plummeted! The price just fell through the floor...along with my jaw!! I wasn't so lucky on other occasions.

I found the other tracks a bit more forgiving though and ended up in profit overall...

Betfair sent me a nice reminder about the Premium Charge which I'm sure is familiar to any veteran traders that read this blog...

It was a nice treat as I was expecting to be debited -£67 this week and I'd kept £1067 in my bank to allow for it.

Where it says...

"if your betting continues to be as successful as it has been, you may be required to pay Premium Charges"

...I'm hoping it means they'll turn a blind eye for a few more weeks! :D

January roundup

2011-01-31T13:31:00.004Z

No trading today with the Betfair API on it's knees. I wonder whether maintenance means clearing logs and archiving data, or whether it means bug fixing and enhancements? Whatever they are doing, I hope they don't screw anything up!

It was same this time last year and I remember someone on the forum saying it's the same every year as Betfair ready themselves for the busy summer season. These were my notes from Jan 30th and 31st 2010...

Nevermind, it's a good excuse for a day off and boy do I need one - it's my first break from trading since 27th December!

Profit-wise, it's been my best month so far and has given me a boost as I end my first official month as a full-time trader.

I did trade with a bank of upto £1800 mid-way through the month and although it gave me more capability in the markets, I still didn't really go above £5 tick sizes. I've withdrawn most of that now and am using a bank of around 1k again; I'm more comfortable using a 1k bank as it reduces my liability in case of a catastrophe. I don't think I could mentally recover from losing more than a grand at this stage in my trading career!

It's handy having a bigger bank on festival days because the markets are more stable so I'll perhaps look to boost the coffers again in time for Cheltenham and hive some of it off to my Aussie wallet when I'm not using it.

There's plenty more I can improve on and I'm looking forward to tackling the summer season with a more experienced head on my shoulders.

Action

2011-01-30T16:54:00.007Z

I couldn't get any action on the racing today. Action is quite a difficult thing to define. If I'm going great guns down at the bowling alley and getting lots of strikes, then I would typically say that there is plenty of good pin action. Likewise, if I can move from race-to-race whilst profiting with a seemingly effortless flow, then I would define that as a good action. Today was a slog!

I made my minimum daily target of just over £30 which is the main thing. If about two thirds of the way through the session I haven't already blasted through this target, then I'll tend to play safe so I don't jeopardise my chances of reaching it.

Poor Andy Murray - I really hoped he'd win the Oz open today. Even though I'm an Englishman, I'm not into all that "he's Scottish so I don't care if he loses" bullshit mentality. He's from the British Isles, he's worked damn hard to get where he is and he deserves his success. I think is problem is that he gives his opponents too much respect...

"Yeah, he's really strong and on a good day he can beat anyone...blah blah blah"

Ok, I'm paraphrasing there but that's the kind of thing he comes out with. He needs to talk like a champion - you wouldn't hear Fed bigging up the other guy in this "I'm already beaten" monotone blather!

I dipped into the betting, and put a lay on Djokovic towards the end of the second set as his price was around 1.10 at that point. I was hoping that Murray make come back to take the third set, and when he broke Djokovic in the first game I became more hopeful. But when Murray crumbled in the second game I decided that he was done and dusted and scratched the trade.

Paul over at Tradeshark's Tennis Trading was spot on with his pre-match assessment as usual but the risk-vs-reward of backing Djok from the start doesn't suit my more cautious approach, so I waited until the game unfolded a bit. I prefer to lay at low odds as far as tennis is concerned.

WON-GA!

2011-01-26T16:32:00.007Z

Oh, how the adverts on At The Races get on my nerves.

"Have you been injured in an accident that wasn't your fault?"

No!

I suppose it's handy to know the number in case I do need to sue the backside off somebody!!

Well, another month is about to draw to a close and I'm well on my way to a record month. Sadly, the Premium Charge is creeping up on me and I've nearly exhausted my allowance...

After reading lots of posts about the PC and possible ways to avoid it, I'm still not really any the wiser. On one hand, I don't relish paying this "tax" in the coming months but on the other, at least it means I'm successful at what I'm doing.

"And what are you doing these days, Mets?"

Well, for a start, I'm focussing on in-play trading more these days. I find the pre-race trading quite stressful and my performance can be quite up and down, depending on the volatility of the markets, so any other money-making angles must be explored. I also commented a while back that I was getting fed up of being manipulated pre-race.

"If you can't beat them, join them!"

Not with a 1k bank I can't, and I'm not really interested in letting my bank grow because my view is, if it's in my account, it's at risk of a betfair outage or an in-play slip up. Therefore, I like to limit my liability to something that won't cause me to jump off a cliff if something goes wrong!

Recently, I explored a strategy using a bot that I'd developed in MarketFeeder Pro, but it didn't come to fruition and the software trial expired, so I haven't moved any further forward with it. That's not to say I won't explore it again at a later date, but there's quite an overhead involved in developing and testing a bot whilst simultaneously trying not to affect the living I'm making from manual trading.

My ultimate goal is to develop a profitable lay system so I can ease off the trading altogether and thus reduce my stress-levels. My adrenal gland has been working overtime for the last 15 months or so now and I'm sure it must be close to burn out. That's not to say that I don't get a buzz from trading, but my heart rate reaches silly levels at times and that can't be good long term.

In the meantime, today was a good day to make some WON-GA and I'm pleased that I've only had one losing day this month so far....

Exhausted

2011-01-15T17:25:00.005Z

The Devil may make work for idle hands, but not for me - I was flat out from 12-4 with trading and trying to get this damn bot to do something useful.

I'm still finding my way around MarketFeeder Pro. It seems a bit clunky in some respects, like the way the master refresh rate doesn't seem to update without saving the page and then restarting the application. And when you do save settings, you never really quite know if they've saved or not as it doesn't give you much feedback.

