Horse Racing Trader [ £0 - £350,000 Challenge ]

Still Alive!

2010-10-06T10:59:00.003+01:00

I'm still alive and occasionally trading in the markets. During my 3 years of trading full time I always had it in the back of my head that I wouldn't be trading on Betfair for the rest of my (hopefully) long life! So I have always kept an open eye for any other opportunities that might come my way. That opportunity came, which was to start a business. I won't reveal too much about the business yet, but when it's launched and running smoothly I will post a little bit up here about it for those who bump into the blog as an early trader starting out and wonders what the hell I'm doing now. It's not Betfair related in any way, I've decided to dive in the deep end into a whole new industry and marketplace! My distinct lack of posting meant that I had clearly drowned from all the water I'd been consuming to stay hydrated!! I always had the intention to post, but in summary I think it was just a natural progression for me because I had my mind set on another goal. The business idea came about in October last year, and looking back on my results it started to subtly affect them. When I set no goal in the new year, I really had nothing to aim for. I also dropped my daily target because I just didn't know what to set it at. I reached my peak and I didn't want to lower it. It was something I had to accept as Betfair horse racing markets reached their limit for the number of users and liquidity they were going to provide.

I still trade to pay for my rent and food, but that's about it. I don't want to eat into my time for growth of my new venture with the business partner I've got. One thing that's new and interesting I'm really enjoying now is what's called Toastmasters. I'm sure some of you will have heard of it; it's a non-profit organisation for improving public speaking, communication and leadership skills. I was a shy boy when I was younger so I never really got stuck in to many conversations with an opinion. It's right outside my comfort zone and the experience I'm gaining from it is invaluable. I've just completed my ice breaker speech which didn't go as well as my expectations said it would!, but it was the first prepared speech I'd given in 3 or 4 years. The thing I most look forward to from being a member is the ability to communicate exactly my opinion or what I'm thinking to whoever I strike a conversation with. I've always had rational opinions in my head but could never voice them so everyone understood me. If anyone's interested I'd recommend taking a look at their website www.toastmasters.org. They have clubs all over the world; 14,000 was the most recent figure I heard, in over 108 countries. It's well-structured and perfect for anybody at any standard, with support from all the members - it's such a great idea, I wish I had joined when I had just started out at University.

So going back to trading. I'll trade whatever day happens to be the least busiest for me. I'm calmer and have much less expectation that I used to have, which thankfully brings a lot less stress! But perhaps without that stress I took to get to where I did, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now. I still experience eagerness whenever I look at a race and the numbers; a feeling of excitement when you were a kid and there was a fairground just around the corner!

Stay Hydrated

2010-05-06T15:18:00.002+01:00

One of the most important factors when trading is to stay hydrated. It makes sense and it's the same for anything else you do. I've always noticed that when I'm not hydrated, it's that little bit easier to get irritated or your decisions will start to worsen; ever so slightly your competitive edge is lost. So keep a pint of water next to you at all times. I always make sure I have water beside me, and the times I don't (when I forget) it soon starts to show in my results and slowed decision making. What's worse is that if you're trading and you don't already have the water beside you and you trade a bad race, the first thing that comes to mind is to make it back up on the next race instead of going to the kitchen to fill your glass, the number of times I do this; it's probably been my biggest sin. So choose the latter and get the water straight-away once you notice; it pays of in the long-run. I decided to write this post because I made that mistake today and paid for it.

Also, about one in 50 days I have 'slow hand'. It's like my hand has decided to have a chillout day and I just can't get my reflexes in it to work properly; it feels laboured and is very frustrating! All in all the combination of the mistake and the 'slow hand', today is not going smoothly - but at least I'm not into negative territory.

Dreaming Betfair?

2010-03-30T14:15:00.009+01:00

Well, Cheltenham has been and gone this year, and I had a great festival. I didn’t beat last years total or my best day, although I came close to beating my best day. The markets were strong, but not as strong as last year. I think this came down to a number of important factors – the favourites’ prices in quite a few of the races were quite high (above about 8.0); this means the big punters don’t need to put huge stakes down for decent returns, and it’s the same with bookmakers offsetting their liability; on-course punters will spread their money over the field, reducing the need for the on-course bookmakers to even need to consider it. I’m not an expert in how this field operates, but it seems to make sense. The markets (in general) also feel like there is much less ‘real money’, i.e non-traders’ money, making it more a fight than a well-interpreted market move judgement. This shouldn’t necessarily be taken as a bad thing, because money can still be made; it just means changing your approach to deal with the change in conditions. Aintree is on its way, which should be similarly as good as Cheltenham. I have a new best race total to beat – two of the races I traded on gave me perfect conditions and I made great decisions as well. I think I lost on just one race throughout the festival, I just couldn’t get to grips with it, sometimes you can be out of sync with the movement in a market, and that’s exactly what happened.

On to my choice of the post title, I forgot to mention about many Betfair dreams I used to have. When I started out, a few months in I started dreaming I was trading and I remember imagining myself mid-way through a trade left needing to back thinking “back, back, back!!!” I remember waking up a few times where I actually tried to click with my right hand but obviously wasn’t sat next to my computer. Thankfully I don’t have as many dreams like that as I used to. If you’re having the Betfair dreams I’m sure you’re deadly keen to learn. Other dreams that aren’t so bad, involve me placing a huge order, forgetting to trade out, and the horse winning/losing to bag me a huge profit! I would never intentionally let a half-completed trade go in-play because the moment you do that, and you don’t know anything about horse racing, you might as well be sat at a roulette wheel in Las Vegas hoping for evens to come up.

Life or Death?

2010-03-04T12:54:00.002Z

After my time away, coming back to trading made me see how tense I am when I trade. I realised that the way I trade is similar to being in a life or death situation. When I trade I don't want to fail, to the point where if I did it would result in death. Obviously I wouldn't die! But my brain seems to react in that way. A lot of this boils down to my innate competitiveness that is present in nearly all successful traders - probably mostly short term traders. The best way I can explain the way I present myself while trading, just imagine that you were playing this game where you had to beat half the people at pressing a button the fastest before they did otherwise you would die. You would most likely hit survival mode and your body would present itself so that you had the highest (higher than normally) chance of pressing the button the fastest you possibly could. This attitude I think is partly why I managed to do so well. My awareness of that led me to seeing that I wasn't giving my body and mind any peace, so I have tried to minimise the effects.Through through doing so I've found an edge has been lost. When I go back to my 'old' ways, I focus better without worrying about the effects it has on me and it shows in my daily profits. I'm not really pointing to anything here, just merely another interesting observation of many that you reveal through a trading career - or any career for that fact!

March is around now, and racing quality will pick up. After speaking to a few beginners, word seems to spread from the high-end traders when they get excited for March and spring and summer racing to begin because liquidity increases, price volatility reduces, and generally the randomness decreases making trading easier. But for the beginners, ultimately it makes no difference because if you haven't got experience in the markets you won't intuitively feel this change. Using small stakes between £2 and £50 doesn't really make a difference in winter compared to spring and summer markets. So a word of advice would be to not give yourself false hope that if you're not trading well in the winter, don't think that because the professionals prefer the higher quality racing, that your trading will improve because it's 'going to be easier'. Perhaps you will get better results, but that may just be because your trading style suits the less volatile markets. As you gain experience, you'll learn your approach must change from season to season. And as you improve further, you must change your approach from race to race. Every race is different. Every race!

Back to Betfair

2010-02-16T12:19:00.002Z

After 5 weeks traveling I'm finally back home, I've heard nothing but bad things about the markets and Betfair while I was away - if there's any opportunity to get away and make a run for it, it's definitely Winter time. My plan is to slowly ease myself back into trading, taking small steps because this is the longest time I've been away without trading and I will inevitably be rusty, so limiting the risk will be my first step. My excitement about trading is still there, as expected!

2010

2010-01-28T09:20:00.002Z

So far.. no trading this year! I spontaneously decided to travel for a bit while the weather was absolutely freezing and meetings were being abandoned left right centre. I look forward to getting back and trading again soon.

2009, the end of the challenge!

2009-12-31T17:46:00.003Z

Well, it has come to the end of the year and my challenge. Looking back it was a hugely successful year for me on Betfair. When I started the challenge I thought realistically I could have made about 170k if I was consistent, and that was exciting. It was a challenging year at certain points, requiring high concentration levels every day. The days I was not fully 100% committed mentally, I lost money. Thankfully that didn't happen too many times. The total I made was £296,208.92. The Betfair premium charge reduced that profit by approximately 20% equalling £59,240. I haven't got the stats for the whole year but 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 know there are at least 3 other people who trade on horse racing markets that make similarly large amounts - you can see and feel them in the markets. Below that it's harder to estimate but there are probably at least a hundred who make a full-time living from trading the same markets.

As for a new challenge? Well, I will continue to set daily goals. I won't set a yearly target, because it doesn't have as much meaning for me. I like to take each day as it comes. And with regards to the blog, I will continue to post! I won't be posting as much of how much I make, but I will post the occasional P&L so you know roughly how well I'm fairing in the ever more competitive markets - especially since the markets feel as though they've contracting.

I hope you all had a great 2009, and probably by the time anyone reads this, a good new years eve. I'm looking forward to 2010, I've no idea what it will bring, but that's where the excitement lies!

What I've learnt (Part 2)

2009-12-29T12:01:00.002Z

So carrying on from the last post, apart from learning not just about myself I've learnt how fundamentally greedy the Betfair markets can be and some people who use it, especially once the stakes being placed down go above £1000; it's easy to see once you know how the markets operate; differing levels of course. I managed to see the greed because I saw it in myself, and on my path of truth it's fairly conflicting. What still keeps me in it at the moment is a paying wage whilst giving me the opportunity to see what else is out there, and of course the undoubted naturally-born ingrained excitement that I get from the predicting, winning, and improving at something, which most of I see clearer has really brought the world to it's current state of mess in large parts, not to mention good as well, but it's getting out of control. I'm making very broad statements, but it's what I see as truth and from my new found experience, living in a reality of truth feels oh so good! On a simple level, it's like when you lie, you don't feel as good as if you simply told the truth without fear of consequences - break that down to every action you make in life and it's quite amazing how many 'lies' we give out every day in so many different ways. So anyway, when I started trading it was very innocent, with a pure aim to make a living from it. But it evolved much further to trying to be the best, which there's nothing wrong with, but it was the side-affects that became very clear through self awareness that really made me like 'wow, is that really me and is that what I need?'.

I had an awful days trading the other day losing over £1000, I was just sat here casually trading and things going wrong left right centre - it was purely my fault, if you use large amounts, you have to always be ready - ready for anything, and I simply wasn't! I'm not going to hit the £300k mark, I'll be about 4 or 5k off.

I've learnt quite a bit more, but I'm trying to keep it related to what I've learnt in relation to my trading. I'm going to get the ball rolling on my awareness development site at www.adamheathcote.com where I'll post about things I've learnt, books I've read and reviews. No advertising - I'll be doing it purely for the interest of myself and others to help bring about awareness of yourself that's hidden. I started in August with one post, but haven't actually put the foot down on it yet, but will make a start on the very first day of the new year. I'll make post every couple of weeks or so, or whenever it feels right to make a new post or topic that I'm interested in.

In my next post I'll post the changes I've seen in market dynamics, where I think the markets are going and how to spot and deal with aggressive behaviour in the market.

What I've learnt (Part 1)

2009-12-17T11:07:00.005Z

Well the markets have been far from great lately. I don't know what I'm comparing against because most days I'm more likely to say that they're poor and not great. At least they are good enough to get something out of. I've been looking forward to writing this post (and Part 2) for a while because I really feel I've learnt a lot about myself, the markets, traits and other people.

I'll start with what I've learnt about myself over this year while I've been doing the challenge. I quickly saw myself very zoned in to making as much money as possible; it was hard not to when I was getting better at trading the markets, and to a certain extent I did that. But it was always an artificial high, it was if I wasn't hitting the sweet spot every day I wouldn't be as happy as I was when I did, and I thought to myself over a long period of time.. why? Well it's mostly my way of thinking, as is the same with any perceived negative situation. So all these questions really just got me thinking what I was trying to achieve, because initially it was more and more money. But what would I do with that - buy a bigger TV, and a house? Then what? So over the last year I've really managed to unravel so much subconscious thinking that goes behind every decision made to see what really is my truth. It's really fascinated and gives me a more natural longer lasting high than, "Yes I made £500 in that race!". This is all coming from me; my story, someone else will have a different outlook. So being successful at this trading is more of a personal Outer success, where what I would much rather achieve is person Inner success. It all sounds funny talk, if I read this a year ago I'd think I was crazy!

So my lack of enthusiasm for making more money from trading has faded, it's still there and will always be there no matter what I do - I have set standards I believe I can achieve, but with awareness of my Self.

Along with my new ways of thinking and questioning my thoughts and actions, what makes the feeling so much better is keeping fit and eating/drinking healthily. I enjoy a combination of the Bikram yoga I do, which I go 2-3 times a week. The benefits are so good! You should check it out, it's the fastest growing yoga and I know why. It's extremely good for any bodily ache or pain, it's great for fitness; my heart beats as fast as when I run when I'm doing it, and after many times of doing it, it's such a great mental workout because it's so tough to keeping going for an hour and a half in the heat and do every asana to your best ability - pushing yourself every time!

I know there's more I want to write, so I'll leave it for Part 2!

*Update - just a quick message to say that those who have subscribed to Racing UK like me, will surely have had their Christmas wishes come true by their Annual Racing UK 2010 members badge coming through the post today! Sarcasm aside, it's actually quite friendly; more than Betfair have ever given me!

November

2009-12-02T09:39:00.003Z

Another fairly quiet month in all aspects for me this month. I've really kind of taken a back seat on trading - I am not so intensely determined to make as much money as possible because I've really no need to earn more than a certain amount. It's very comfortable earning enough so as to not worry about money to live from - anything after that really is a bonus. The attitude has partly come on because of the low liquidity and poor trading opportunities out there are the moment, but also from background work on myself. I basically made a decision to get out of the spiral of wanting more, more and more of something I in essence don't need. It feels great - less stressful for sure, meaning less core work just to minimise stress from really being at the peak of my game. As a result I am more and more sitting back and getting involved in the markets when it's optimum to do so - sometimes I get carried away, but I usually spot myself when I get too intense. It is great that I have a chunk of money saved, which allows me to take this approach, and be open to new ideas that come my way. Anyway, enough contemplation of my current situation. In November I managed £16,270.96 averaging £57.29 a race, and for the full days I worked averaging about £1200 a day. It's not bad considering the laid back approach - it definitely suits me as I've been getting this usual illness I get much less - which I put it down to just being able to let all tension out of my body in whatever situation I'm in, including trading. Tension comes from being very ready to click your mouse button as quick as possible to have a competitive edge over other people - but it's probably just a bad habit developed over the years (I think most people though would tense parts of there bodies if asked to reacts very quickly to something about to happen).

Regarding my overall target I'm clearly not going to reach £350k, I'm currently on about £282k, so my target is £300k. That's £18k in December, which I should be able to do, just as long as I put a good number of full days work in.

At Ease

2009-11-20T10:49:00.001Z

I've been more accepting of the slowed down pace that the colder months have thrown up. I've learnt to trade slow and steady and be happy (as long as I reach over £1000 instead of the £2000 daily target!). I'd say I reached limitations with trading, and I can see now how the likes of Peter W. just accept trends in the market over periods of the year because they have seen it over more years than I have been around. I've only worked 9 days this month so far; buy doing all sorts of things. I am £25k short of the £300k target - I think the only thing that will prevent me from hitting it is the number of days I manage to sit down at my desk and trade. It's not because I'm not being disciplined - if racings on and I know I can trade, I will be there without doubt.

