The elusive £500 day

Well, my first £500 day came in the end but not how I expected

I had a fairly mediocre session on the horses and there was even a pad-throwing incident as I started giving large chunks back towards the end of the session. I got blasted in the 17:45 Chester race and had to red up for -£50 on one runner...always a kick in the teeth when you've been grinding away all afternoon to build up a nice bit of green.

The Eurovision, on the other hand, went quite smoothly and accumulated a lot of green on Sweden which I let run once those grannies from Russia had been on and didn't go down as well as expected. The grannies did steam in from about 7 to 3 while the vote counting was going on though, so I don't know what was going on there - they didn't go below about 5.8 while they were on and drifted to about 7 during the performance.

Still looking for a £500 day on the horses but I don't feel I've got enough in my arsenal to reach that at the moment.

What a difference a-ldi makes

Well, I'm still here grinding away...and what a grind it was today. Two low grade all weather meetings on a Wednesday afternoon should have had alarm bells ringing as far as pre-race trading is concerned but that didn't stop me getting stuck in. One day I'll learn from past mistakes.

The markets were so horrendously manipulated that only a fool would get involved...especially when there's a Barney Curley runner involved

To think I can crack these markets is futile - and I know this - but the challenge of getting one up on the people steering the prices is more than I can resist. To cut a long story short, I got smashed from pillar-to-post and ended up -£100 down by tea time. Approx -£70 of that was from pre-race trading, the other -£30 from in-running

Should've just stayed in bed this afternoon!

Since I started jotting down my pre-race and in-running totals for each race, it's been a real eye opener just how slim my pre-race edge is some days; quite often, I'm just glad to break-even and today was one of those days.

While it's tempting to carry on sitting at your desk hoping for a miraculous turnaround, it's likely your brain is already tired and your confidence shattered from the disappointment of one negative total after another. I had no choice but to pull myself away as the weekly grocery shop at Aldi beckoned. I don't know which is worse, sitting at my desk losing money or trudging round Aldi for an hour buying the same old crap I bought last week.

Anyway, the break away from desk seemed to do the trick and I managed to rake back the deficit and half the grocery bill in the remaining 8 races :-)

post-Aldi

Even after all this time, I'm still perplexed by the way some days play out. I could've stepped away at 17:00 just -£35 down but the "lure" of one more trade is hard to resist and it ultimately cost me another -£65 over the next 3 races. As I've said in the past, I hate losing days and the bad feelings it brings - it's really exacerbated by my OCD too which insists that I don't leave any "loose ends" and a losing day is a loose end that I can't fix until tomorrow...it really bugs me!!

In other news, this weekend brings the Eurovision Song Content 2012 and to be honest it's about the only other thing I do outside of horse racing that I'm confident I can profit on at the moment. I made a measly £30 in 2010 but managed to triple that last year, so let's hope it's another good one. It's such great fun to watch and the betting side of it is fascinating - pity it's not on more often.