The program did a fair amount of "binging" and "bonging" as rules were met and bets were placed, but I had no clue what was going on until I discovered the Action Log nestled at the bottom of the screen...

This contains a fair bit of information which, now I know it exists, I will observe more closely in future sessions. I should read the manual really, but I'm far too impatient!

There was plenty of money around as you would expect on King George day, and it was refreshing to see the stands full at Kempton following some quite dire Winter meetings with hardly a soul in attendance at times. I had a nice day profit-wise but I'm eager to get this bot working to take some of the pressure off.

Bad ch'i

2011-01-14T22:14:00.011Z

A rather bitty day today, with only a tenner earnt. Matters weren't helped by me trashing my desk area while trying to shoehorn my new Korg X50 synth into an already crowded workspace. Stuff was everywhere and I hate trading whilst surrounded by chaos, my mind is all over the place.

I was testing the bot too which was distracting as I tried to figure out, for the first 6 races at least, why it was doing bugger all. It turns out I'd managed to disable the first of two triggers by selecting 'never' in the execute dropdown...see what I mean - chaos!

Once I'd got it going it didn't really do much and I spent the rest of the afternoon fiddling with it. I decided in the end that I'd approached it in the wrong way and have thought of a far more straighfoward method of execution - 'more than one way to skin a cat' as they say. As a former programmer, I'm used to solving the same problem in a number of different ways. Usually, the second or third attempts end up being far simpler that the first - I believe we called it refactoring.

So I'll have a tinker in the morning and let it ~~lose~~ loose on tomorrow's markets and see where it gets me - another step closer to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow!

Automated trading

2011-01-13T21:02:00.011Z

Since I wrote this post about my 2011 pledges, I've been investigating how I could profit from botting.

Rather than re-invent the wheel and code something from scratch, I sat down last night and looked at what software is out there already that could help me. The two main programs I've found are Gruss and MarketFeeder.

My basic understanding of Gruss is that it's a trading tool similar to The Toy but with the additional option of triggering bets from rules set up in spreadsheets.

MarketFeeder can automate spreadsheets too, but it also allows you to set triggers up via the UI, which seemed more straightfoward to me.

Fast forward to tonight then and I've set about implementing a new strategy of mine in MarketFeeder. I've opted for the 14 day trial, so it's not costing me anything yet, and I'm using Test Mode...

...so I can see if my strat is a goer before putting any real dosh down. I'm aware of the cost implications of making too many calls per second to Betfair's API, and am therefore using the program with a relative's Betfair account that they're not using.

The number of permutations of rules you can set on your triggers is staggering, and quite easy to pick up with help from the great tutorials on their site. The trigger took me about 2 hours to write and I'm going to use it in anger tomorrow, alongside my regular trading on my main account. If it works out as planned, then it will be a few hours well spent.

Newsflash from Corrie...

2011-01-06T20:24:00.006Z

...Cheapstow has passed the inspection - let's go racing!

"Er, Eddie? How do I get to Cheapstow again?"

The kiss of death

2011-01-02T23:41:00.007Z

I must apologise to fans of Pete Nordsted's Draw Master service. If you've seen his newsletter, you will know that he picks three Premier League matches every week that he thinks will end in a draw.

I've been following his picks since the start of the season and it had been doing very well...that is, until I started putting some real money on his selections. Yes, sadly, since Boxing Day (when I saw fit to jump on the bandwagon and earn some extra cash) the wheels have come off and he's now 0 for 6.

Ok, I'm not tossing away huge bucks, but 45 quid is 45 quid. The question is, do I carry on backing his selections and hope things come good again, or jump off now and undoubtedly watch Mr Nordsted land all three this weekend??!! ;)

Stepping up

2010-12-30T16:52:00.007Z

It's been a busy few days on the horses with so many races going off on both sides of the Irish Sea.

I've been exploring some different strategies this month and, in the last 3 days, these have proved to be very successful...

This gives me a good deal of confidence as I will be going full-time in January 2011.

It's been a long year, with many ups and downs as far as making a living on Betfair is concerned. Having started trading properly in October 2009, it took until February this year before the profit came, and a modest one at that, but it's been positive ever since and I look forward to doing even better in 2011.

My New Year's resolutions will be to take a more proactive approach to trading by:

• exploring other markets besides football and horse racing
• using some of my programming skills to create some bots (if I can remember how to code!)
• focussing on the 'big picture' and taking a position at the start of an event rather than just during it eg Premier winners market, X-Factor, golf tournaments

Plenty there to be keep me busy.

I'll try and get in some more horse racing tomorrow and then it's off to a party to see in the New Year - somehow I ended up being the DJ??!! I hope they like Fear Factory hehe...

Happy 2011! :)

Treading carefully

2010-12-21T16:03:00.018Z

Nice to see a couple of meetings on today. I was a bit wary after Saturday when a bug / feature / anomaly (call it what you will) in The Toy pulled the rug from under my feet...

Basically, since I started exploring in-play betting, when the race begins I would usually tap in £2 across all runners by hovering my mouse over each runner...

and hitting the 2 key on the keyboard. On Saturday, for whatever reason (probably a variable in the code that retained the old value), when the race went in-play and I tapped £2 in across the board, it didn't register and the ladder remembered my pre-trading stake amounts.

So I ended up plonking £100 on a nag at a price of 32, which was quickly shared amongst hungry layers whom anticipated the horse having no chance. The price never recovered.

The Geek explained that "There is a bug in 1.0 where stakes were retained for runners that were not visible on the ladder".

I hadn't upgraded my version to 1.1 since I currently have no need for the charts, but I upgraded today as a matter of precaution. Also before each race began, out of paranoia, I reset the stakes across all runners using the stake tool...