Anybody play Call of Cuty: Modern Warfare 2? I rarely play games, but this game is so much fun. My nickname is "fo_shizl" (PS3), I also play Fifa 10 if anybody wants a thrashing?

Sorry for the lack of posting - I normally like doing long posts, but I've covered a lot of trading aspects in past posts, but I'll do more, but shorter!

October

2009-11-02T11:14:00.004Z

Another quiet month for me! Ideas, time out, planning and evolving my sense of self has been high up there on my what I've done list. One thing that I discussed with a fellow Bet Angel user (aka my landlord!) was that once you've learnt how to trade an make money from it, the general skill and ability won't disappear - it just needs refreshing. Many people will want to learn trading as a skill to be able to do to earn some extra side money - this is absolutely feasible, however, you need to have got to a certain skill level to be able to do that. If I were to work once a week, I would quite simply be rusty whenever I trade, but because I have learnt the skills I should always be able to profit from - but only a percentage of my full capability. I'd say it lies somewhere between 25 and 60 percent. Another thing to mention if you are learning - you really need to have worked full-time for at least 4 months at it to acquire these skills! Going half-hearted at something will seldom get you anywhere to being able to compete in the markets. This is because markets can subtly change, and you need to be in the change while it's going on. However, market movements are still fairly predictable, even with the noise of money you see.

October I worked 9 days averaging approximately £1000 a day, which is not good for me, but it was because of the on and off trading I was doing. Not to mention coming back from holiday and a long weekend course, I went on to find volatile, low liquid markets. A few big backers also changing the shape of the markets from what I was dealing with in September!

A good break

2009-10-22T09:20:00.002+01:00

Hello everyone! Sorry it's been a while, I've been on my last holiday of the year to St. Lucia where I had a very welcomed relaxing holiday. It's back to business now, to get as close as I can to my latest revised target. After the two weeks off, trading feels fresh again - which is good - as it was starting to get a bit repetitive.

My first day back was half of the racing yesterday where a few large chunky bets were going through; looked like gamblers' money which threw me off a couple of times. I was very rusty but determined to get back into shape. I didn't do too badly considering I went to bed at 8.30am when I got back from the airport with jet lag! Not much else to say at the moment, I will post when I've done a bit more trading.

September

2009-10-01T11:11:00.004+01:00

A slow month for me, similar to August. I don't know how much different this time of year was to last but it certainly feels more restrictive in terms of amount of money I can make. This time last year though, I was still on a steep learning curve and was constantly improving. Now I feel, as I have for the last 6 months, that I have really slowed down learning, to the point where it feels learning has stopped (although learning is constantly going on subconsciously in order to adapt to slight changes in market conditions). I can feel myself tending towards a more conservative approach and fine tuning myself to subtle indicators much better than before, as the markets feel and appear to be thinning out the colder it gets.

Anyway, managed to fit in 11 full working days with the holiday to the US I took. It should have been 12, but one day I was very slow (actually I was hungover from the night before but I decided to trade anyway!) and I let a race go in-play and ended up losing £1,000.. so I cut the day short! I profited £16,172.03 which has been my lowest earning month this year. It's quite hard working on-and-off. I fare much better when I work Mon-Fri, with a bit of trading on a Saturday, and the same repeated the whole month without any random days off.

The service I've been running with Dave, Exchange Secrets, has really taken a positive move forward. Our advice has been very helpful to our members, and satisfaction is what we have been striving to achieve; it's been working. Our advice has been evolving and members have been very happy; many making the service fee up in one advised race. We offer the advice in the afternoons Mon-Sat. This accumulates to about 70 pieces information a month, or between 14 and 20 pieces a week. The information has not only been very helpful in helping our users to make profit, but to also educate them on scenarios, trading advice and to give our experienced views of the market from years of involvement. The information is designed to make you profit, but also give you a depth of understanding to the markets that you do not find explained anywhere else.
The advice has evolved so that we offer on average between 2 and 5 pieces of advice in a days racing, covering our view of the likeliest scenarios for the front 2, sometimes 3, runners in the race. The good thing about offering the likely scenarios if we see them, is that if our strongest opinion of the race goes wrong, you have a scenario to fall back on to in case you are not sure what could happen.

As well as advice, we've also got a live chat room for members; trading videos done by ourselves, offering a more technical analysis of trading on Dave's half, and a more intuitive analysis by myself for our members.

I'm looking forward to the cool Winter months ahead; it's not so bad being stuck inside - it's just a shame that the racing is practically cut in half if you include abandonments due to weather.

Tough first day back

2009-09-22T12:33:00.003+01:00

Trading after a lengthy break I'e found can be easy or demanding. It's easy to lose rhythm, and it definitely showed in my P&L. Lot's of ups and downs totalling to just over half an average day. My decision-making reactions were slow and it's hard to explain, but my bodily reactions were also slow - I think from all the crap I had been eating. I'm on a 'detox' diet; back to eating healthily; and it feels good. None of these sugar highs and lows with tired spots. Back to regular exercise and I'll be back in top mental shape. As with anything you do a healthy diet is important to help keep you alert, physically and mentally.

I lost in 9 out of the 22 markets, but made some good decisions in a few of the races to keep me well into profit. There were some big movements yesterday; I was expecting the volatility to be high, but not as high as it was. Kieron Fallon is definitely helping create some of this volatility on the horses he rides. Whenever I'm not expecting high volatility, I never stay in a swing trade long enough, but then it's pretty easy to see why. I seldom let greed take control. In fact I don't remember the last time I was frustrated because of any greed I've shown. I may try and up the 'greed' slightly to see if I can improve on my current swing trading performance.

Back from a break

2009-09-20T12:45:00.004+01:00

I've been away on my long-awaited trip to the USA with 4 of my friends. It was basically a road-trip to Vegas from San Diego and back again via the Grand Canyon, L.A. and a few other places. I feel exhausted from it, driving, gambling! and eating pretty unhealthily. I now know why the Americans are so obese, it's because it's actually hard to find supermarkets or somewhere to eat that offers healthy foods - I didn't make that much of an effort in all honesty to find it though, generally going for the easy option while I was out there. I was planning on doing a post out there, but found it hard to find a good internet cafe, as well as the time!

Anyway it's good to be back, refocus from my gambling in Vegas; I lost £200 which felt pretty bad, I won't lie! I'm not an out and out gambler by trade and it showed. I kept it small, on the tables that offered the lowest minimum bets. I worked on the day before I left, but just couldn't keep my concentration because I had so many things on my mind - it just shows again how little you must have on your mind to be able to trade effectively. Alternatively you could just be good at blocking out thoughts that you don't want, from coming up while you trade.

I haven't really been trying anything new with my trading. It's pretty much become standardised. So until my approach doesn't work I'll keep doing what I do. I expect a rocky start after a while away from the trading screen - I'll keep my progress posted on here.

Interesting Day

2009-09-04T18:41:00.004+01:00

Well today has been one of the more interesting days - with the comeback of Kieron Fallon, it definitely brought more volatility and action into the market today than usual. Punters will have strong conflicting views and markets can get pushed around, sometimes violently, as we saw in the 14:20 and Lingfield with Fallon's first race of the day. I didn't manage to get a screenshot but Peter W. on his blog did and just showed the massive move that occurred. I only managed £141 or so in the race, which is very poor considering the move. I usually don't do too well (in comparison to the price movement) on races where there is an absolutely massive move where I wasn't predicting it; mostly because I'm always expecting the price to turn back round, but sometimes they just never do.

It's always fairly exciting as well when the commentators get into debates, or there are stewards' enquiries ongoing etc. - it all makes for a more exciting day behind the screen; it should be cherished because they are few and far between. Actually sometimes I'll just miss completely what's going on on the TV - some days I'll just blast my music and not listen to any commentary, mostly because I'm just in the mood. I can sometimes get frustrated with myself when I do that though as when a horse is playing up, or something like that, and the commentator mentions about it, I'll miss it! But it's when I lose money because of it, as I'm just not expecting a drift.

I've had a good week this week which I'm pleased about - but it hasn't been without a few races where I just blow up and lose a load. That's been happening more often recently so I'll have to reanalyse my trading style.

Moving on to the discussion of blogs. There's a new blog called Adapt & Survive, which from his first post seems to be fairly successful! I always find it fascinating finding out out about other people who make more than a few hundred a day. One of the great blogs I think everyone would agree with, is the blog Don't Give Up Your Day Job, which has always been on of my firm favourites - as I write this it has made a comeback which I didn't know about! (I knew it would come back!; sharing your thoughts with other people and writing a blog is addictive to a certain extent). Of course, there are plenty of other blogs who offer great stories, maybe not raking in hundreds and hundreds of pounds, but are good reads. It's crazy when I look back and see where I started out. Anyway, I won't go into reminiscing! If you have a blog relating to horse race trading and you update it fairly regularly, then leave a comment or send me an email and I'll put the link up.

I remember posting up a graph of average I made per day since the start of my trading career. Well it's been exactly 2 years from the day I starting keeping records - rough as though they may be because I only record 'full' trading days. I don't mind posting this up because it can really show that hard work and dedication can see you improve. Also, since I started this blog, a lot of people have said to me, why publicise it, because it will only encourage other people to compete against you. I haven't found it getting harder, nor easier, but really I guess just constantly challenging - if I was losing out, I'd without a doubt probably stop! Anyway, this is about as detailed as my personal records get. All of the monthly figure totals will most likely be short - sometimes by a few thousands compared to the Betfair screenshots because I don't put up half traded days on this sheet.

August

2009-09-01T09:48:00.003+01:00

August was an okay month; I didn't work that many days, only about 10/11 full days, but I also had a fair bit of frustration being carried around. I seem to be finding that if I don't give a day's trading my all, I'm likely to just lose money from not being focused. Where as I used to be able to trade with as low as I'd say 60% concentration and still pull good days out of the bag. It's partly because I've been doing for 2 years, which isn't that long, but the repetitiveness can take it's toll. I'll counteract this by staying fit and going to the gym, and I think I'll now set myself a monthly goal as well as my usual daily goal. The daily goal is working for me because when I'm focused on a day I can usually hit it. If I want to hit my £350k target I need to average £27.5k a month in the remaining months. If I stay focused and take fewer days off; I'll be able to make it.

On the Friday I had a very bad day, worst ever in fact (excluding the time where I lost £1.8k when the internet went down round my brothers house!)- but a good reminder nonetheless that it's not always easy. I started with a huge loss which I do from time to time, but it usually just kicks me into gear and I just blitz the rest of the day. But this just didn't happen! I was having one of those days where my personal body response time was slow!, and my decision-making was equally as slow. I was predicting what would happen pretty well, but still made rookie mistakes putting in too much money in the market at the wrong times - awful! Anyway I look forward to a refreshing few months ahead as the weather cools and my office also stays cool. The bad weather generally doesn't make me feel guilty about being indoors, so my concentration definitely improves during the Wintery months.

Headache

2009-08-26T17:34:00.006+01:00

Well what a headache I have! I came back from Germany on Monday evening from the Nurburgring absolutely exhausted. The freedom working for yourself is amazing, allowing you to take whenever off as long as you've worked hard when you need to. I was slightly rusty on Tuesday's trading and the same today. I managed to lose my biggest ever sum on one race today, £970! I literally backed at the bottom of this trend and it went all the way back up miles, and I simply thought it was going to stop but it never did. I still managed to finished up just under £1,200, but boy do I have a headache - I'm still a bit clogged up from that fever draining through into a summer cold.

Exchange Secrets is coming on well, Dave and I are giving out sound advice through analysing fewer races that we feel more confident on. Our members are very happy, a few members writing their joy with the service over the last week's worth of advice. Today I predicted a potential drift from 2.82 to between 3.7-3.9. This did happen and that one race alone would have covered more than the cost of membership. Anyway that's just one example - the service has been shaping up nicely from the advice we were initially giving out, which was too many races and less detail. I'll get a link up soon with all the historical advice we've given out soon and a few of the great comments we've been left from our current members.

I was gutted about yesterdays Sedgefield delay because I'm really trying to finish this months total over £20k. So far I've only traded 8 full days, with 3 left before the months up. I missed out on a lot of York but instead of looking back I'll look forward.

One reaason why I think I've been rusty is because while I was driving round that track in Germany, I thought how much more intense driving at high speeds was, and I thought that it was about 4-5 times more intense. Now I realise trading's not quite as easy compared to driving fast because I really had to up my concentration levels to come back from losing that grand - I have to say, I was pretty frustrated with myself after doing that - I don't really use my boxing bag in the room anymore because I accept mistakes I make more easily now, but I had to that time!

Back to blogging

2009-08-20T11:41:00.004+01:00

I'm back to writing about my daily ups and down of the life of trading on Betfair. I've been fairly inactive in the markets at the moment; there's something really intriguing going on at the moment because I'm again not feeling very well. It's not a common cold or anything, it's the same thing I get all the time, which just seems to be a temperature and achy - anyway I'll figure it out sooner or later. Normally I just trade through it, even if the results aren't very good. This time I have decided to just rest and see whether it helps me recover more quickly, annoying thing is, even when I plan on doing nothing - things always need to be done! August is going to be a poor month based on records - but not for average per day, which out of 7 days traded is not bad. I'll be able to fit in another 5 hopefully before the end of the month is up.

It's great the football season is back up and running. I really enjoy playing the fantasy football (I play the official free one; the budweiser one here. I've just used my wildcard and think I've got a quality team! Last two years was easy as long as you had Ronaldo - so tougher this year.

Over today I'm going over many comments and emails, I have plenty to get through - apologies it's taken a while. I let them build up and all of a sudden there's loads! My internet is down today so I'm on the small laptop with backup mobile broadband.

Speculation

2009-08-18T09:48:00.011+01:00

There is a lot of speculation out there at the moment - and I just want to set things straight. Exchange Secrets (ES) is a new idea that has never been done before, and when Dave approached me with the idea a couple of months ago, I thought this could work because whenever Dave was with a client teaching 1-to-1 trading, we would often give out predictions as to the direction of the markets. We wouldn't get every race right, probably 50-65% of the markets we predicted were fairly accurate. Anyhow, our intentions are not to scam people, rather to help people; if you're not happy with the information then we are not tying you down to a years subscription or anything like that. If after a couple of months we find that the information isn't really helping people, we will do our best to adapt the information to help people the most, i.e. try and be more accurate in some areas or word things differently. If people aren't happy at all after a couple of months of the site being up, we will not waste our time or anyone else's time! It is genuinely out there to help people rather than deceive people and become a business adventure for myself, and see where it takes me.

From a personal point of view, if while I am providing this service it effects my trading to the extent that I'm losing out more than I gain, I probably won't continue, but there's only one way to find out! Money will always be flowing through the market no matter what advice is given out, so that neither increases or decreases someones ability to make money in the market and that's the reason I went ahead with it.

To verify my results there is a guy at Betfair who I spoke to on Sunday evening called Christopher Thomas. He sent me this email with the following P&L from 1st Janauary 2009 and said he can verify it; he's also sending the same thing via post, which I should get in the next couple of days.

I also reiterate that I don't work for Bet Angel in anyway. My link with them purely came from me sending an E-Mail to Peter W asking if it was okay to put up a link to my blog on the Bet Angel site in exchange for having the blog themed for Bet Angel - seeing that I already used the software and didn't have any readers I couldn't wait. The blog was not set up with the ES in mind, it was set up because trading is a lonely existence. When I started I had no idea how well people were doing outside of me apart from pinstickers blog. ES also has absolutely nothing to do with Peter Webb, it was purely a business adventure taken by myself and Dave.