...AND tested pre-race that the amounts registered on the ladder as it should for each horse, with these bets being subsequently cancelled in-play.

It's hard giving away a hundred quid through no real fault of your own, and with so many other hazards to negotiate, this is one I could do without. On the other hand, in the 12 months+ I've been using The Toy, this is the only time my profit has been compromised by this software.

So, nothing special today but I hit my target which is something I need to embed in my brain from now on...

Having said that, I need get out of this bridesmaid mentality ie £30 is enough and everyone else can make their money. It's no surprise that some people make this amount per race consistently, as I assume they are usually the ones dictating the ebb and flow of the prices by bullying others. If Peter Webb really has 250k in his account, he can more or less do what he wants to the prices!

Indeed, he seemed to be a major player in the X-Factor markets by stating "people would be horrified about how much of that market was me". Where does that leave the rest of us?

Despite all the trading blogs out there, no-one really talks about the level of manipulation that goes on in Betfair markets, none more so than horse racing given there isn't much at stake until the race starts. It's akin to steroid use in Bodybuilding: Ronnie Coleman may be at the top of his game but he didn't get there using the protein shakes alone - to do so would expose his methods of winning and assure the end of his livelihood from endorsements.

I don't use the word Guff enough

2010-12-14T23:56:00.011Z

One of yesterday's lapses in concentration cost me 34 quid...

At one point I was 45 quid down but ended up with a fiver loss, so I can take some comfort in the comeback. Making 70 quid and losing 75 is really not the way forward though.

I got the sticky notes out and scribbled a few reminders that are now stuck on the bottom of my screen. It's all the usual guff that most traders talk about, and indeed I've talked about in the past, but I've never actually written them down before on paper and stuck them where I can see them.

Today was a different story....

Whether the sticky notes helped I'm not sure, but I was pleased to trade upto £36 on the second race in which made me feel better about the 34 quid I lost yesterday. Not quite up to Didd's standards, who reported a £70+ win on one race yesterday - staggering! (there was a screenshot but I can't see it anymore)

The Nugget Crew called the Seville-Dortmund game correctly tonight, hats off to them. I was going to have a sniff but my dutching spreadsheet went on the blink and it took me a while to find a new one.

I read the Nugget Crew's Trades of the Day and fair play to the lads, they do put their predictions in black-and-white for everyone to see. Quite a few of the trades seem to end up as scratches but they have their moments. At the end of the day, they're business men and creating a buzz around their chat rooms will inevitably lead to curious subscribers to their service, eager to part with their cash in search of riches. Football's pretty subjective though, and 4 pundits on Gillette Soccer Saturday can call a match 4 different ways. Cripes, how many times does Andy Gray call it wrong on his Betfair blog!

Well, the weather forecast looks pretty bleak for the next few days so I wouldn't be surprised if the racing is turned on its head once more. If there is going to be a big freeze like they keep saying, possibly lasting for a month (!!!), then maybe it's time to get on with all those jobs around the house I keep putting off like decorating (groan) and replacing the kitchen mixer tap (double groan) ;)

Take a chance

2010-12-05T16:06:00.004Z

I commented in this recent post how I sometimes like to trade outsiders for small stakes and hedge in-play. Well this approach came good again today to the tune of £58, as I let the outsider of a 4-horse field run his race.

This is the single highest amount I've made in a race and I'm very pleased - it's nice to get a slice of luck like this for a change.

This gave me a nice boost, but I then struggled to capitalise on the win for a further two hours as I won and lost equally. Whilst profitable, this "win a bit more than I'm losing" approach isn't very satisfying and only goes to highlight the limitations of my strategy; I just need to pin down exactly what those limitations are.

Cheeky Reindeer

2010-11-29T23:03:00.005Z

Well I'm no weatherman, but at this rate I can't see much end to the cold, snowy weather. Trading-wise, the first half of November was pretty stagnant and just as I was starting to find my way again, this cold front has put my comeback on ice.

I even thought about getting some seasonal work at Tesco or Royal Mail to tide me over, but instead I've just decided to watch my spending by cutting out non-essentials (veg and meat) and only buying the cheaper whiskey for the time being.

So with the racing on its knees, what better way to spend my days than dressing up as a reindeer and having a mate chuck hay all over my carpet...enjoy! :)

High on Meydan

2010-11-25T16:18:00.008Z

Iron Maiden

I traded a ~~South Africa~~ Dubai race today - Meydan - just so I could indulge in the pun in today's title! Actually, I was prompted by the fact that Kieren Fallon's name came up on ATR. The liquidity was low, and the prices were very gappy, a bit like the dog markets in the last 30 seconds. It's not for me I'm afraid, but worth a sniff.

If there's a strong odds-on favourite and a bunch of outsiders, like in the first race at Wolverhampton this afternoon, I'll look to trade a few of the outsiders for a profit, using small stakes, and hedge in-play. It came good to the tune of 11 notes which is ok for little risk. It's nice to let some run anyway, as I still like a cheeky punt now and again.

Not a bad day but I find myself scratching around for a profit these days, whilst trying to stay out of trouble. I've run into a fair bit of trouble this month, and it's taken me over 2 weeks to claw back to where I was back then. I'm sort of getting a handle on things since the clocks changed so I'm just hoping things don't change again too much before the Spring - my nervous system can't take much more!!

Children in Need - traders unite!

2010-11-19T13:51:00.009Z

That jolly good fellow The Geek is making a concerted effort to raise funds for Children in Need 2010.

The Toy has been free to use since its launch last year, and The Geek has pledged that this will continue throughout 2011 to users who at least pledge a minimum of £5 during fundraising events.

Not a bad deal for such a solid piece of software, which now features a plethora of ass-kicking charts.

The Geek's Toy - probably the best Betfair Trading Software in the world!