One things for sure is that I'm not going anywhere because I have nothing to hide and my intentions are good. I want to continue my blog because I enjoy it. There will always be people who question anything and everything that happens - it's just crazy the extent to which it's all guesswork!

Exchange Secrets

2009-08-15T14:15:00.003+01:00

The service I was talking about is now up and ready to go!

www.exchangesecrets.com

"A brand new site designed to help people trade profitably on the sports exchanges. Exchange Secrets is a service providing its members with professional views on horse racing markets on Betfair.

This site is for like minded people who want to profit on sports exchanges. If you want to gamble, want large instant profits, then you are in the wrong place. We will provide solid professional advice, the same methods we use to trade the exchanges day in day out. It will provide you with the opportunity to not only make profitable trades but to learn a bit more about the markets and how they behave.

Membership allows clients to receive our daily assessments of UK horse racing. This assessment allows our clients to trade on the exchanges with more confidence which ultimately allows them to succeed at trading the horse racing markets. Clients also enjoy a private members section and a forum for discussion about anything related to trading."

The service is perfect for inexperienced traders who have just started out. With the knowledge of knowing how to back and lay, the advice can help you climb the experience ladder and give you a clearer picture of how it's possible to make some decent profits through trading.

If you're looking to improve your trading, our advice can give you the trading insight you need to turn a profit in the horse racing markets.

If you're already fairly experienced, our triallists found that it solidified their view and gave them more confidence, leading to higher profits. Our view is that if you use our information correctly, you can more than easily make up for the monthly fee.

£55 a month is our initial starting fee, we were tempted to start off at £75 given the value of the information if it's used properly, so jump on board before we change the price!

We have left the site open to new ventures in the very high chance that we will expand the service into advice for our clients for trading other sports including football, tennis and golf, as well as other major sporting events. We've also got a forum for members to discuss trading and advice and for people to share their views on the day's markets.

Back to my challenge, trading has been okay recently, but I've had to really sit down and focus hard. Some days it's as easy as sitting down and clicking a few buttons, but that's rare. Most full-time traders will tell you of a day where everything went so smoothly, everything just drops into place. I think days like that are more down to luck than being in-the-zone though!

Awareness

2009-08-12T17:10:00.003+01:00

I was driving on the motorway on the M25, you guessed it, in traffic. I was in a slowly moving queue for a while out of the three lanes, and thought, hey this isn't moving anywhere! So after I sat in the queue for a bit I jumped in the next lane where it appeared to be moving faster. Low and behold, as soon as I got in the next lane it slowed down and the queue I was in started moving again. Of course this is a school boy error, I knew the rule of thumb that you're better off staying in the same lane; but I couldn't help it because I was sure it would work out. It reminded me of trading, you see a great move - the price is going down, and it looks like a sure fire thing to carry on going. The minute you jump on it, bang, it goes the other way. It's happened to me many-a-times, and a slap on the knee to remind me not to do it again can only help so much! Learn from mistakes and hopefully next time you see the same thing happen, you'll think twice before entering the market for what you thought was a quick buck. Jumping on trends that have already been going for a while will eventually stop just like the traffic in the lane did; it will go the other way and you will lose out; the measure being money rather than time!

My Awareness Development website should be completed soon, and I can't wait to get it to everyone. There won't be much there except a couple of articles; I plan to write 1-2 articles a week. It's all free, exploring the fascinating world of emotions and thoughts, how we can develop awareness and in general why we do certain things that seem rational, but are in fact irrational after a closer look. How does it relate to trading? - The more you are in control of your emotions, the better trader you can become. This comes through awareness; awareness of your thoughts which fire all these emotions.

Going back to my trading. Yesterday I had a sloppy day, I wasn't focused at all, so after a couple of races I quit; I don't do this too often because it's failing. Anyway I went back home and strolled around the greenery of Buckinghamshire, it was very relaxing and I'm glad I did it - I was very focused today.

Ever get that feeling?

2009-08-07T20:17:00.010+01:00

Have you ever had that feeling that someone knows what you're doing and is purposefully going against you no matter what? or just for any reason whenever you decide to get in the market it goes wrong? Well snap out of it! I occasionally get those feelings a few times in a month, I have to overwrite them because it's simply your brain seeking reasoning for survival as to why it's not working out for you. There are hundreds of traders out there and so much going on, with people in numerous types of positions, which means that you got yourself into it because you pretty much just got it wrong. The best way to step out of it is to just compare yourself back to when you were in the zone and felt like everything was going right for you.

Comments

I've just gone through a months worth of comments and replied to them, so check back to see if you left a comment; I should have replied. Also, apologies if you've posted a comment and it wasn't accepted. I tend not to accept comments that antagonise other people or users who post comments. I tend myself not to get involved in arguments unless it's merely a discussion, as they literally are pointless!

I was up to lean sheet of about 40 races today from two days ago and I'm pretty sure that was my record for the most number of consecutive races without loss. I sent a message to Peter W asking what his was, to see if I could aim for it and beat it. Guess what? I lost in the very next race! As Peter said, it's always the case! I'll just remember next time to not mention it to anybody, even myself!

A couple of recent P&L's:

Today

Yesterday

Today was a fairly poor day, no excitement. Yesterday was a breeze I was just completely in the zone the whole day and I wish every day was like that! I'm 65% through my last updated challenge at £227k. I predict a very tight finish to it, especially since I have a month's holiday to take, spread over the remaining of the year. It going to require me to remain focused every day.

Back in action

2009-08-04T15:38:00.004+01:00

I've just come back from a long weekend in Mallorca; I nearly couldn't go with the bombings out there and the closing of the airport. Thankfully it reopened and the flight left on-time! I've been fairly rusty today - it's also been a shock coming back to rain from the consistent sunshine of Mallorca. I can't believe that Chepstow got abandoned from the rain - it's supposed to be August! Anyhow it's hard to keep focused when you don't know if meetings are going to be abandoned or not because of the likelihood of trading on a race and not knowing whether it will run. Catterick also got delayed, and whenever there is a delay, the liquidity drops because the timing of traders and punters etc. all gets messed up. I also don't think it helps when traders like me put a negative on delayed racing because traders contribute the majority of liquidity. Anyhow, I managed to make £700 from 10 races, a poor start for my first day of trading August; mostly not down to my fault though!

July for me was painful looking back! It just felt slow and a bit of a drag to be honest. I made £25,260.02, which actually is a bit more than it felt like. I traded 317 markets averaging £79.86 per race. The average per race is definitely lower than the last few months because when I was ill I gave trading a go for a couple of the days without making any money, which was pointless; it would have been better to have just rested! Also, I traded a few of the evening races, and as the liquidity is lower, it's harder to pull consistently bigger results out of the bag. Hopefully this month I can hit over 30k.

Feeling Better

2009-07-30T15:01:00.004+01:00

Well I feel much better now - feeling normal is very underrated compared to being ill! Somebody left a comment saying that confidence is not important, so I've popped up a questionnaire to see whether you guys feel that confidence helps you trade.

The last questionnaire I posted was to do with "What income would you be happy with?"

It's always something that everybody would always be happier on a higher salary. I've fallen victim to this. I reached my peak on my trading abilities a few months ago and to be fair, I've dropped off a little bit, but only slightly and my effective salary has gone down! So anyway I caught myself thinking 'oh no!' and realised how daft this was; I'm sure I could live a simplistic life off a salary between £30-40k which equates to between £150 and £200 before the premium charge, which I think I could manage no matter what conditions the market throw up in the upcoming years. Anyway, what's keeping my competitiveness up at the moment which helps me keep an edge is I would love a place to buy in London where I can call my home, somewhere to live with no mortgage (so I'd have to buy outright) which would let me enjoy life without the need to earn enough to pay a mortgage - but until then, I need to keep my eagerness and competitiveness up as well as willingness to learn and adapt; it's important if you want to learn and grow!

Anyway, most of you said £100k+ you would be 'happy' with. Seeing that the average income is much much lower than that, it seems like we've all got to be rich to be happy! Fair play to the ones that said £10-20k!

Illness has struck

2009-07-23T19:53:00.003+01:00

Last few days have seen me away from my computer. If I was ill before, depending on how bad I was feeling, I will always attempt to trade because the thought of taking a day of when it's not deserved is frustrating. This time though, I'm feeling absolutely drained - most definitely self-inflicted from an exhaustively draining day and a very late night out Monday; there's no sympathy for me. It's definitely not swine flu before anyone asks!

For the days I have trading over the last couple of weeks, which hasn't been that frequent, I've felt indifferent about the markets - meaning that I think they have just felt average in terms of movement and liquidity. Whilst thinking about it, I remember it took at least 4-6 months of full-time trading before I ever get a 'feel' of the markets. Up until then, I think I purely traded on factual information such as weight of money and graphing.

I hope I get better soon; I've really been missing out getting my new challenge progress on its way by the end of the year.

Providing a service

2009-07-19T21:05:00.004+01:00

This last week has been painfully slow for me! The trading has been fairly abismal in my opinion, but mostly boosted by my personal frustration with being busy and there being other high profile events on so last week saw me achieve about £2k. Over only 46 races this should have been much better!

I am raring to go and my lack of work over the last week will ensure I stay focused throughout my next week of trading!

Since I started my blog I've had numerous emails from people who are in one of the following categories regarding their skills as a trader;

1) You are totally new to trading and who would like guidance with their trading.

2) Has had some experience, but can't pin down consistent profits.

3) Has had plenty of experience but needs that extra bit to make trading pay.

One of the biggest attributes required to trade successfully is confidence. Knowing this, it opens doors to providing a service to people which can help them with their trading to become more confident, and in turn, profitable. Anyway, keep an eye out for news very soon!

Clashes

2009-07-16T15:41:00.002+01:00

Occasionally, like today, you'll find clashes with other sports. The liquidity is fairly low and trading the markets whilst the golf open and ashes cricket are on, give the markets a much less meaty feel. It's hard for me to hit these targets I set for myself, and knowing the nature of the markets it makes it slightly demoralising. This is the sound of an unmotivated person and I'm writing this post to remind myself that all this negative talking about racing is having a big impact on my ability to focus and make the best of the days racing.

If you ever catch yourself speaking negatively, all you have to do is talk yourself out of it. The more you do it, the quicker you can turn your attitude around in the future.

Tidiness

2009-07-15T09:25:00.003+01:00

One thing I do to make myself stay focused is to keep a tidy office. If the room's tidy, my thoughts are going to be much clearer and concise than if I was trading in a messy room. Clutter just seems to have this amazing ability to clutter my mind. I still forget to tidy it occasionally and not very surprisingly those are the days I am not very focused and trading at the lows of my ability.

I had a good week trading last week pulling in a respectable £8,000 before the premium charge. This week I've been fairly off the beat; busy with other ideas and extra curricular activities such as Argentine Tango which I've taken a liking to recently. Hopefully planning to go to the Nürburgring Nordschleife again soon for a two day track run which is exhilaratingly fun. A chance also to see some fine cars and practice my photography on cars zooming around the track.

Exit Points

2009-07-09T23:42:00.004+01:00

Exiting your trade is as vitally important as entering a trade. If you have made a poor entry position, you'll be falling back on to your exit trade to determine whether you make a non-profit trade or a terrible trade.

If you missed the entry points post you can find it here.

Instead of repeating myself, all of the entry points are important to be aware of when making an exit trade. There aren't really any new points so I'll just cover each point where I can add new information with a perspective of exiting a trade.

Weight of money

After watching so many races, I've developed a good sense of deciding when the price will stop moving in one direction and head in the other. The way the money gets matched is different to the way a false move does; it's subtle and unexplainable, but if you watch carefully you can eventually get a better judgment.

Book over-round

Similar to entry points, if you're in position on a horse drifting, the over round will most likely be edging between 102-4, so you'll want to keep your eye on this as when the book starts tightening you'll want to think about getting out. But remember, you can't just rely on this, over hundreds of races you will start to get a feel of when the best time to exit is around.

Time before the off

Be careful with about a minute to go before the race is due off. A fair number of people will be exiting their positions and in my experience it's harder to predict. I also find that trends will usually come to an end with about a minute to go as the markets find an equilibrium; so if you backed a horse going down, then would be a good exit point if it's been a constant steamer, the same goes for drifters.

Matched and unmatched bets

Try and keep a tally of matched bets in your head so you know what's been matched going what way, this will help you decide on when to exit your trade; based on every factor I mentioned in the entry points also.

Commentators voicing opinion

I find that once a commentator voicing an opinion, it takes about 5 seconds on average for people to react, depending on how strong the opinion is and who is saying it. So getting in position by then is good. Getting out I find that the stronger the opinion, the closer to 30 seconds is a good point to get out, where as if it's weaker, closer to 10 seconds. Remember these are all guides and nothing definite, it's just roughly what goes on in my head during these events.

Horses 'playing' up

The same rule I explained in commentators voicing their opinion should be used here also. The more extreme a horse plays up the longer you should wait before getting out; this time the extreme end could be minutes. A horse being stubborn as an example of a tiny play-up, then exiting the trade could be no more than 10-20 seconds after it happened.

Regarding stop losses, I personally seldom use them. I prefer manually controlling my position and being aware of my net position in my head. Stop losses are very good when predicting long term trends. One attitude I take is to get out if I have any doubt greater than a strength of 2-3/10 that the price will move against me. Sometimes very slightly higher if I'm doing long term trends because you need to ignore the subtle swings in prices. These 'mini' swings in prices can be quite predictable - they occur because everyone is always constantly unsure at which point the price will stop and/or head in the other direction.

Never let trades go in-play, it's gambling if you do it on purpose because you felt bad about getting out at your current loss. If you don't know anything about in-play betting, then it's simple; stay away from it. If you are one these people who are addicted or just have a habit of letting it go in-play, try setting accountability on this. So whenever you purposefully let a race go in-play half way through a trade, make yourself do something you don't want to do, like cleaning the toilet - if you don't follow through on it, you're only letting yourself down and you will most likely never succeed at trading if you can't introduce good habits.

Never sit and hesitate too much on a trade, the more you hesitate, the more confidence you're draining from yourself - just get out of position and start again. This piece of advice is invaluable! The more you restart your trades, the more chance you give yourself from learning from mistakes. Also stop yourself from being in the 'what if' mentality. My flat mate used to do it all the time, saying things like 'If I got out a minute later, I would have got x more ticks and made £y more!' - it's time wasting and you're not paying attention to the market, holding yourself back from valuable market experience! It's also just negative thinking. You want to be as confident as possible.

Always remember: before you succeed, you must fail; take each loss positively with the mindset 'Yes I lost money, it was a bad trade, on reflection I did x and y wrong, next time I will try and do this' If you say this after every bad trade, you will undoubtedly improve. This statement is basically what I think an intuitive person repeats in their head subconsciously every time a mistake is made. I have sidetracked a bit from exit points, but it's still important to know.

I have been fairly consistent this last week, apart from today where I was not focused at all. I started poorly and was £500 down after 7 or so races. I then managed to finish £100 up - I decided to stop because I couldn't get in the zone (it happens). So I went to go shopping, got half way to Westfield and turned around because what I really needed was a deep breather and some music to calm me down from the rush I was in in the morning. Anyway I managed to turn the day into a £1250 profit; very gutting because the liquidity was good today with the Newmarket meeting and if I was on form and focused, I felt like I would have make a killing. Oh well, there are plenty more races in the future. I've started Argentine Tango lessons, which have been great fun, I'll talk about that another day - but ladies - watch out!

I'm currently on about £207k so far, I'm going to edit the challenge for the final time, making it £350k instead of £250k; I think it's more of a challenge to me which should help me refocus throughout the remainder of this year.

June

2009-07-02T18:07:00.006+01:00

June for me was a very frustrating month with the heat in the office, the high standards I had set myself of my now target £2,000 a day and overall lack of motivation. I think the lack of motivation came from having reached my peak and knowing it would be nearing on impossible to match it; and when I could not produce the same results I did from Cheltenham at Ascot I was disappointed. Anyway, that was just where I stood. Without always wanted to do just that bit better every month I don't think I would be I am now - I had the burning desire to succeed. The markets were also different to what I was used to - randomness in the markets and the frequent low liquidity made for unpredictable times and lowered confidence. Some normality I feel is coming back, obviously without that punter who kept backing the favourite with large sums of money. I managed to make money off of him, but it held me back from getting in positions I would normally have gotten into. I also feel more motivated now that I know I can control the temperature in my office, I can stay cool during the day and keep much more focused.

On to my results. I traded 19 full days, with quite a few days where I traded just a few races. I profited £29,478.35 covering 305 markets. A much better return per race than I was expecting it to be. I am making all this money yet my bank balance doesn't seem to by increasing that much. I thought I had curbed my spending on gadgets, but somehow the money slips out the bank in many other ways!

Anybody that had emailed or left me a comment, I will be going through the past few weeks' over the next few days.

The heat is on

2009-06-30T22:03:00.005+01:00

Well this past week has been very busy for me. I took Thursday and Friday off in preparation for a house party I had, which ended with great success! The best party I have ever hosted.

I'm sure many of you, as well as myself, have been struggling with this heat. It's been so hot I was getting very agitated this morning trying to think of a solution. If you read a couple of posts earlier back, you'll know I was struggling with the heat. It really affects my decision-making and everything else that's needed to trade - mostly mental strength. It drains me and I've realised more than ever how important it is for me to work in a cool environment. I got to the point this morning that I was taking someone's advice on here and phoning around to see what office space with air conditioning was available within walking distance of me for the summer. There are two floors at the bottom of my block of office space that hasn't been in use for months and months, so I gave that a go, but they weren't interested, as it would only be for a couple of months. I have a portable air conditioning unit, but it's so loud I actually lost concentration the other day and lost several hundred in one race as a result of not being in a comfortable environment. Anyhow, I remembered I had a pair of Shure in-ear headphones - I put them in, and they instantly dramatically reduced the noise; with my music or the TV makes in completely bearable. I also repositioned the air con unit so that the air more specifically cooled the area I was in rather than the other side of the room. This is as well as the 76% heat reflecting film I have cover the whole of the window! So now I've got the heat sorted - I can focus my efforts back to pulling out some good results out of the bag which I have been really lacking of this month - which I think was down to the heat. It all links in with having a clear head whilst trading - which is so important if you want success in trading to come your way.

In the next couple of posts I will make sure I get that Exit Points post done soon. I'll do it after tomorrow's update of how June went for me, and my general overview of the markets. I'll try and strike a good balance between helpful information for to improve your trading, and information that isn't so useful; but may serve as a motivational source.

Blag a million

2009-06-24T16:32:00.005+01:00

Well, the Blag a Million project is officially under way and this Monday they blagged all my profit from the afternoon's trading session. Here is the video:

My progress has continued at the same rate as it did throughout May. The days are sunny, and sitting inside is a bit of a pain! I've been making the most of the sun when I can get some; a bit of sunbathing on the roof is quite fun and relaxing. My brithday's coming up, I'll be 24 and I'm heading down to Windsor racecourse for the day to gamble my money away with a group of friends. I'll try and get in the background shots of any filming like those goons you usually see who pretend to be minding their own business but are clearly trying to edge in on TV!, so if you're trading watch out for me!

Ascot (continued)

2009-06-19T12:41:00.003+01:00

For the second day of Ascot I had similar success to the first day - although I took a big loss on the last race. I was in position and some punter who clearly wanted to back the favourite went against me, and lost me money!; sounds like Alan Sugar. Anyway the day was a result to be pleased with. Yesterday I struggled, I just wasn't 'up' for the days trading and I wasn't awake in my head. I played squash late in the evening and it showed - I just couldn't keep track of the scoreline, and every shot I kept playing was rubbish! I managed to finish up £1200, which by my standards was pretty poor; especially considering the higher liquidity at Ascot.
Normally what I've been doing lately is if I finished under £1000 for the afternoon trading session, and I haven't any plans for the evening, I'll trade the evening races to make it feel like I've put in a good effort for the day.

I'm really considering taking one day off in the week to pursue whatever I feel like doing. It should open up my career path, because at the moment my trading on Betfair feels like something I do just to make money, not something that I can be really enthused about. I'm thinking about starting a personal development blog/website initially for myself, but to share what I've learnt with others. I'll be sure to post up the link for anyone that might be interested in it - I think I'll start it next week.

1st day of Ascot

2009-06-17T09:31:00.004+01:00

Royal Ascot has started and I was very much looking forward to it. The big meetings bring higher liquidity, which, if you can learn to master those kinds of markets, can be worthwhile for your wallet! I did have a good day today. But they just didn't feel as good as Cheltenham was earlier in the year. Well, it was only the first day with 4 more to go! I've attached my P&L, what's funny about it is the start I had compared to the rest of the day. I've found that I can usually have a good day if my first result was a loss because it bumps me into action to say, 'come on Adam, get in the zone'.

I pulled a nice result out of the bag in the 15:45, mostly down to there being a drift on the horse in the final couple of minutes. Thankfully it stayed slightly cloudy yesterday so my room wouldn't heat up past my level of comfort. The forecast is cloudy over the next few days too, which I am very thankful for over the festival. I had my air conditioning unit on a couple of days ago. I started off with it in the room adjacent to my office, hoping it would cool that room enough so as to suck the heat out of this one!.. That didn't work so I put it in my office, a small 1.9m x 3.3m room. The noise was very loud. I don't think many people would be able to cope trading with what I had going on at one point - the air con, my music and the TV commentary; all within a metre of me! Pretty funny stuff.

Blag a million

2009-06-16T12:22:00.007+01:00

Slightly off topic, but it's a challenge, similar to mine! - blag a million at www.blagamillion.com are these 2 guys, one of which is my friend, who are attempting to blag a million pounds in 3 months by doing everything and anything they can think of! It's going to be crazy. They are filming the whole thing; you can keep track of their progress by visiting their website once it's fully up and running starting on the 21st June. There's a big chance that it will take off and become big news within the 3 months so keep your eye out and join in wherever possible.

I will be taking part. I am offering/donating a day's trading towards their total! Hopefully just over a grand, or whatever total I can pull in on the day they film me will be a good start.

Hopefully I just don't have a losing day! You can join the facebook group here.

Taking time off

2009-06-09T23:54:00.004+01:00

I've been working quite intermittently lately, and busy with plenty of things - such as buying a car. I have been trading, and of course I am carrying on with the blog - no doubt about that! I know it's been just over a week since my last post - someone just asked me if I'm stopping my blog! I really enjoy writing this blog and can't imagine discontinuing with it. I did trade on Derby day, although I was slightly hungover - so I just traded on the Epsom races alone; the other races seemed fairly poor in terms of liquidity. My confidence is back up again now - when my confidence is low, I can see the mistakes I make whilst trading; it's just so hard to change your trading style in an instant.

Taking time off

Regarding the post title, there are advantages to working non-stop. I remember when I started I wouldn't take a day off, I worked on every race I could - little did I know that that's exactly what you need to do to give yourself the best chance to get good at trading. It's the same anywhere else. Successful individuals work extremely hard at their chosen profession to work their way up, and when they have raised their game, they have the freedom to take time off, knowing that they have already put the hard work in. I find that if I trade too many consecutive days, my performance drops. So what I do now is take the time off when I feel I need the time off; allowing me to maintain a high level of concentration throughout a trading session without exhaustion. It's good to recharge the batteries! I've had quite a few days off though, that once I'm more settled and have less distractions, I will feel ready to trade 2 weeks non-stop!

This month so far I'm currently averaging just above my average per day from last month. I want to work hard the remainder of this month as I feel guilty for spending a large chunk on a car. Actually, it brings back memories of a motivation I had to make money trading. I have never had any problem spending money, and I used to spend my winnings easily - the motivation being if I didn't make any money the following few days, I would have no money at all! (I was strict about not withdrawing past a set amount in my account I was happy trading with).

May

2009-06-01T10:59:00.004+01:00

The pressure was really on for me in May. I had done so well in March and April, at the start of May I felt it was inevitable that I wouldn't do as well. I think that was my downfall, that mindset is not that of a winning one. Nevertheless, I still averaged £1,707 a day for the 18 full days I traded, consisting of 2 Monday's, 4 Tuesday's, 4 Wednesday's, 3 Thursday's, 4 Friday's and 1 Saturday; that's a respectable profit of £31,766.84 for the month. On the Friday just gone I let the heat get to me and I only just managed to keep the day profitable with £25!. my worst day for a while; maintaining my run of 79 consecutive profitable days. After writing this post I'm heading out to the shops to by a fan. Last year I did buy an expensive air conditioning unit, but it was so noisy, I never used it.

I averaged £76.54 per race over 415 horse races. That's nearly £30 less per race than last month. I put this down to there being no 3/4 day festival like Cheltenham or Aintree (the liquidity was very high at these two meetings on almost every race), as I nailed them this year! My confidence in March and April was very high, so May, I have to be honest, wasn't as high. My biggest challenge this summer is going to be keeping cool (literally), as the heat can really affect my decision making; living in a top flat where the heat rises to, and having my office facing the sun during trading hours doesn't help! I only traded 18 days this month; if the weather stays like this, I will probably be spending more time outside rather than inside. A slightly different approach than the other top traders out there.

Entry points

2009-05-27T12:12:00.007+01:00

Entry Points

There are different types of entry points given the information you are basing the entry upon. These are:

Graph history
Weight of money
Book over-round
Price bands
Time before the off
Specific market tendencies; i.e. repeating patterns
Price movement; i.e. how far has the price already moved.
Price movement of another horse
Matched and unmatched bets
Commentators voicing opinions
No. of runners
Horses 'playing' up, etc.

All of these need to be taken into consideration when placing an entry - the better you can learn about every single one of these, and your ability to process them all very quickly will help you get a great entry point. I will keep the explanations brief as I could probably write a full blog post for each section!

Graph history

I think it's important to get to grips with using graphs religiously, as what has already happened is, in my opinion, a massive indicator of what is likely to happen. The less graph history there is, either using the Betfair graph or Bet Angel graphing, the harder it is to predict the future, but closer to the 5 minute mark before the off, the easier it is. But remember, never solely base your decision on one thing; you need to use a number of these indicators to make the right decision.

Weight of money

In my opinion, is important as ever; but never solely base a decision on just this. Watch money flowing in and out of the market and eventually you'll be able to judge at what points in time before the race where weight of money is a true reflection of potential price movements.

Book over-round

This is one of those facts that you don't need to be intuitive to understand; if the book over-round is close to 100%, you know that something has got to give way in the prices of the horses. A tip: most likely the one that has already been either drifting or steaming.

Price bands

If there are a few minutes prior to the off time, take a look on the far right column of the Bet Angel ladder interface. Here you will see the total amount matched for each price. If you see that 30K has been matched on every price between 3.2 and 3.5, then outside those prices the amount matched drops to 15K and less, you now know that the price has predominantly stayed between those prices for a while, and the graph is most likely to reflect that, so the price is much more likely to carry on staying between those two prices. Being aware of the time before the off is, in my opinion a very important factor for using this indicator.

Time before the off

Being aware of the amount of time before the race is due off I think is pretty important. For example if there is just 30 second to go before the off, there is much less chance of there being a massive swing in price, the same goes if there is only 10 minutes before the off. Making the connection between time and price movements will help you with your entry.

Market tendencies

You need to be aware of patterns in the market that are repeating. So for example, prices moving inside a price band - they usually see-saw between the upper and lower 'boundaries', but seldom in equivalent timings.

Price movement

If a price has moved from 2.0 to 3.0 for example, you should know that the price isn't just going to continue drifting forever out to 1000. Taking price movements that have already happened can help you make decisions about entry points. Taking the example of a move from 2.0 to 3.0, you should be much less inclined to then lay the horse at 3 given what's already happened.

Price movement of another horse

Say for example you have to favourites price equally at 3.0 If the price of one of the favourites started to drift, the price of the other favourite will more likely than not do the opposite. There are many more scenarios I've subconsciously learned I could explain, but that example gives the simplest explanation of what to be aware of.

Matched and unmatched bets

If someone jumped in the market and just backed a horse with £6,000 for example, the price is much more likely to go south; there are many explanations as to why, a couple being the weight of money has now changed, or £2,000 of that could have been traders, in which case they now need to get out. Unmatched bets simply add to the mixer of whether or not they are going to get matched, whether it's 'spoofing' - i.e. they don't want the money to get matched, and whether or not for example it's a punter's money and they are keen to get their money matched so they 'drag' their money down intentionally to get matched.

Commentators voicing opinion

If a commentator or a successful punter, e.g. Dave Nevison (when he's on a winning run!), starts explaining every reason under the sun why a certain horse can or cannot win, most likely people are going to react to them, therefore these opportunities can serve as an excellent entry point.

No. of runners

If there are only 2 runners for example, their prices will move nearly perfectly to each other; keeping a low book percentage. That's one of the easiest examples, but if you build up a picture of all the races you trade and remember the number of runners, you will start to see price movement patterns appear. Knowing and learning this can help with entry points.

Horses 'playing' up

This is well documented and known by everyone; if a horse plays up the price if going to drift and serves as a good entry point to lay the horse in question, or even back one of the other favourites if the horse is a strong contender.

While writing this, I felt I could have explained everything into a lot more detail - I never realised I actually analysed things subconsciously into so much detail so quickly whilst I trade. I will go into the technicalities with screenshots of specific examples another time. There may be a few more indicators I have forgotten to mention, I've listed all the ones I could think of whilst writing this.

I'll make my next post on exit points; it should be much simpler.

Regarding my challenge, it's going great. I didn't trade bank holiday Monday - I took the time to play golf and beat two of my friends! I did pretty appalling with 31 points, but it was only the 2nd time I played in over a year! Yesterday I managed to just scrape over £2,000 profit; all in all it was a pretty uneventful day (sounds silly I know) - I was auto-pilot the whole day.

Update

2009-05-22T23:29:00.005+01:00

Apologies.. its been a while since I last updated. I was aiming to reply to everyones' comments before I made my next post - I'll reply to them over the next couple of days. I've also been really busy doing all sorts of stuff; my interest in so many activities definitely keeps me busy. Some new activities I've been doing include Ultimate Frisbee, which I first tried out at University, and now play occasionally in the park with an organised group. I think one of the best things that has come about making all this money from trading has just allowed me to be open to new activities and ways of thinking, especially with being your own boss and working 4 hours a day; although I used to trade practically 7 days a week and on every evening race meeting when I was learning the ropes. I remember my now friend ex-girlfriend wasn't very happy when I was so adamant to trade every day and every race! I'm so glad I'm slightly more relaxed about taking time off by prioritising better. It also reminds me of my Dad back at home when I used to just trade that 'extra one race' just before dinner while it was getting cold on the table - if I lost money on it I'd get it in the ear about coming down to dinner when you're told - but if you won lots, it's happy days!

Trading for me has quietened down this week, what I mean is the markets have been more rational and consistent, without the price jumping here and there from a massive order hitting the market. I didn't handle it all very well, being stressed out with annoying problems was hitting my confidence. I don't know whether it's just me but I think maybe as soon as something irrational happens, it changes your way of thinking so dramatically. It's also amazing how thoughts can manifest in your head and change your perception of the markets and your ability to trade successfully; for example if you were to start looking for a specific price movement, or order that you might be expecting to hit the market, or even a particular person you have a feeling is doing something (if only Betfair listed the names and addresses of all money in the market, so you knew exactly what each person was doing!), your senses for figuring out what's going on in the market as a whole, I think, are dramatically reduced, and you start making poor decisions because you are becoming detached from what's going on in the bigger picture. I do this frequently and it's amazing how much it affects my trading - I hope I've explained it okay.