Following Children in Need, we then have Mets in Need, a fundraising effort to prop up my ailing PnL for November. Further details to follow...

Rude awakening

2010-11-12T16:17:00.004Z

Well, bring back British Summer Time because I haven't managed to settle into any kind of groove since the clocks changed.

Curiously, I managed to cancel out my profit on four separate occasions, the fourth time being quite severe - a sort of subconscious self-sabotage maybe?

This week has seen more money flow out of my bank account than in.

"You mean you had a losing week, Mets?"

I prefer the way I said it.

Tunnel vision

2010-11-08T19:34:00.006Z

Well I had a thoroughly crap afternoon and lost my money and my rag rather too frequently.

I thought things were pretty volatile today and I got smashed around like a young seal at the mercy of some rather large Orca types. And I haven't said that for a while.

A crumby start didn't help, and the amount of times I traded upto a tenner or so and then lost it and more beggared belief. I had a chance early on to get back to zero which I blew with one of those overtrades and things got a bit silly from thereon in.

I realised that I have a tendency, when I'm losing, to get a bit desperate and start focusing too hard on certain prices whilst failing to notice what's going on around me. I got done for -£30 at Wolves by a sudden drift when I didn't notice something else steaming in.

One thing The Badger said in that conference last week is that he's 100% certain he can make money from any horse racing market, although he admitted that it wasn't always the case. It's a good mindset to have and of course, with the correct decision making, we're all capable of making money.

You might wonder how I handle losing days. Not very well. Throwing stuff usually helps, as does using profanity. But typically I'll go and push some weights to get it out of my system.

The hardest part is actually walking away from the PC in the first place, as it's not always wise to walk away too early in case a comeback is on the cards.

I hate London

2010-11-04T22:27:00.008Z

I think it was John Lennon that said "life is what happens while people are busy making plans" - or something like that. Well in London, life is what happens when people are busy trying to get somewhere. Where the hell are they all going exactly, scurrying around like rats....?

An so concludes my trip to the big smoke, lol!

I just got back home from my free Betfair Advanced Sports Trading Course. Actually it was more like a (deep breath) Betfair-endorsed-but-held-in-central-London-at-Centaur's-offices-and-presented-by-people-in-Betfair-clothes-that-don't-work-for-Betfair-type-thing. In summary, I'm not sure what to make of the day really.

I'm well aware of the whole Badger / Geek / Racing Traders saga having read some things on the Geek's Toy forum. So I turned up at this big building and was greeted by a chap from Betfair (ok there was one) although he didn't do anything expect skive off his day job to man the big fridge full of soft drinks and beer. Nice touch with the beer, by the way!

Big building

The conference soon got underway with Tony Hargraves and a couple of associates giving a presentation discussing aspects of trading psychology, software tools and in-game strategies. The content was fairly brief but sparked a good deal of debate amongst the trainers and the 26 or so that attended. Some of the attendees didn't pull any punches and were getting properly stuck into Tony et al! I think Tony wanted to punch the lady at the front that was talking a load of toss, and I did too because she was annoying (and really posh which was even more annoying).

In fact, traders are a bloody annoying bunch of know-it-alls. They can't wait to tell you what they know but don't have any listening ability. Worse than IT geeks even.

Tony discussed the 4 main players in the trading-tools market - BA, BetTrader Evo, Gruss and The Toy. The discussion inevitably landed at the door of BT Evolution and he demonstrated its various tools during a live trading session. The banter was fun and he made a few quid to boot. On his RT videos, Tony always gave the impression he was in control of a trade and he was equally cool in the live arena, albeit for small stakes.

After lunch - and I must say that the catering was excellent - we all each had a dummy Betfair account with a £100 to play with using Evo. Sitting there drink Stella and messing about with some play money on live races was quite a nice to spend an hour or so....until I got frustrated with Evo (cos it's rubbish compared to The Toy) and the fact I wasn't making any real money of my own.

I'm not sure where the whole Centaur thing came into it which is, by my reckoning, Tony and his chums trading with other people's money? And why were they wearing Betfair t-shirts when they stated that they don't work for Betfair? All I'm asking for is a bit of transparency. If you wanna flog Evo and slag all the other products off, do it, it's your course! It was funny the way Tony almost had to mutter The Toy under his breath. The bottom line is The Toy is free and better than most things out there. Did I mention it's free?!

According to Tony, a new version of Evo is coming out soon with the ability to simulate trades so you can just have a play without sacrificing any of your own money. Evo can't even display jockey names next to each damn horse for goodness sake!! Get that fixed first!!!

Anyway, I'm coming to end of my summary which is turning into a bit of a rant. But it's my party so I'll cry if I want to ;) All-in-all, I'm glad I went just to see what it was all about but having traded on Betfair for over a year now, it was a bit like teaching me to suck eggs.

The remains of the buffet - a trader's metabolism can't digest fruit, it's just there for show

Off to see the Wizard

2010-11-03T20:15:00.005Z

Tomorrow I shall be venturing down to London to attend a Betfair-endorsed advanced trading course in the City. I've been led to believe that Tony Hargraves AKA The Badger will be doing some of the talking; Tony's video antics over at Racing Traders were one of the things inspired me to trade the horses in the first place.

It should be very interesting and I'm hoping to learn a few bits I might not have thought about before. Besides which, it will be nice to get out of the office for a day and see some different surroundings.

Didn't get anything out of today and ended up a few quid down. Tried a couple of evening races and one of my winning trades ended up getting withdrawn in the last. Just that sort of day really, where my mind wasn't in it and everything seemed such hard work. Was in that "chasing a deficit while trying not to make it any worse" mode - very frustrating.

Red Thunder

2010-10-26T19:59:00.013+01:00

I needed a dose of poor man's Red Bull today to get me in the money. It was such a sloooooow rise to profit, I mean it took me 2 1/2 hours to claw my way out of the red!