I had one awful race today, I was scalping and literally every scalp was a losing scalp, if ever there was a time of how to be 'out of the zone', that was it! I did about 10 losing trades in a row - I just couldn't believe it. It would have been a perfect example of what not to do. Apart from losing a good few hundred there I managed to tip just over £2k profit for today - I should have done better because I was well in tune with the movements that were going on today.

My next post will be on entry and exit points; a short guide of when to enter and exit the market as a trader, while trying to make as much money as possible!

Old challenge completed

2009-05-13T23:08:00.005+01:00

Today marks the day where I completed my older challenge of £150,000. This does not include premium charge, which would bring the total to £120,000. Looking at those figures now, I can't quite believe I've already achieved what I initially set out to make over the course of the year! I'm 4 and a 1/2 months in, with about 6 and a 1/2 months of trading left, given I take about 1 month off to holidays. I guess maybe I should raise the bar a bit higher to 300!, but I don't want to look too far ahead; I like taking it day by day.

I had a good day yesterday and managed to keep another clean sheet, I think it's my second or third clean sheet of the year. Days like yesterday really help me towards my target, and keeping confidence high. I think if I were to break down the percentage of day's I was confident this year to those where I wasn't, I'd say 90-95% of the time I am confident of my abilities. I haven't been trading the evening racing as of yet, apart from once or twice. I don't like to drain my brain by trading for 7 hours, I think trading about 3 and a 1/2 hours keeps me staying fresh for the rest of the stay and even fresher for the following day's trading. Plus the liquidity at the moment is about half of that from the afternoon's meetings - I think. But by all means, if you're learning to trade, get involved in as many markets as you can, it's the best way to learn. There is plenty of money that can still be made from evening racing alone.

P&L from yesterday's trading:

Passion

2009-05-11T21:07:00.008+01:00

I just want to start off by saying thanks to everyone who makes any kind of comment to me on my blog or via email, whether it's positive or negative. I really appreciate when someone comes along and congratulates me because it makes me smile. But I also appreciate when I receive someone else's opposing opinion or negative feedback, whether I like it in the moment or not, I accept it, because it's purely from someone else's perspective, and wisdom comes from many multiple perspectives.

When I talk about 'Oh I made this this week', and I don't appear to be happy with the result, that's purely because that's the realm I'm working in right now. I had a friend tell me today about some guy in an office saying he 'only' got half a million bonus this year, but looking from a different perspective, it's just the realm that guy is living in. I have set targets (high ones) and have partially become desensitised by the numbers; I think it happens when you are used to a certain outcome. I am slightly worried that I have been churning out the results over the last couple of months, that any kind of slip up in momentum would really affect my confidence. That's where some of you have come in and jerked me back into reality and put things into perspective. I have a life coach, a mentor to me. I've learnt so many things from him and if there was one thing that has come from earning all this money, it is the ability to afford my life coach to completely better myself as a person, to have a purpose and know my journey is a good one! I've become so aware of myself and I love it. I strongly recommend a life coach worthwhile, someone who you feel you connect with, someone who you deeply truly want to be like. If I all of a sudden don't earn any money doing this, I'd much rather save the money I have made for the coach than go on a holiday for example! I feel truly guided to where I want to go; having a purpose in life is the most important thing I've learnt from him. I don't know how long I will stay trading on Betfair exchanges, until it feels right to move on I guess. It's hard for me to say I have a real passion for it, more something I feel I am naturally good at, and because I don't feel like I have a passion for it, I don't think I'm possibly getting the most out of my life! I don't know what 'job' I could do that resonates with my passion, but I sense I will find out soon! Peter Webb is definitely someone who has real passion for trading, if you've ever met him, you'll know you get a sense of that as soon as he speaks about it, and the best person you could possibly learn from is the guy with the most passion for whatever it is you want to learn.

So anyway, back to trading. I had a tough and stressful week last week, with a fever and frustrating problems with my computer, my confidence dropped quite significantly, and it showed in my trading. I was aware my confidence had dropped, but because I wasn't feeling very well, it felt almost impossible to drag myself out of it! I feel better now and I'm back to picking up my confidence, I have my computer back up and running smoothly and I aim to crack on with my trading and learn a few new things. I'm sure most of you know that for a couple days last week there was someone backing horse's with large sums of money on favourite's unpredictably. If you were 'screwed' over by them, don't be angry. I think those events just don't happen frequently enough for someone to be expecting them and to therefore learn to trade around it. Hopefully he lost all his money and doesn't come back! If your not sure what I'm talking about, basically there was someone repeatedly backing favourites with between 20 and 30 grand, I think over two days, which just through people off their mark and caused confusion and uncertainty in the markets. It definitely didn't help me! If it happened all the time I wouldn't mind, because you can learn to adapt to changing markets.

Since last Monday:

Trading on Betfair, is I think, the biggest mooching career there is. You take and (edited:) don't give much back compared to most other careers paying taxes! Not even direct taxes to contribute to society. I have to say, at the moment I don't feel terrible about this, when I should, which is bad, but I have been socially conditioned this way. Trading definitely does give me great feelings though, making a great intuitive trade feels awesome, I think this aspect of feeling great partly keeps me so motivated to stay dedicated every day to it.

I will make sure I reply to comments and emails over the next couple of days now that I'm feeling better. I was poorly for about a week. One of the reasons was because I worked even though I was unwell; I always feel I have nothing else I could do productively, so I might as well just trade. Thankfully it wasn't swine flu!..., and next time I'm feeling poorly I will make sure I just rest. Looking back it would have been the best thing to do.

Trading when you're ill

2009-05-08T15:56:00.007+01:00

...is not a good idea. When the Chester meeting started on Wednesday I was feeling fine and I had a cracking day of ~£2,600. In the evening I started to get ill - I suppose I felt it coming on earlier in the day. To top it off, on Wednesday my computer decided to fail on me. One of my hard drives decided to fail with bad sectors on my Raid 0 configuration so I was forced to trade on my laptop which I'm not used to, so for the last few days I've been without my PC. When your trading, I personally feel I need all the energy in my body to focus on my trades. Mostly because if a trade doesn't go my way I need my body's energy to keep myself calm and focused for the next trade. So anyway, last two days have seen me make just under £1000. Which have been my worst two days for a while. I'm gutted about the timing because there has been plenty of money in the markets. So anyway a stressful couple of days, I'm probably going to take a couple days off next week.

Is this stuff teachable?

2009-05-04T09:42:00.004+01:00

I was thinking the other day, is it possible to teach and train someone up to be good at trading on the horse racing markets? And the answer is yes. I think it is possible to teach someone basic signals/indicators that the market shows to allow someone to profit between £100 and £200 a day. This is with some intuition, and not jumping into the market when the indicators don't seem convincing enough. I think to progress further than that you start needing other skills, such as fast responsiveness, quick decision making and a greater intuition at market reading. There are other skills, but I feel that these are the main ones to getting 'really good'. One of the reasons I started the blog is because there is this stage that I feel anyone could reach with learning the basics and applying them on the right horse at the right time, and £100 to £200 is a good tax free wage for working from home!

Currently I don't offer personal mentoring or training, I may do in the future, but Bet Angel do offer two ways for you to learn these basics. The first option, is going on Peter Webb's course, the founder of Bet Angel and a masterful trader on Betfair since it opened in 2000. This is a great way for you to learn everything about working on betting exchanges and how to profit from them. This is the course I went on in 2006 and I can safely say it is definitely worthwhile if you want to become a full-time trader.
The second option is personal mentoring by Dave Raybould, the 1-to-1 tuition is tailored to your needs. I've known Dave for a few months now; he's an accomplished trader, trading full-time when not teaching, and very good at explaining how something works. Occasionally we'll talk online while he's with his clients to get my views on the day's markets and to help them get an understanding of what their doing and why. Dave can give you the tools to enter the £100 to £200 a day category, as it's so important to learn basic principles before entering the market. You can apply for tuition here. Any learning to get better than this requires self skill development!

Just a note, I do not receive anything for these recommendations! It is merely my own personal recommendations. I feel Bet Angel is the best software in its league for its integrity, support, features and reliability, and therefore any training should match the software!

April

2009-05-01T10:47:00.008+01:00

Yesterday was a roller coaster for me. There were so many opportunities yesterday it felt like a trader's dream and I managed to make good sums nearly every race. In the 15:05 race I let a trade go in-play, but not on purpose. The clock on my Bet Angel had about 1 second to go before turning 'red' and it warns you that the race is due, and although I didn't have my eye fixed on the TV, I'm sure it was one of those races where they just cut to them running off without any prior notice, such as "another turn and they will be off". So anyway, it was pretty unfortunate that the horse that I was trading on had a 10 length lead after no time. I ended up taking a loss of £1,410 on the chin, instead of the £200 I had actually made on the race. I've noticed over the last week (it might just be my imagination) that races have been going off on time much more frequently. Surprisingly the loss didn't really have an affect on me; my acceptance of big losses is much better than small losses strangely.
I had another mare, my worst one in fact from a purely trading perspective in another race. I ended up piling in plenty of money on one side of the market when I thought one thing was going to happen, but of course it didn't and it went wildly against me. I took an £800 loss in that one. Amazingly, I finished the afternoon £800 up. It would easily have been my best non-festival day for trading if I hadn't lost in either of those two races.
I think I made these mistakes because I remember at the start of the day I really wanted to make a certain amount to tip my winnings for this month on horse race trading over £50k. I thought I had fell about £200 short but while I was writing about this I checked my P&L for the month and just made over it! I have an Excel spreadsheet I use for estimations to track my progress that way.

So April was my best month for me so far on my trading journey, I traded 480 markets in 21 of my 'full' trading days, averaging £104.70 per race. So my total was £50,256.59. After the Betfair premium charge of approximately 20% it's more like £40k. Still good, but gutting that they steal that money off of me in the way they do. I've never had a call from Betfair, ever! I'd like to think that heavily paying customers of premium charge we would get a surprise present now and then, but I guess that's never going to happen!

As you can see I'm only really good at the horse racing at the moment. Trading the football I'm learning a few things so next month that negative should turn to a profit.

Agitation = Bad!

2009-04-30T00:34:00.004+01:00

I was trading the other day and felt agitated over something, but had no idea why I was agitated. It was definitely having an effect on my trading. I was trying to figure it out so I could do something about it - it ended up giving me a headache! It made me lose some large amounts in a couple of races from making purely bad decisions.
Recently the markets have felt consistently different each day. The build up of liquidity has felt quite different each day - possibly just the transition into the flat seasons which I can't really remember much of last year. It doesn't effect my trading; I always approach each race independently, using appropriate stakes given the liquidity of the race. Over the last week I've found myself getting more frustrated than usual if I take a loss, I think it's mostly because the week before I hardly had any losses, and having a few losses, I forgot how to take them on the chin!

Well it's nearly the end of April and it's been another record breaking month! I'll post the results up tomorrow. I'm definitely not expecting a record breaking month next month, as I'm not sure if there are any big meetings on like Cheltenham or Aintree. Plus the heat in the summer really plays with my emotions, and the noise from an air conditioning unit can be an annoyance! - I'll have to try and figure something else out this summer.

I just came back from a seminar by Richard Bandler, he's the co-founder of NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming) - it was fantastic, he's also a pretty good comedian! I'm slowly becoming more aware of how powerful our brain is, and I'm intrigued how it works and why we do certain things and behave in certain ways, and what's the best way to overwrite bad behaviours! Anyway, good luck with your trading, there is plenty of it on at the moment.

Continued Progress

2009-04-24T22:47:00.005+01:00

Today was a good day for trading. I managed to pick up a few big sums trading on a few big swings. One of the biggest I caught was this horse called Leahurst in Wolverhamtpon. His price moved (while I was watching it) from about 1.9 to 3.15, then back down to about 2.8 just before the race started. Yet another example where it is almost impossible to not profit from!! I managed to make just over £500 on the race, it was crazy that the horse's price drifted out all that way and he still won.

I might start practicing trading on more than one horse simultaneously, because if you can do that for opportunities such as this one, you could lay one horse and back the other one, making potentially a lot more money! I was thinking about trading ambidextrously, one hand with one mouse on one horse, and the other hand trading on the other horse simultaneously, using my eyes to flicker between the two. I'm not ambidextrous, but I'm going to give it a go - so I've started brushing my teeth with my left hand, and doing most normal tasks with it.

Here's kind of an average week's trading result, trading about 4 and a half days. My experimenting with other sports hasn't gone quite so well so far, but I'm learning! I'm 84% through the old challenge, and 50% through the new updated challenge (£250,000). I'll start updating the pie chart to go with the new challenge once I've completed the old one.

Evening Racing

2009-04-20T21:45:00.003+01:00

The Armin van Buuren gig I went to was awesome, with some other well known DJ's their supporting the man himself. Evening racing is now in flow, so there are plenty more opportunities, especially for the inexperienced traders to give trading a go outside normal working hours. Today was my first time this year trading a full day with the evening racing. I traded 32 markets making £2,017.03. I felt a bit lerthargic today from having messed up my sleeping patters because of Friday night! I started the day with plenty of focus, but the warmth of the day and my room tired me slightly, not to mention a frustrating time with Betfair at one point where it slowed down completely on my land line and laptop, so no idea what happened there. It got me a bit disappointed because it ruined my momentum! So by the end of the afternoon racing I was about £800 up; a poor show given my more recent standards. My flatemate came back and I thought, why am I being a little bitch about things?! So I got my energy levels back up and focused finishing the day with increased concentration and motivation. That is the problem I think I am going to have with the evening racing - I don't want to think, "Oh, it's okay, I have the evening racing to fall back on if I haven't made a decent total from the afternoons racing" - I am going to probably set separate targets for each afternoon/evening so that this doesn't happen! For me, it's amazing how a target actually improves my ability to concentrate and trade with higher standards.

Routine

2009-04-17T00:12:00.010+01:00

I was asked in one of the comments what my routine is, so here goes..

I have learnt to keep a very relaxed state of mind just before I start trading, it allows me to focus on the trading and being able to slot myself into what I call 'in-the-zone trading' quite easily. This is mostly done by just not being too busy or rushed in the mornings. I remember days where I was rushed, went shopping in the morning, or did some gardening for my Dad before I lived in London, and got back just in time before trading, sometimes missing a few races, and I would be rushed to sit down and make some money. It never worked out that way because I just wasn't settled enough; as I've now found out you need to be before trading. If I was wound up by anything, it would be preying on my mind and I wouldn't be able to focus properly. I think I'd be able to cope with things like that much better now after being aware of it, but it's still best to just cut out any sense of feeling rushed before I start trading.
So anyway, when I wake up, in all honesty I find it challenging to get up in a motivated state, because I haven't really got anything to put my efforts on straight away as trading doesn't start until the early afternoon - but whether this helps, who knows. I have started making a list of three things that I want to get done as soon as I wake up, so I get something to wake up and say hey, I must do these things I wrote down last night; I write them on a post-it note and stick it on my glass of water so when I wake up in the morning there's no way I'm missing it (for me anyway!).
Once I've come alive, I'll do some tidying up around the flat to make myself feel organised, then I generally get myself down to the gym and on the bike for half an hour and read at the same time, occasionally going into the steam room. The exercise every other day in the mornings is a great way of actually feeling good and mentally ready for the day.
I make sure I've made my lunch before racing starts - eating a ham, cheese, tomatoe and lettuce sandwich, with a glass of innocent smoothie and an apple; best time of the day! I usually sit down at my computer with about 20 minutes to go before the first race is due off. This gives me time to fire up my laptop with the mobile broadband and set it ready to select a horse race just in case the Internet decides to stop on my land line! I'll switch on the TV and usually listen to a bit of music.
During trading hours, I frequently walk around the flat and get some fresh air on the balcony - it helps quieten my mind, and calms me down if anything didn't go very well in a trade. It's also good for blood flow and sanity!
Ultimately, any kind of a routine is a good routine, as long as you feel comfortable doing what you do. The moment I'm not in my comfort zone in the build-up to trading hours, and I feel a sense of it carried through into trading, I find it harder to settle in my 'trading-zone'.