Anon: "You could say the Red stuff got you out of the red stuff there, Mets"
Mets: "Yeah, but I won't"

Nothing stressful really, just annoying. It's so important to me to end the day in profit, my 17th in a row now, because I find it encourages winning ways.

The Red Thunder actually tastes quite nice, not bad for 20p a can. Better with vodka or bacardi though muwahahahaha ;)

The word on the street is that Geek's Toy has new charting bells and whistles. I can't say I'm too bothered by this latest development, since I don't really understand what half of those graphs mean anyway! There's enough for my poor brain to consider without these added graphical shenanigans! Besides, they take up too much valuable real estate on my monitor and I like to have 5 nice big ladders in full view.

I captured a funny little clip from At The Races that I thought I'd share. I love some of the off-track things they pick up on - some of those lads have got a great sense of humour! :D

Incidentally, I recorded the clip on my new iPhone 4. I posted a while back that I was considering getting an Android phone - the HTC Wildfire - so I could run the Betfair Touch app on it and that it could probably do everything an iPhone can without the restrictions that Apple put on things. Well, as it turns out, the HTC Wildfire has such a crap screen on it that as soon as I booted it up I knew in an instant that I'd made a mistake. I flogged it on eBay and bought an HTC Desire (the next one up) which had a beautiful screen on it. But there's an old saying...

You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear

... and at the end of the day, the Desire just didn't cut it; the HD video camera hasn't been implemented properly (drops frames, noisy microphone), the satellite navigation seemed laggy and slow to get a satellite fix, and Google's app store is a loooong way behind Apple's. I love the iPhone have installed ibetmate as recommended by Handy Andy, and I've gotta say it's a lovely little app for interacting with Betfair, very slick and preserves the session so you don't keep getting logged out - brill!

Wakey wakey!

2010-10-25T17:47:00.005+01:00

It wasn't a great start today at all. I don't know what it was - a bit of complacency, a bit of lethargy maybe - but by 3 o'clock I was -£41 down and starting to think about calling it a day.

After giving myself a good telling off and a blast of Megadeth on the hifi, I managed to turn things around with a good win at Southwell, which quickly got me back into winning ways.

I got to my target daily average of £30 so I'm pleased with that, given the uphill climb I faced. It's amazing how negative thoughts can snowball when you're in deficit though. It takes a strong mind to overcome adversity in any pursuit, and it's not something that comes easily to me. Once again, I had to remind myself what I was in this for and to have respect for the markets, the bank and the opportunity to be doing this in the first place.

As I've mentioned once before, I work off of a bank of 1k and my whiteboard is instrumental in getting me out of a deficit because I find, once I start scrawling numbers on the board, things become more real. I then concentrate on making that chunk of money back before anything else; other people may have a different approach to staying on the straight-and-narrow but this seems to work for me. After all, £30 a day is a tidy £900 a month which is not to be sniffed at.

Strength to strength

2010-10-23T20:11:00.007+01:00

Well things are definitely looking up having hit my third £100+ day in as many weeks.

"Make hay while the sun shines" makes a lot of sense after being reminded this afternoon, by one of the Racing UK pundits, just how cold last Winter got. The prolonged bout of snow certainly did play havoc with the race cards.

I was reading Chris Evans' auto-biography recently and he mentioned that his Dad was a bookmaker when Chris was a lad, during which time there was a 4 month frost! He went on to explain that having got through that rather lean period, his Dad then accepted an accumulator from a punter but hadn't covered the liability; the bet duly came in and put his Dad out of business! It's a surprisingly good read by Mr Evans - very well written.

My performance last week surpassed my £30-a-day target and I ended up making more than £50-a-day. Choosing my battles more carefully does seem to have helped a fair bit, and trading <= 3 minutes before the off has ironed out a few inconsistencies.

"Ton" it on again

2010-10-17T17:23:00.009+01:00

Fans of Genesis might appreciate the play-on-words in today's title.

Question is: what era Genesis were you? The "Peter Gabriel dressed as a flower" period? Or the "Phil Collins coming from behind the kit to be lead singer" era?

I don't know what's happening but Sundays are starting to be my most profitable day. Another ton reached on a day I used to really struggle with. I suppose that as my approach has evolved, then so has my alignment with particular days' markets.

Fans of my UFC forecasts will be looking forward to my new subscription-based tipping service. I'm 0 from 3 so far but I'm sure it's just a blip. There can be so many twists and turns in a fight that maybe the only money in MMA markets is fools' money?

"Oi 'ardy, I'm down 20 notes cos of you! What you gonna do about it?"

All bets are on

2010-10-16T18:24:00.005+01:00

Not a bad arvo on the horses results wise. Chucked a good £40 away though mid-session which made for a bit of teeth-grinding for the next two hours.

Got a fiver on the draw in the Villa v Chelsea game which is looking good at the time of writing.

Despite a few mis-hits on the UFC in the past, I'm going forth with my UFC gamble tonight.

UPDATE: Hardy got chinned in the first to lose me the bet. Not looking a great night for the Brits with Wilks defeated too. I hope Bisping has got what it takes to win his bout.

The "Outlaw" is back

2010-10-16T11:56:00.008+01:00

A bumper night of fighting at the O2 tonight for UFC 120, and Dan "The Outlaw" Hardy returns for a fight with the USA's Carlos Condit. I don't recall seeing Condit fight but then again, since UFC and TUF (The Ultimate Fighter) went off Bravo, I haven't been keeping up with it as much, unfortunately.

I know that there aren't many with Hardy's level of self-belief though. Indeed, despite nearly having his arms ripped off by George St-Pierre in his last bout, he must have won over a large contingent of UFC fans with his gutsy performance. I mean, GSP seriously opened a full can of whoop-ass on him in that match!

With the UK crowd behind him, I'm expecting Hardy to put the smack down on this New Mexican upstart. I'll being having a £20 punt on Hardy fo' shizzle, provided I have a good arvo on the horses today, cos I don't gamble with money I haven't earnt that day, period!

Decent week on the horses, bouyed by last Sunday's uncharacteristic performance....for a Sunday.

I hope to do some in-play trading in the future, along the lines of a recent post by Alistair over at Bet Your Life Sports Trading. Eddy over at Trading Times had some punting joy backing Frankie Detorri yesterday at Newmarket. There's no doubting the man's horsemanship and I'll be looking to see of any in-running opportunities present themselves as far as the dimunitive Italian is concerned.

Turning my swag on

2010-10-10T17:40:00.007+01:00

"I said wazup, wazup, wazup...."

I have no idea what I just said, but I'm down with Cher from the X Factor. Fo shizzle.

For anyone trading the X Factor in play, I say wazup wazup wazup if you're watching the live show in real time - it went on for nearly 3 hours last night! At least with the old Sky+ I can blast through it in a third of the time. It used to be same with UFC when they showed it on Bravo, I could blast through an entire 3 hours fight night in about 45 minutes!

I pulled off a great heist today. Bit more respectable than the fiver I made last Sunday. I wasn't planning on using big stakes today because I find Sundays can be a bit volatile, but I saw a few opportunities early on that I couldn't help but get involved in.

After a difficult few weeks, trying to get to grips with £4-£5 tick sizes, I've managed to steer the profit line back in the right direction.

Just one more

2010-10-09T18:47:00.007+01:00

Another reasonable Saturday I suppose. The last trade was a bit of a duffer, a case of "just one more trade for luck". The old "see what happens" approach - marvelous (not)!

I celebrated my one year trading anniversary last Wednesday, although I didn't start the blog until the redundancy was confirmed a month later. A friend asked whether I would've done anything differently...I can honestly say I wouldn't. It's taken a while to convince myself (and others) that this is a genuine career path....ok perhaps career path is a bit strong! Some came round to idea pretty quickly (my wife); others are still waiting for me to get a real job (my mum)!

My performance has only been mediocre since a ground-breaking August, which has led to a few anxious moments and self-doubt. Admittedly, I've been upping the stakes which has affected my bottom line, but I'm hardening (nurse!) to the effects of the losses I've incurred as a result.

I'm still of the opinion though that, as long as you can cover the bills and have a few treats like the odd take away now-and-then, then it's worth living without flat screen tellys and expensive holidays in order to have more free time for yourself and the family.

If I can make it beyond the Christmas period by continuing to take home some modest monthly profit, without losing my money and mind, then things should go from strength-to-strength in 2011.

Early bath

2010-09-29T21:07:00.006+01:00

Time to call time early on this month's trading and reset my approach for October. The larger stakes are killing my game, as I find I'm chasing losses a lot more and expending a lot of energy and cash in doing so.

I started today's session with a clear mind and good intentions but after getting a tenner up, I began to get complacent and got caught out a few times, including one -£23 loss. Total loss nearly 60 quid :(

I feel I'm being braver, playing the favourite a lot more and getting involved in the fast money, but I'd hoped I would be suitably battle-hardened by now. I'm not.

When I came downstairs yesterday after sustaining a similar loss, I went into the garage and beat the crap out of my punchbag. Proper UFC-style ground-and-pound hammerfists too. The bag didn't stand a chance!

My wife reminded me of similar behaviour the last time I upped my stakes and went downhill. Indeed, my overall profit graph shows a few battle scars.

It was a disappointing end to September after a strong start but on the other hand, nothing-ventured-nothing-gained as they say. I have a better idea of what level I'm at and what works and what doesn't. I need to build up some momentum again by drawing a line under September and taking a less gung-ho approach in October.

Tug of war

2010-09-26T18:02:00.005+01:00

Things are getting ugly. The total profit line nearly touched -£70 after another series of mishaps. There must be some psychological term for this lose-lots-then-claw-it-back-painfully approach.

Happy to end where I did to be honest as I'm being quite ambitious with my trades at the moment. Suddenly, earning £3 a race is not enough for me anymore, I want £10-£20 a race.

I've managed to make another reasonable profit over the course of this month so I think this week will see more boundary pushing as the month draws to an end...hopefully without too much hurt!

Then it will be a case of battening down the hatches for the Autumn and Winter to try and grind out some steady profit. £30 a day is still a nice target, and I was happy to achieve in excess of that for August. I just have to remind myself that, although £30 doesn't seem much profit for a session, it does all add up quite nicely by the end of the month.

Throwing it away

2010-09-24T17:35:00.005+01:00

Scraped in just over £100 this week. The bigger staking is having a neutralising effect on my profit once again. This happened the last time I ramped up the stakes. I mean we're only talking £5 tick sizes here - which to some is small fry - but it soon adds up when things go awry.

It has been a week littered with errors, in-play gaffes and lucky escapes...hardly the right recipe for profitable trading. My underpants drawer is completely empty...!

I'm sure things will settle down, including my jangled nerves. I've been forgetting to take the Kalms which hasn't helped.

On the plus side, I've been signing friends up left-right-and-centre to Betfair so the little £25 bonuses have been topping up my ailing bank. Been thinking about going door-to-door and signing people up en masse ;) Like one of those NPower salesman but more respectable!

There seems to be so much chatter about betting exchanges' contribution to the demise of the horse racing industry, with the BHA and bookies getting on their backs, that post-float, us Betfairers may find ourselves sailing some pretty stormy waters. Then again, maybe it's just scaremongering. But I do wonder if I'll still be sitting here trading on the ladders in year's time?? Having said that, I have got into a good habit of taking life a day at a time, which is probably something we should all be doing, given that none of us know what's around the corner.