Moving away from my routine, trading today showed a prime example of when a horse of reported in TV to be acting funnily, and going down to post strangely (sorry, my terminology is awful, I don't know anything about the horses!). I can't remember which race it was, but his price I'm pretty sure drifted from about 2.3 to about 2.7! A massive move, again showing how TV images can be so worthwhile. I caught some nice moves today and came away with an awesome profit:

I must mention that, the profits I make are attainable, but I don't think should be taken as a realistic goal for most people to achieve. I've put up this poll on the right hand side as a, what salary would you be happy with?, because even £100-200 a day is a good effort, higher than the average salary. I'd say that £100-200 is a much more realistic target, so never go beating yourself up! I really believe that leading a life of sufficiency will give you a much happier life, than a life without sufficiency. The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist is a book I thoroughly recommend. I know it's crazy me saying this when I'm making plenty of money, but from reading quite a bit and finding out different perspectives, I'm really start to believe it and change my ways of thinking - I go shopping for material things far too much, without thinking about the bigger clearer picture!
Saying that, don't write it off. When I started off, I remember thinking to myself, ah, this Betfair has been around for a while already and I doubt I'll be able to achieve the results I had seen; I thought the market was 'saturated' if you like. If you stick at it and find yourself constantly improving, you never know. The markets can sometimes be quite competitive, and when your learning how to trade, I can imagine to some it would be like 'What the faaark?', so I guess just let the results I post up inspire you and see where the inspiration can take you, rather than comparing to how well your doing! I have grown up having a life of comparing myself to others, as do most - but comparing yourself to others always opens the door to negative thinking, such as I'm not good enough. Anyway, I could probably go on for ages given the amount of reading into philosophical stuff I've done.

Tomorrow night I'm seeing Armin van Buuren live at Club Air in Birmingham, finishes at 6am! It's going to be a great night. In the meantime, good luck with your trading.

Confidence is key

2009-04-14T22:04:00.002+01:00

Confidence is so important when your trading. It can mean the difference between a profitable day and a losing day, even if you have all the other skills required to be a good trader. I was trading the golf like I was trading a horse race on Sunday evening. Looking back I made so many mistakes, I'm so glad I lost a crap load! I was getting carried away - turning my well executed scalps and trades from £700 up in the end, to losing £1,850! My stakes just got bigger, with misfortune - it certainly taught me lessons as I say. Anyway, that's not part of the challenge obviously because that's golf!
Going back to the confidence, I sat down today slightly down from trading the golf, and it showed in my trading - no confidence whatsoever. I was down half way through the day. It got to that point where I put on one of my favourite episodes of A State of Trance by Armin van Buuren with a great song to bring my mood back up to par and from that point on I managed to finish up over a thousand, so my confidence is pretty much restored back to normal now.

Not such a bad Easter, since I am top of the league in all my leagues in the Budweiser Fantasy Football! I'm currently 11,655th out of 1,922,244 players in the whole game - not bad really! I consistently do well in fantasy football; I know most of the people actually forget to make changes to their teams throughout the season, but there still must be some skill that I could possibly transfer to having a slight edge in trading football and predicting outcomes!

I just watched one of the best games of football I have ever seen regarding the 4-4 draw between Chelsea and Liverpool - one I'll never forget. I can still hear the place buzzing with jeers around Fulham. I think I'm going to get my tent pitched up to get my Chelsea Barcelona ticket right now!

Diversification

2009-04-10T00:06:00.004+01:00

One thing that I've had in the back of my mind is diversification of my trading. Having a good bank of money behind me from the profits I make in horse racing gives me the opportunity to trade other sports, without fear of breaking the bank, and with enough money that makes your trading matter (sometimes using small stakes can vary from the decisions you would make than if you were using larger stakes).

So anyway, I was trading Tiger Woods in the US Masters tonight, and was making some good trades - and it feels so much better making a good trade in sports such as golf compared to horse racing! I was trading on personal judgements and price movement patterns.

I've also done some pre-race trading on Formula 1 - there are no 5 second delays and some movements in odds can sometimes drift and steam just like a horse does.

The challenge has been coming on exceptionally well! I'm currently 71% through the 150k challenge; just over £106,000. I had no idea I would improve further moving into this year - so the challenge is now 250k, and if I reach that early then I'll make it 250k after premium charge reductions.

Good Friday today, so nice to have a day off from trading. I won't be able to trade the golf today because I'm off out. I would love to trade it; from now on I will be making a more conscious effort on trading high profile events.

Your seat

2009-04-07T10:20:00.005+01:00

I thought I'd discuss a bit about what I sit on whilst trading. I used to sit on a normal office chair, but I never sit on these chairs properly. I will kneel on them with an arched back - no good for posture or future care for your back! So about 6 months into my trading I thought I'd invest in what's called a 'Kneeling' chair. I started off with this one:

It's a simple kneeling chair, where you literally are shaped like your kneeling, with your knees resting on the two pads you see. The only downside to this was that there is no support for your back, and I frequently found myself finding inventive ways of perching myself on this chair whilst I trade. About a year into my trading, once I'd made a bit more money, I decided to invest in the same chair but this time with a back. These specific ones are ridiculously expensive, but me being me bought one. They have a great selection of well designed chairs such as these at www.backinaction.co.uk. So anyway here is the one I use with a backrest:

The backrest has definitely encouraged sitting the way your supposed to on the chair, and also helped you sit the way your supposed to for much longer. The only thing is that I'm so used to sitting unorthodoxly, I find myself sitting in these weird and wonderful positions whilst I trade. Most of the time I let myself sit that way because if I start sitting in positions I don't feel comfortable in, I find it hard to get in-the-zone while I trade - and without me being in that zone, I am throwing a big percentage of my profits away. Anyway I suppose I am writing this with the intention of making a concerted effort to progressively change the way I sit for long periods of time!

Aintree

2009-04-05T09:43:00.005+01:00

I was really looking forward to Aintree, especially since I did so well in Cheltenham. The higher profile meetings give me a chance to use slightly bigger stakes than I would normally use - hence the potential profit!

Here is a screenshot of Thursday's P&L, Friday was a similarly great result. However Saturday, that's where the frustration came. As everyone who trade's knows, the responsiveness is poor on Saturday's. I was nervous about trading even more so because of it being Grand National day; I knew the Betfair servers would be getting a pounding, and of course they did! The responsiveness was extremely poor, sometimes taking up to 10 seconds for the user to be aware that a bet was either received or cancelled; I was very worried that Betfair might crash altogether. My intuition goes out the window when the data is not coming at me at a steady consistent rate - frustrating.

This screenshot was from a race on the 1st of April, I took it because it is a great example of a race where if you are a trader, it is practically impossible to not make profit from. Prices usually overshoot, and you can see that when the price peaked over 7, it came back in to around 6. If you used a £500 stake at odds of 3.6, and got out at a modest price of 6, and hedge at six, that's a hedged profit of £200 across the card. Double the stake, and that's a £400 profit! If your fairly intuitive it wouldn't be too hard to trade a big chunk of this trend. Let alone when its reached it's peak, come back to above 6, and then any scalping you can do when the price has reached its equilibrium.

March

2009-04-01T11:49:00.004+01:00

This month has been an awesome month, the stats are predominantly boosted by Cheltenham Festival, but even after Cheltenham I still manged to maintain a higher level of success than I was doing beforehand. In March I averaged £113.65 per race over 370 races. My 'full day' statistics I keep shows I worked 19 days. I paid about £8,000 in Premium Charge - thankfully we won't have to start paying per bet. I must be a fool because I read it and believed it - I forgot the date!

A great day out at Southwell

2009-04-01T10:34:00.003+01:00

I was kindly invited by Bet Angel to go along to Southwell yesterday to support the sponsorship of the racing card. I was meeting up with Dave Raybould, as I'm sure many of you already know! He is the lead man in the personal tutoring and if anyone is keen on personal 1-1 tutoring on learning how to trade on betting exchanges then definitely check out the mentoring section here. So anyway, I was merely expecting to stand in the stands and watch the racing, having a little wander around. Dave ushered me into the private area at the top and enjoyed a great 3-course meal! We were taken into the parade ring where we got to inspect the horses running in the first race, or should I say Dave was doing the inspecting! I was like 'what's that? what's this?' because I haven't got a clue about the horses or any of the equipment on them! - terrible really! So anyway Dave spotted the favourite sweating underneath his saddle or cover over him, and looking slightly agitated - when we got back up the stand, we had a check up on the odds and the price of him had drifted from around 2's to 2.5! Thing's like this can clearly define a price movement, a much bigger impact than I had initially thought. We were desperate to lay him; we could have made a killing! So as some of you may know the favourite lost, not even coming in the front 3! What a trading opportunity.

Next thing I know I was invited to present the prizes to the owners of the winning horses - I was gutted the ATR crew weren't there as I would have loved to be on TV! It turned out the meeting was just a rearranged from Great Leighs. The day got even better when we were taken into the winning enclosure and invited to drink champagne with some of the owners and trainers! I brought my small Dell laptop for use on the train up there; Dave was already there with his laptop with mouse and charger - anyway we gave trading on a few races a go in between watching the racing and running downstairs to present the prizes. It started off as a competition of who can lose the most money! - We weren't in our comfortable trading environments of home and it's so much harder to get 'in-the-zone'. I can safely say that I have never trading under the influence of alcohol; until yesterday that is. It was hilarious, I was on my 12 inch laptop screen, with no mouse, using the the touch pad - speed was definitely not on my side! However I managed to make £149 from a few races; the first traded race was a loss, just me accustoming to the environment. The real first race I laid £20 on the favourite that we saw sweat, and backed the second favourite by £20 - (Dave said he looked good!), but he didn't win so I broke even.

Overall a great day! It's a shame that Bet Angel aren't sponsoring the Grand National - I would have loved to have done the same at Aintree!

Bet Angel sponsor Southwell card

2009-03-30T23:34:00.007+01:00

Tomorrow Bet Angel are again sponsoring the whole of one meeting; this time at Southwell, and like leonthefixer said in his blog, it's great to see something being given back to the sport.

For some reason the responsiveness on Saturday's are not to the same standard as weekdays from Betfair. I started off really well, reaching a profit-high after only 5 races which I was really happy with. Anyway the responsiveness slowed down whilst trading the 15:00 race - I've been so used to having great responsiveness, that it got to me. I spent the rest of the day hovering below my profit-high, finishing the day on a modest total. I also had slightly loss of focus, much less than normal, mostly because it's a Saturday, and my mind generally wanders to looking forward to going out that night, to what are the football scores! Anyway poor excuse, I'd be a better trader if I was able to stay calm through any scenario. The responsiveness did improve, but by then I had a headache over the whole shebang!

Saturday's P&L

My Journey - Part 2

2009-03-27T11:34:00.003Z

So continuing, when I got back from the Betfair Academy I had a look up on Bet Angel and Peter Webb to find this course that was mentioned - booked it for October '06. After the course I was inspired and made a conscious decision to give trading a go full-time after I'd finished University, especially after seeing someone P&L's for a day trading, where they made about £400 for a day's work. So yeah I finished my degree, the project of predicting horse racing obviously didn't work, otherwise I'd be a rich man sitting doing hardly anything, letting the computer do all the hard work!

Once I finished my degree, I went on a second Bet Angel course, this time it was to learn the In's and outs of the software. By this time, I had still done next to no trading on horse racing whatsoever - maybe about 5 trades on 2 horse races in total. This was in June '07. After this, I felt I had to earn some money to keep myself afloat, so I began doing gardening for my Dad, he's semi-retired and had started his own Gardening business. About a month after the second course I went on, I remember going to Kempton races one evening, I'd never been to the races before - it was after that heavy period of rainfall, where quite a few courses just could not run any races. I bumped into Peter there and had a great chat with the maestro himself. Meanwhile I was thinking to myself, why haven't I started trading yet! I think the real reason was because if I was going to have a go at it, I wanted to give 100% and not one evening here, and one afternoon there.

From there it took me 2 months before I got everything in place - my office, with Sky, and more importantly my determination to make it work.

Frustration!

2009-03-24T23:50:00.002Z

Well yesterday was frustrating! - I started off the day really well, but then realised that my mobile broadband was not working properly. I was trying to get it to work as it always used to but couldn't. It was really starting to get to me because when your so used to something working, and it doesn't, especially when you pay good money and nowadays we rely and expect technology to have a good reliability, it can change your mood! It changed my mood and concentration levels because in the back of my mind I knew that it's so riskier trading without a backup connection (mostly in the last 2 minutes before the race is due off - because anything over 2 minutes, you have plenty of time to call up Betfair and exit the trade that way), because if my Internet went down half way through a trade with 30 seconds to go I'd be farked!; well, not if your one-way trade won; but then those sorts of things don't happen frequently enough for it to be averaged out. So anyway, as soon as I knew the mobile broadband was buggered I frantically tried to fix it whilst trying to trade at the same time. The fixing wasn't working and my trading reflected my fowl mood - terrible! So anyway I traded about 8 races and lost just under £200, which I knew was a one-off because of the problem. At about 4pm half way through the trading day I decided to forget it and fix it later, meanwhile to get away from my frustration head to the shops for a bit of instant gratification and go to the shops!.. Going back to what Peter said in his blog, I am starting to become more wary of my instant gratification personality - in certain areas - and slowly making amends. A good old habit I have is stuffing myself with chocolate when I 'need' it, for example after a bad couples of traded races - but now I'm only letting myself have 2 squares of Dairy Milk a day; it will teach me to defer my need for gratification and probably most likely help balance my sugar levels throughout the day.

Anyway, today was good as I got back on track. I'm now coming up to the 50% completion of my challenge, way ahead to schedule. At the time when I set the target it felt like a reasonable challenge, but I guess now it seems silly! I can't really go and change the title of the blog now, but my personal target has now become £250k (before the premium charge - 200k with it). I'll follow on with the 'how I got here' post tomorrow.

My journey to being a horse racing trader - Part 1

2009-03-22T17:44:00.003Z

My journey into trading on horse racing markets started at Exeter University where I studied Computer Science. I never really enjoyed the subject as much as I think you should of an area that you intend on studying for three years. But anyway, I was in my second year and one of my friends said he's got a way of making some free money, so like anyone, he had my instant attention! As most of you probably know already, it involves signing up to numerous online bookmakers, inlcuding Betfair, to profit from the free bets they offer by backing all outcomes of an event proportionately so that you end up profitting a high percentage of the free bet's offered (most of which only offerered after your first bet of similar value). So anyway, I went along with this and made a few hundred pounds; only downside being that all my details were with nearly every single bookmaker in the country! But being a student that didn't really matter. So that's when I signed up to Betfair; I had no idea that trading on horse racing even existed.

So now that I had used up all of the bookmaker's, I felt disappointed that it had to end there, and began googling more ways of making money. This is when I found a service (which has now been taken down), where they offered 'trading' tips for in-play football and in-play horse racing. It was a subscription paid service that I was willing to pay. It was my first real insight into trading, yet I still didn't fully understand it. I also signed up to a horse racing tipster called "1st for Racing", which actually went really well when I joined - but eventually it went downhill and lost nearly all of the profit I had made.