Paranoid Android

2010-09-17T21:11:00.010+01:00

I was shopping around for a new mobile phone this week cos I'm a bit bored of my ageing Sony Ericsson handset. Had a hold of the new iPhone while the guy at Tesco hovered around, probably making sure I wasn't going to nick it or drop it!

I like the idea of the dedicated Betfair app but I'm being careful not to be sucked into the Apple hype again as I did with the first iPhone (which I ended up flogging soon after cos it was a bit too much of a brick).

I did stumble upon this article about a new app for Android handsets which is good news as I'm rather a Google fan-boy and this adds weight to the "Android is catching up with iPhone" argument. In fact, I've more-or-less set my heart on getting the HTC Wildfire...

Poor man's iPhone

...but I've not seen a decent 12 month contract yet. Looked pretty sexy in the Tesco shop even though the assistant was trying to prise open my wallet for £349 for the iPhone whilst simultaneously dismissing the Wildfire in disgust!

Funnily enough, as I mucked out the hens today I suddenly realised where Google got their inspiration from for the Android robot thingy...

...my bar-b-que of course! ;)

It's been a hard week trading the horses this week not least because the missus is away and I had my little one with me in the afternoons. Nothing can beat shutting the door and trading in solitude for 3 hours as distractions can wreak havoc on my focus, but I'm happy that I more-or-less kept my mind on the job.

Lost -£27 on one race today after going chasing and, more worryingly, went in-play in a Listowel race because I didn't have the sound up on the telly. Could've potentially lost -£500 cos it went on to win :( Fortunately, I didn't panic and managed to get out in-running for a fiver loss. How many lives do traders have again?! The Irish races do go off very promptly so if you're trading close to the off you're more likely to get "done" in one of these.

The day

The week

I've been trying to increase my stakes upto £200 for prices <6 and it's not doing me too much harm. Obviously there is only so much I can lay at bigger prices with my £1000 bank but I don't intend to increase it this side of Christmas, and will continue to withdraw the difference after each session.

Hens: free to a good home

2010-09-07T19:54:00.007+01:00

Well, my 24 day winning streak has come to a clucking end with a shambolic session that's messed up my PnL graph with an ugly minus!

BAKAAAWWWWWWWWWW!

My mindset going in was that of a crazed lunatic after my 6 hens decided to play up, 2 of them in particular were egging each other on; it was a poultry affair. My mood wasn't helped by my internet playing up again - it was dropping out every few minutes which is about as much use as a screen door on a submarine. After many trips up and down the stairs, rebooting routers and roosters, I was spitting feathers!

And there was me starting to think I was invincible.

And then there were 5....

Where do blogs go to die?

2010-09-05T17:44:00.012+01:00

In my defunct folder of course!

And the list is getting loooooooong ;)

I won't say which are in my faves and which aren't, in case I offend anyone ;)

Sadly, another blog went on haitus today, as Didd stepped away from trading for the time being.

Fascinating things these trading blogs. People start them for various reasons - to help keep disciplined, to track a challenge or perhaps just to make some like-minded-cyber-trading-friends - and end them for lots more reasons - a return to full-time employment, a blown bank or maybe just sheer boredom.

Google Reader does an adequate job of keeping my reading material organised, although I could think of some improvements to make to its arduous labelling process.

Another pleasing weekend of trading the horses...

Sunday trading seems to be coming into its own as I'm getting a feel for them now. Not much doing on the tennis front as I'm either too knackered to watch it after a horsie session, or just too afraid to get involved after getting my fingers burnt a little recently. Only odd tenners here and there but they all add up.

At the end of the day, you only get out what you put in and with the consistency coming on the horses of late, that's my number one priority.

August round up

2010-08-31T17:41:00.007+01:00

August has been a pleasing month, if tiring at times. I've traded the horses every day to condition myself for full-timedness.

As I've said previously, I'm looking for about £30 a day at the minute on average. I achieved £38 a day on average this month although, as you can see, the daily amounts aren't uniform.

One quite fundamental thing for me has been ending the day in profit, even if it's just a couple of quid. It confirms that I'm managing my bank and keeping things on an even keel. Bearing in mind I trade off a bank of £1000, being able to withdraw my wages each day and protect those earnings has given me a boost.

As you can see from the graph, ever since last October I've had some very negative days that have swung the graph line to extremes; this month has seen a very positive trend in the graph (circled in red).

Damage limitation
On the days where I start off badly and get into deficit, I employ a little technique where I write the negative balance on my white board in red, and then endeavour to claw back from there. It seems to work wonders and I did the same today after getting into trouble early on.

Cycling on thin ice

2010-08-29T17:22:00.009+01:00

Went in-play a few times today, was feeling a bit dozy like one of the late-summer wasps that are easy to whack with a newspaper!

I used to thrash at the hedge button and shut my eyes but I don't panic as much these days, and try and get out at a reasonable price.

I never intend on going in-play but it's one of the hazards of trading right to the off. Things aren't helped by:

- the laggy Racing UK player which I generally have to refresh a minute or so before the off to ensure near-to-live pictures (because if I don't the thing will gradually slip behind by 10+ seconds)
- the Racing UK / ATR commentators who have a chin-wag from time-to-time and don't alert me of the off as I concentrate on the ladders
- me forgetting to switch between RUK / ATR for the next race
- me being dozy like the aforementioned late-summer wasp

Today was a slow-burner; I've come to realise that this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it's important to start cautiously and see what mood the markets are in for a while. It was 4 o'clock before the floods gates opened and the profit came.

A cheeky 50p @ 14 on the Sunderland win against City in the dying minutes brought another 7 quid when they scored. I had a live stream on for a bit and City looked useless. If I'd held on a bit longer I could have had a staggering price of 90!! Pity the fool that laid them then :/

Ponderings and pontifications

2010-08-27T21:45:00.011+01:00

This week has seen a good proft returned from the horses, God love 'em.