At the end of my second year I had to choose a project for my final year dissertation. It was over the summer where I somehow came across that Betfair offered historical data on horse racing, so I thought, how about I try and use this data to predict the racing. I was interested in football, and thought, how about football then? - but realised that it had been done several times by student's from previous projects, so reverted back to horse racing.

After doing some research, I wanted to get some bonus points under my belt and found that Betfair did an 'Academy' which was designed to teach people how to explain and demonstrate Betfair. I went there with about a £1,000 in my account (most of which came from the horse racing tipster) and didn't really have a clue, evening though I had been using Betfair. I remember one of the question's asked to everyone was, 'what do the numbers beneath the odds represent?' - I honestly had no idea, and everyone in the room already knew! Anyway, that's where I met Scott Ferguson (his blog), who was the field education manager at Betfair at the time. During the day, the group was recommended to Peter Webb's academy if we were interested in some of the stuff that we had been discussing, so I scribbled the Bet Angel name down!

To be continued..

Ireland

2009-03-19T23:31:00.002Z

After a personally jaw dropping experience for me trading during Cheltenham I took a planned trip to Dublin for St. Patrick's day and had an awesome time out there; it really is a great place to be on the day! It was my brother's 27th birthday, front left of the photo, it was his idea to dress up as Men in Black - it was a fun idea, catching some good and bad attention, but overall good!

This was taken just outside our hotel before we left, the hotel was a great location right next to a couple of clubs and a 10 minute walk to the centre of Dublin.

It was very weird coming back to trading, the 5 day break was the longest break I've had since August last year. I don't know whether it was just the time I had off, or whether it's because of post-Cheltenham, but the markets felt different, a sense of more traders and some occasional big stakes being used. Anyway I managed to adapt and pull out a good result - I didn't feel refreshed at all, it felt like I had been working 10 days straight, mostly because the time out in Ireland was a complete binge; a 12 hour drinking session on the 17th! (I made an allowance for my 2-drink a night rule!).

2nd & 3rd Days

2009-03-12T23:45:00.005Z

What an unbelievable two days. I've really been in-the-zone, and when it matters - on the big festival. I have kind of 'clicked' with these highly liquid meetings now and hooked up a siphon to the money in the markets into my account. Obviously its by far not easily done - I've only got this far through the last year and a half of determination to improve my trading skills; through passion.

It's been really inspiring watching all these top-quality horses all compete to cross the finish line the quickest. I love the high frame rate, slow video captures of the horses on Channel 4, when you see the effort these horses put in, with all there muscles working in tandem. It's also great to realise that these horses clearly have feelings; personalities - from some of the names that owners give to their horses, and the expressions of what the horses are 'like' by the horse carers. It just shows the awesome connected communication there is without speech between living beings and animals. It's quite sad when you see these horses crashing and falling into fences. Anyway, I'm changing the subject slightly!

I wish Cheltenham races were on every day! I will definitely plan ahead and work out now when all the big meetings are so I can remember not to plan or book any time off. I don't really want to post the results up because some of the sums I have made just seem so unrealistic, even to some experienced traders. I remember when I was starting out, or 6 months into my trading, if I saw results like the last two days, I'd just have been like - "What the hell?" and just discard it and imagine I never saw it. I'm actually looking forward to posting a tough / losing day when I have one next; I will explain it in detail.

1st day of the festival

2009-03-10T19:37:00.006Z

Well, what a day! I thrashed my best day; I've got a few screenshots from today's record breaking day. When I traded my first festival/highly liquid races, I used to hate them, but as time when on I learnt to trade them better - part of the reason why I've been so excited about trading the big meetings now. My best came on the Champion hurdle; the focus race of the day. I managed to catch Binocular's price coming in and out again when he was caught sweating.

As usual the races surrounding the Cheltenham races were suffocated slightly until the last few minutes - it's funny to see - you can see that bigger stakes are attempted to be brought into the market because some people are in 'high stakes mode' from trading the Cheltenham races, at least that's the way it seems. I can't wait until tomorrow, but I should calm down before I start. The lost just over £100 today on 2 races, most of which came from on the race after the Champion hurdle; I was so elated from making such a great amount, I lost focus.

Just watching the Liverpool v Real Madrid game; Real must feel so hard done by, in my view both goals shouldn't have happened - the first was a foul and the second was not a hand ball! Hope you've all been enjoying Cheltenham, either as a spectator or with a view to profit from.

Cheltenham Festival

2009-03-09T23:26:00.004Z

Well Cheltenham's coming up, starting tomorrow, and I am excited like everyone else that surrounds the horse racing world. I don't know why I am excited; last year I found it really hard, I was frustrated at trying to figure out what to do - but by the end of it I was wanting more because I felt I was close to really making the most out of the highly liquid markets and reasonably limited price movements. If you find it hard going - try changing your style. So for example, in the highly liquid races, when you see a gap in the prices, for example 2.94 - 2.98 - 2.96 is missing, if you figure out which side of the book is going to fill up, (either back or lay side) then get in there first so your at the front of the queue and get matched the quickest, then place your other trade on the other side. Or dutching/bookmaking, I tried that on the Cheltenham races last year and it works much better because of the limited price movement. There are plenty of method's you can use - most of the time you just need balls of steel.

I'm cruising along okay with regards to the challenge, I've managed to make ~£5,000 from Wednesday so I'm now a third of the way to my target. At this pace I should be finished mid-August, but I haven't really taken any holiday off yet. I've worked 50 days this year so far. I'm considering new separate challenges for myself - such as seriously cutting back on the chocolates and deserts I eat (I eat a lot of them!) - as well as going alcohol free except occassions. I've become more aware of how the alcohol affects me for a few days afterwards - and I reckon giving up will help me stay much more mentally balanced. I've noticed this because I've currently set myself only a maximum of 2 drinks in one night when I'm out, and the change has been noticeable. Achieving a pure form of concentration while trading - imagine that; that's pretty much what I'm aiming for.

I've also found a great habit - instead of reading sitting still at home, I now read while I sit on the bike at the gym - how about that for productivity! It actually helps me concentrate better on the reading the fact that I'm cycling at the same time for some reason.

Good luck trading on the festival; hopefully we'll all be saying one of my favourite sayings - "Come on all the horses!"

Traits

2009-03-04T09:46:00.004Z

I've been doing some work on personal development lately, and the poll I introduced about a month ago is a great way to figure out what area you need to work on the most. If it's discipline, which was the case for 39% of people, then ask yourself what can I do to improve my self-discipline? If your into a bad habit of letting a race go in-play before trading and hedging out of your position then a good way to break the habit would be to progressively train yourself to stop doing it by challenging yourself to go one day where you have to exit your trade and hedge at least 30 seconds before the race-off time - and if you don't, then commit yourself to doing something you'd rather not do, like cleaning the bathroom. I use external accountability to bring in good habits; I recognised that my vocal communication was poor, probably made worse by sitting by myself half the day so I have written my friend a cheque for £500 to say I will do an hour's reading a day, if I don't do it, he gets to cash the cheque - I know I'd much rather do an hour's reading than give away £500 like that! Anyway, the point is to find ways to improve areas where you think you're holding yourself back from trading more successfully. What kind of discipline issues are they (aimed at the 100 people who tick discipline in the poll)?

My trait that holds me back the most is focus, luckily the other traits I naturally have a good grasp of, so I am going to start improving my focus by practicing reading for 20 minutes without distraction and complete in-the-zone reading - which I'm terrible at right now. I'll gradually increase this until I can transfer the ability to trading to focus in one hour chunks with just a few minutes break.

I was surprised to see that intuition was ranked lowly in terms of a trait holding people back. I associate intuition with a 'feeling' of the market, as in you understand how a market is moving. You could analogise this in many different ways - one comparison is judging whether a person you've never met before is a friendly person or not. An intuitive person would be able to say to a higher degree of certainty whether a stranger is friendly or not, without having to speak to that person; where as someone who isn't intuitive would have to speak to that person and get to know him before making a decision. So the more quickly you can decide how a market is likely to move without getting involved in it, the less likely you'll throw away money from making poor judgements on price movement. Peter has briefly just discussed this on his blog; I think it's such an important factor if you strive to become a good trader.

Greed is a funny one, it's important to keep it under control otherwise you'll just lose your money from poor decision making. Everyone has experienced greed while trading, it's one thing I have learnt to control much better. I never used to go a day without being slightly frustrated that greed held me back from performing better in the markets, but now it's much less frequent. Don't let greed affect your decision-making.

For those of you who have ticked acceptance, the last month I have become more accepting of trades that go wrong. You have to be aware of not accepting, like anything, to overcome it. I then put an A4 page on my wall next to me with "Acceptance" written on to remind me - I'm much better at accepting now than I used to be.

Patience is a good one, sometimes is better to sit and do nothing in a market and wait for the good opportunities. The better you get, the more opportunities there seem to be as you learn to understand how different markets move.

If your not decisiveness enough, then being responsive doesn't matter if you can make decisions effectively! A good game to play to improve your decisiveness and responsiveness is Big Brain Academy on the Wii.

Best Day!

2009-03-03T19:37:00.003Z

Today was my best day ever, there was plenty of money in the markets today with reasonable movements and decent priced horses which made it an ideal environment to trade on. I managed to make £2,038.89. My best ever day prior to today was back on September 25th last year where I made £2024.23; so not really a massive jump, but I was still really happy with the result! Although it didn't come too easy, with six races left I was £1,700 up, thinking, yes I have my best day in sight, then the next two races saw me lose £300 - I was very annoyed, but gave myself the challenge of hitting the £2k mark with 4 races left, amazing I manged it! It's funny because in the first race I lost about £75 thinking I've got a tough day ahead of me. Anyway, I've slowed down the posting slightly from every day to every other day or so, I've been pretty busy lately with everything - but it's great!

On Friday last week my friend Frasier started filming me about being a horse racing trader for a short on Current TV on Sky. It will be about 8 minutes long and should capture typical emotions I go through, some trading and some views from myself and friends of what I do. It should be good; it will be finished when I hit my target, with a bottle of champagne and a party!

P.s. I'll update the pie chart with my progress just as soon as I figure out why Excel is putting out the wrong percentage.

February

2009-03-01T12:54:00.005Z

February has been a great month for me, I traded on 385 races, 3 more races than January and averaged £55.02 a race; exactly the same (to the nearest penny) average per race than January. I worked 19 full working days, with a couple partially traded days; 5 full days less than last month - that just shows how many meetings were abandoned last month. I've been very busy over the last week, I went on a presentation skills day event; I thought I'd face my fears and try and overcome the nerves I get. I learnt some good skills and techniques which I can use, not that I have any presentations lined up! I thought my last ever presentation I'd have to do was at University, I never thought I'd be paying to do one! Anyway, back to last month's performance. I must have kept up my concentration fairly well throughout the days I worked - as the density of races increased compared to last month, I still managed to maintain the same average per race.

I am really looking forward to the big meetings coming up through the year, starting with Cheltenham in March. I never used to like them, but that was a year ago and I have gained a lot of valuable experience since then. I remember the last Cheltenham as being manic, with 4 days of racing condensed into 3 days, they were long and hard days I remember. Maybe a random snow shower this year will do the same?

I still haven't got round to replying to comments and emails - I am doing all these later, so if you left a comment, even 2 weeks ago, check back later tonight for responses.

Update

2009-02-23T17:19:00.003Z

The challenge is going pretty well so far, although recently, especially Saturday, the API was absolutely awful. I gave up in the end because I found myself getting far to stressed out about it! The API felt back to normal today and I got a great result under my belt for a Monday. To update you on previous days since my last post on Wednesday, I traded Thursday making £1082.44 - I can't remember the day at all, it's well in the past now. Friday I wasn't feeling very well at all, my housemate and I both came down with something; I gave trading a go for parts of the day, making an unspectacular £200. Saturday, as I explained I gave it a go, but got fed up and finished about £120 up. Those two days I really don't count as full day's to go down as being recorded because I didn't trade the whole day on both occasions - I always feel guilty if I haven't traded on a day that I planned to work on - even if I'm slightly ill. The profit I made though will still account to my yearly P&L.

For the last year I've noticed that while I trade, I don't breathe normally. It sounds strange, but I effectively hold my breath and breathe very shallow while I'm trading - when I exit a trade and lean back on my chair, I'm aware that I'm not breathing (much) and try and resume normal breathing. I know my body does this to ensure I focus more. It's a bad habit I've developed since an early teenager that I'm going to overcome by practising breathing techniques throughout the morning which will help with my breathing while I trade. I'm interested to find out if anyone else is aware that their breathing pattern changes whilst trading, or maybe just certain trades that require intense concentration? There are plenty of comments and emails I need to sift through, apologies! - I will get through them all.

I had a full health check up this morning with BUPA, I've never had one before - it included a cardio-respiratory exercise test which was great fun! I got wired up like Morpheus once was in The Matrix and got on a bike to do some exercise. Everything was just fine with me, as I expected/hoped considering I still am only 23. The only thing they recommended me to do was to increase the intensity of my cardio work - my body is far too used to moderate exercise which it copes with very well. I've obviously been taking the easy route when it comes to exercise.

Experimenting

2009-02-18T23:34:00.007Z

The last two days I have been experimenting with the refresh rate on Bet Angel - I have been using 400ms since I started in August 2007, then a few months ago I accidentally left it on 500ms and when I realised, I thought, hmmm, I seem to have been doing okay on that refresh rate so I left it at that. Now since yesterday, I've been using a refresh rate of 200ms. Theoretically it would be better since you would then be viewing the data in more of a real-time state and you can make decisions based on the latest information given in front of you. It took a couple of races to get used to, right now I am not seeing any benefits from it - I'm not sure whether I expect to really, mostly because the higher refresh rate is effectively making my brain process more information and it definitely tires my brain out. I will stick with the 200ms refresh for another for another few weeks to see how that goes; it's good to be experimental with your trading setup. I used to trade with one Bet Angel open, then I started trading with two open at the same time to view more information, and now I have just one open (well I'm restricted to just one because otherwise I would incur Betfair data request charges!), but with the 3 ladders page, instead of just the one enhanced ladder interface. Try every layout/setup possible and eventually you'll be able to see what works best for you. I think I may find that 200ms is too fast, and going back to 4/500ms is much less stressful!

My target now is officially £1,000 a day. It sounds a hell of a lot, and back when I was started out I never dreamed of such a feat. Even 3 months ago I thought, it's too much to ask for. Today I found myself just over £100 up nearly half way through the day thinking, oh great, I've stuffed today up, having averaged only £12 or so a race. But I kept the £1000 target in my head and amazingly I broke it on the last race! Anyway, I'm sure I've discussed it before, but setting daily targets is not to everyone's taste, mostly considering the varying quality of racing and the number of cards going on in a day, but I really find it helps me get that little bit better.

Today:

Yesterday:

ISP

2009-02-16T19:42:00.004Z

It's important to be on a good ISP, at the moment my connection frequently drops once every few days. I have rung up but they say there's no log of it cutting out, including my modem log - which must be lying since I see the Internet lights disappear on the modem! I haven't sorted it out yet because I have my backup laptop with mobile broadband, so I just jump on there as soon as I sniff anything wrong with my connection - a poor excuse really, I will get it sorted. The quality of connection with the API has been quite up and down over the last week, today was good though; it can be very frustrating and stressful when you click to place orders in the market and there is a delay. This is what happens on the Bet Angel graph:

Bet Angel spots the difference with the total matched between the last price matched and the current price matched and says there was £19,500 traded in one go - obviously there wasn't, it was just my Internet connection dropping out for a minute!