It's not masses I know, especially compared to what some squeeze out of the exchanges, but it's far in excess of the £100-a-week minimum target I set myself at the start of the summer. I've managed to make some profit the last 15 days in a row now which has done wonders for my spirits; in fact, I've only had 3 losing days this month so far. Now I'm starting to get some consistency, I'm contemplating going full time and really making a go of it, using horse racing as a prop while I explore other territories (tennis mostly).

The only doubt I've really got is how things will go over the Autumn / Winter with less horse racing to fall back on. I've been doing the horses pretty much every day since last October but I don't know if the markets were good or not because I was only making pennies back then. All I cared about was not losing loads while I was learning.

I've always found the lifestyle of a trader enchanting ever since reading blogs by the likes of Adam Heathcote, Jack Birkhead and Peter Webb. This recent post by Peter was just pure awesomeness and exactly the lifestyle that I dream of. What a cool little mobile setup.

I'm a bit rooted to my office at the moment with trading, reading blogs, scanning Betfair for trading opportunities, studying form, looking for live feeds, talking in chat rooms...it all takes time. In fact, if I'm not careful, I'm in danger of becoming consumed by it! Once the kids are back at school I hope to get into a better routine whereby trading compliments my life rather than consumes it. I think the run up to Christmas will be a true test of whether I can cut it in the long run.

I'm certainly not delusional as I know how hard it has been just to reach this far without losing my mind or money! The gravy train could end tomorrow for us all, who knows what's around the corner? So we might aswell enjoy it and aspire to be the best we can, while we can!

Pleasing weekend

2010-08-22T17:31:00.008+01:00

This weekend started with a few quid won on the Roddick-Djokovic game on Friday evening. I hung out at the TradeShark's chat room and enjoyed a bit of banter with the lads in there. I can't say I've got any real strategies on the tennis as such, and am really just putting money into the market with a certain degree of expectation as I watch the match.

Saturday's racing was MENTAL and I struggled to keep up with the off times because of some clashes. Got off to a rubbish start because of greed and lost -£17 so was playing catch up for a bit. Came good in the end though with lots of concentration although £38 is a fairly modest sum for me on a Saturday these days.

Got back from a family party to trade a bit of last night's Fish-Roddick semi; it was 4-5 to Roddick before rain struck and he came out to break serve and nail the set - Fish was woeful. I watched Roddick's odds steam in further as he looked like taking the next set and the match. I laid Roddick for £100 at 1.03 and set a back bet at 1.5 in case Fish decided to fight back, then went to bed. So it was a nice surprise to wake up this morning and find that Fish did the impossible. Roddick was trading at 1.01 before I switched off too, so there must have been some unhappy punters out there.

Should have had another £12 on the Chelsea-Wigan game when I backed >2.5 goals for £20 but bottled the trade before the goal flood began. Statistically, the outcome was nailed on but I haven't got a lot of confidence in trading the footy at the moment, tennis seems more straightforward. I think it's because you get that price-time decay thing on the overs where the price drifts out sharply when no goals are going in and I'm always thinking "if only I'd hung out for a better price..." or "if a hedge now my red will only be this much..." - it's at conflict with my trading personality if you like.

Had a good session on the horses this arvo; I was really relaxed, not really expecting much of a Sunday - they are usually pretty poor for me - and was pleased to make £50. My trading was calculated too, happy to take a few quid here and there. I really think patience is the key to it all: the days where I jump in feet first and don't wait for the right trades to come about are typically the ones with the up-and-down PnL.

Keeping a cool head

2010-08-15T21:35:00.003+01:00

I took another step in the right direction today after getting cruelly SMASHED IN twice. Someone was lumping on again and my lay bet was demolished with a kamikazi 33k back bet taking me for -£25, which was followed by a withdrawal and a price re-adjustment which kindly re-adjusted my loss to -£30...bah! This was followed some time later by a similar scenario except I clawed it back to about -£9.

I was very calm about it though and tried not to let it affect my state of mind when trading the races that followed, which is a sign that my trading is evolving in a good way. Another snippet from the excellent Trading in the Zone by Mark Douglas states:

"...but the bottom line is that successful traders have virtually eliminated the effects of fear and recklessness from their trading. These two fundamental characteristics allow them to achieve consistent results."

I can certainly appreciate how debilitating fear is and it's something that I'm endeavouring to cut out of my game. Reckless trading seems to come out of fear too, or indeed laziness or plain stupidity.

He then goes onto make the point:

"Interestingly, most traders are closer to the way they need to think when they first begin trading than at any other time in their
careers. Many people begin trading with a very unrealistic concept of the inherent dangers involved."

Food for thought!

The curse of HomeHub

2010-08-14T20:31:00.006+01:00

Forget what those twits on the advert say about BT and their HomeHub, I can't get on with it and don't have a lot of faith in it when it comes to trading.

Admittedly, I've got a long network cable stretched across the conservatory from the router which goes into one of those ethernet plug-in jobs, which sends the signal across the electricity cabling to another plug-in jobby in my office, then onto my PC via a 5-port hub - but who doesn't, eh?

Anyway, I keep getting these silly dropouts from time-to-time and once I restart the HomeHub it works ok again for a while. I didn't get this problem with Talk Talk and wish I'd never swapped over.

So when it dropped out again today I lost £14 which, following lots of shouting and throwing things, sent me off-course for a while. After clasping my dog-eared copy of Trading in the Zone by Mark Douglas and saying a few words of prayer, I managed to regain enough composure to pull off a £37 trade which put me firmly back on top!

I hate getting off to a bad start on Saturday especially as I know what I'm capable of. Still, all is well that ends well but the HomeHub's days may be numbered!