Prior to today, the previous 3 trading days I kept hitting a ceiling of profit of £700-900, which isn't bad at all, but I made all that profit in the first half of racing cards. Looking back it was definitely a psychological battle which just influenced my trading! I traded a few Irish Navan races today which is why the screenshot shows 23 races traded, I used to try and ignore them; now I try and trade them.

Video

2009-02-13T11:19:00.007Z

I've been playing around with the Camtasia software, it's pretty good. I've got a video basically showing me logging in to my Betfair account to show my past month's results, this will definitely throw out the skepticism over the authenticity of my results! I tried putting the clip up on YouTube so I could show the video on the blog, but the quality comes out really poorly.

Anyway, check out the video here.

As you can see I have increased my balance to £10,000 because I am preparing for the big meetings such as Cheltenham where higher stakes can be used!

Last few days of trading have produced good results, but yesterday was the most stressful day I've had in a while. I did phenomenally well in the first 7 or 8 races, but the rest of the day was ridiculous - I in fact lost money over 13 or so races. What I decided the reasoning behind this was due to a build up of lack of acceptance. I remember one race where I lost money, then a massive price movement happened in the same race which I totally missed out on, that frustrated me. So because I never accepted it and moved on, I let the frustration build up inside - preventing me from turning the day into an awesome one. The quicker you can accept what has happened, the more focused you will stay.

Last 2 days:

Authenticity

2009-02-10T13:06:00.009Z

It is becoming clear that in the horse race trading community there is a sense of questionable authenticity over the P&L's taken as screenshots on blogs. I am aware that screenshots can be replicated using photoshop or using an HTML generator. It does make me laugh when I see people question the results on here, but I guess that's only because I know I'm making the results. I really would like this blog to be seen as authentic and stop the conspiracies flying around - so I would like your (realistic) feedback on how best to prove my results. I have already tried Adam Todd's method of emailing Betfair and asking for someone to verify my results, but this apparently is not allowed! I have thought about doing a video of me logging into my Betfair account whilst using some screen video capture software - if anybody knows of a good one? I hope I can eliminate 100% of the uncertainty, but probably eventually more like 90%.

I generally like to stay away from controversy, but this Betfair result generator is quite sad! I can see the funny side of it, but not if it lessens the genuineness of this blog.

Anyway, back to my challenge, I've kept up the recent progression I've made, although I have had a temperature since yesterday and I find trading more stressful when I'm aching a bit. I find that trading really does use a lot of emotional energy up, especially if you're trying to keep your emotions under control, because that itself consumes energy! A goal I have is to trade without emotions, and be unaware of it, so I'm not using energy up being aware. If that makes any sense.

Today

Yesterday

Heathcote won again!

2009-02-08T18:33:00.004Z

Heathcote the horse ran the other day in a race of 3 runners. Thankfully, the favourite stacked it at one of the early hurdles and basically gave the victory to Heathcote. I put a £30 bet on him to win and I had only made £9 from trading the race. The amount I gambled just shows how much I don't like gambling with anything over £50. Anyway, the fact that I knew I was going to put a bet on him really impacted my trading on the race - amazing that if you have any preference over a horse that it can affect your ability to trade; at least in my case.

I traded this Saturday, because on the Monday there was absolutely no racing so I felt like I should work. It was my first Saturday in about a month, the liquidity was good to start off with but seemed to deteiorate as the day went on - possibly because I know quite a few people were experiencing connection issues with the API, myself included; it made it one hell of a stressful day for me but managed to just tip over the £1k mark by a couple of pounds. The thousand marker seems to be my daily target now.

Let the good times roll

2009-02-05T19:10:00.004Z

I frequently read around other blogs to get a sense of how other people are finding the markets, but also because it's nice to see other people go through similar emotions. I was reading John's blog, and read that some guy said I was on 'trading steroids'. I promise you I'm not on trading steroids, I've just been really in the zone lately with my trading! John's blog is a good read. Another great blog is Leonthefixer's; his blog is a really good read, he puts a great effort into it by making it very detailed about his life as a trader. Everyone knows Peter Webb's blog, the link has now changed, his blog is also a great read; he comments on pretty much everything! Scott Ferguson has a good blog, with a range of sport related posts its a breath of fresh air - so check that out too.

I hope the graph I posted yesterday answers those questions from readers who were wondering how long it took me to make a certain amount.

..I nearly forgot this other blog, there is a post that is quite interesting; John Wakefield is attempting to produce a Neural Network (NN) that can successfully trade profitably on it's own. By the looks of it he has managed to do it on a small scale - very impressive. I did a project on predicting horse racing in my final year of Computer Science, the intension was to produce a number of methods to predict the racing, including a NN, but there was so much work involved it never materialised.

Progress

2009-02-04T23:51:00.007Z

I thought I had hit a plateau, but it now appears I haven't! I have managed to gradually get better as time goes by: this graph shows the amount I averaged per day for every month since September 2007 (from a bank of a few hundred - near enough when I started, when I decided to keep my own record) until the end of last month. I seemed to have managed to keep pushing myself even until now. I will carry on pushing myself to see what is achieveable.

Month

I traded the last couple sets of the Nadal vs. Federer final and managed to make £100 from having done little trading - I am now very keen to get involved in trading tennis, so when the next tournament comes along that doesn't interupt with any planned horse race trading you can guarantee I'll be in the market! I am quite optimistic about trading tennis, I found it easier than I thought, as all it took was opening up a trade at the point that serves as minimal risk (no pun intended!) to a greater gain.

I was watching the Everton vs. Liverpool FA Cup match tonight, in the final few minutes of the second half of extra time, all of a sudden the adverts kicked in; we were all like - what the ...? 30 seconds later the numpty at ITV who must have accidentally pushed the avert button put it back on the football, only to find out that the only goal from the game had been scored! I'm sure the guy must have got the boot!

Southwell

2009-02-03T23:56:00.004Z

Today was my best day ever (based on average return per race) given so little racing! But I wouldn't be able to achieve this return per race in the space of 3 meetings because I practically started trading with 25 minutes to go before each race today, and usually you only get given about 10 minutes. It's what I used to do at the Kempton and Wolverhampton evening meetings in my first 8 or so months of trading; I was very dedicated and spent almost every possible chance trading, even if it meant me not going out. Now of course, knowing I have put the time and effort in the early days of trading, I can afford to take time off for my social life. It was just the price I had to pay to get this far. Thankfully, unlike some careers, it did not mean years of a diminished social life, such as starting up your own business.

January

2009-02-01T10:55:00.006Z

January's trading finished on Friday for me; I haven't traded a full day on Saturday for a few weeks now because I feel like the weekend off leaves me feeling refreshed for the next week. January has turned out to be my best month in terms of daily average and monthly profits, with the racing fixture list this month taking a big hit from the poor weather conditions I don't quite know how I managed to produce these kind of results. I traded 24 full days and 2 partial days, where a full day means I traded through all the racing in any given afternoon. I averaged £55.02 a race and approximately £854 per full trading day, averaging around 15-16 races in a full day. On the downside there was about £4,000 damage in premium charges. All in all a great first month of the challenge!

Great rebound

2009-01-29T16:45:00.005Z

Apart from a few races where I managed to turn a good profit into either a loss or very small profit, I turned the day into a good result. I started off slightly hesitant given what happened yesterday, but after a couple of races I practically forgot about it.

I took a screenshot of this great example when somebody comes along in the market with a big order by backing (or laying) a large number of ticks away from the current price, in this example about 10 ticks! Anyway, you can see that the price slowly rebounded. So when this happens, the best thing is not to panic; well sometimes you do because the price may stick to where the backer or layer brought it down to, but more often than not I don't think you need to panic and get an awful price.

It was funny when Nick Luck, one of the TV presenters on Racing UK, accidentally aired "f***ing Nad Al Sheba" - something or rather that he was annoyed about. Anyway, it's random things like this that actually gives me something to laugh about considering the solitude I find myself in!

Loss!

2009-01-28T23:02:00.005Z

Well what happened to me! You wouldn't believe it, but at one point I was £700 down. My worst day ever is £400 down. This is my first losing day of the year, but there is a reason for it. The truth is that I have been getting these odd calls over the last week about some 'tips', anyway it's dodgy stuff, I have been going along carefully. So anyway, I placed a big bet today, it lost (I hate gambling!) and it really messed with my emotions; I'm not going to carry on with it anymore. I was all over the place while trading because I was worried whether it would win and when it didn't my emotions were even more all over the place. Anyway, a good lesson learnt for me; never gamble big. Thankfully, I managed to pull £500 back after I accepted what had happened and calmed down.

I think the new poll I have added on the right hand side navigation is really interesting; if you could complete it that would be great, then at the end I'll anaylse the results. Incredibly, with this loss today, I am still having my best month ever in terms of average per day and total for the month - a great start to the challenge.

10 Seconds!

2009-01-26T19:50:00.004Z

Those of you who use Bet Angel will know Peter Webb's voice is used to signal how long before the race is due off. Yesterday evening I was on my run past Chelsea towards Battersea Park listening to my iPod shuffle; I fill it with random songs from all the MP3's on my computer. Anyway I was running when I heard "10 Seconds!", I thought I was in the middle of a trade!, which obviously wasn't possible! Anyway it made me laugh. I still wouldn't mind a calm lady's voice telling me the same thing, not that I don't enjoy listening to Peter's voice every day!

Anyway, back to today. I feel like I have been reading the market's really well recently, giving me a third day in a row with a profit over £1,000. I lost in 4 out of the 19 races I traded in; an average amount of losing races in a day.

Back on my own

2009-01-26T17:28:00.005Z

Firstly I'd like to apologise for anybody who has emailed me over the last week. I have been very busy and will get round to emailing back soon. I didn't really trade over the weekend, probably trading about 8 races over both days to bump up my monthy total. I went out about 4 nights in a row with my friend down, and wasn't fully focused with her down; nevertheless I had a great time. But now I'm back on my own I can give myself the time needed to prepare for a day's racing. There were some big movements in a few of the races today, where I poorly performed in. However a nice total for today so I am pleased.

A review of the poll I carried out:

The poll showed that Sunday is the least favourite trading day, followed by Monday and Tuesday. Saturday was clearly the most favourite day, probably because it's when most people have the time to trade the whole day, therefore making it a day to look forward to with confidence. Personally, my favourite day changes. At the moment I don't have a favourite day, I look forward to every day with a full day's racing!

PC Setup

2009-01-23T15:16:00.006Z

I have been having a few problems with my PC for a few weeks now. It started with a few memory errors just as I was shutting down. Then my computer wouldn't boot, saying disk boot failure. Anyway, I am suffering these problems because I have a dodgy motherboard. I have my a RAID 0 for my OS and it has just caused a load of technical problems. I have been stubborn in getting a new motherboard because I want to wait and get the new Intel i7 architectured motherboard with the new processor when the new Windows 7 comes out. Anyway I got Blue Screen Of Death the second I finished trading on the first race today. Thankfully it wasn't half way through a trade! At the moment my setup consists of:

2.4Ghz Quadcore
8Gb RAM
Raid 0 10k Raptor Drives
30" Dell monitor
22" TV
Wired mouse
Wireless keyboard
Dell Latitude E4200 w/ HSPDA 7.2Mbps mobile broadband
Vista Ultimate 64bit

I don't really need to go into any more detail than that for the setup. Most of the stuff I have is not needed to trade, I'm just a bit of a geek and like to have a powerful setup! The main things to worry about is the processor speed, a good motherboard and plenty of fast RAM. A piece of software I would recommend is called Tuneup Utilit ies. If you don't have a powerful setup and want to make the most of what you have, the software can help you optimise everything about your Windows setup to improve the performance.

Thankfully I had no more BSOD's and the rest of my trading today was incident free (saying that I just got another BSOD just at the end of writing this paragraph!). I went on the London Eye for the first time yesterday evening and it was a great experience. I can't believe it had taken me this long since it opened up to go on it! Especially having always lived in and around London.

Today

Yesterday

Wandering mind

2009-01-21T23:51:00.004Z

Yesterday was an okay day, tipping just over the £1k mark, but today my mind was wandering badly. I had my mind focused on some work that I'm doing to develop as a person. It didn't help my trading. It was amazing though that I managed to make a decent profit in a couple of the races without actually focusing on what I was doing, but that obviously wasn't sustainable, losing quite badly in a couple of the races. I only traded 8 races today.

I never used to record partially traded days like today, but now I do because this year is more about focusing on the end of year target rather than a daily target. I do feel like the daily target helped me though. Some people will find having a target helps, but others will not. It's all down to personal preference and what you feel will get the best out of you.

Monday drag!

2009-01-19T23:07:00.005Z

I failed to follow up on my success from Thursday and Friday last week. Managing to scoop just £325 today. One race I lost £300 through poor judgement on the price movement, it went totally against me. I don't mind losses, but big losses do have an impact on my emotions. Safe to say I'm sure that's the same with everyone.

I have a friend staying down from tomorrow for a few nights so if anything goes bad I'll have her to blame for anything that goes against me! Before I traded from my office in London, I was living at home with my parents. Whenever I took a bad trade, it was always my Dad to get the end of my emotions. He always used to pop his head in the room occasionally just to speak to his son. Of course, I didn't mind at all when things were going well, but when they weren't, I always used to get angry and say 'You know the rules!', as in the rules I made up for him not to come into my office at all while trading! Haha. He used to say 'well what if it's important'. I said if it's important then okay. But of course whenever he had something 'important' to say, I would always be like 'that's not important!!! you just made me lose £20 pounds (or I could have made £20!), as if 'dinner's ready' is something important anyway! So then he'd shrivel back behind the door and pop his head back in an hour later to repeat the whole situation! Lol. It all makes me sound very horrible!, but I knew he had a smile on him, especially when he made jokes about it to his friends!

I could write a book about all the interactions with my Dad while I was trading. He used to say the most annoying things such as, if I were to tell him about a trade where I lost money on a movement against me, he'd say, 'well why didn't you get out earlier'! Or if it was the opposite, he'd say, 'why didn't you stay in longer and make some more'! It makes me smile when I look back at it all.

Great result

2009-01-16T20:23:00.005Z

Another great result today, when it's going bad it gets worse, but when it's going well, it really goes well. I know I'm not having a hard time at the moment, but if you are it's always good to realise that luck changes hands a lot and that there will be a lucky spell just around the corner. A good book to read if you don't think you're very lucky is a book called 'The Luck Factor' by Richard Wiseman. He discusses the factors that make a lucky person lucky. One of the most important factors I picked up was if you believed you were a lucky person, you were more likely to find luck! I read it last year and it has made me a more positive, and in turn, lucky person.

Back to today, I thought there were some good movements and good liquidity again; the best combination for a trader. I didn't trade on the evening races because I was mentally exhausted after concentrating so hard today!

A great day!

2009-01-15T16:59:00.008Z

I kept up focus throughout the whole day and came away with a great profit. Although I did have one bad race losing over £150 because I just thought the price was going to go one way the whole time, but it never did; each time cutting out for a loss when all of a sudden the losses racked up. I felt there were quite a few moderate price movements today, probably why I managed such a good result. I lost in 4 out of the 21 races losing £260 in total. Only bad thing about todays result is that I'm paying somewhere in the region of £300 Premium Charge. Not cool.

Sometimes I like listening to music while I trade, I like Armin van Buuren A State of Trance radio shows, they are a great listen, if your into that kind of music! I listen to music when things are going well, not when they are going badly. If it's going badly I like to know I'm not concentrating on anything else. I had another Bikram yoga session today after racing, I swear the room was heated to more like 50 degrees this time because I nearly fainted with heatstroke!

Minimalistic Day

2009-01-14T23:59:00.001Z

The racecourses once again fell into the hands of the weather with Newcastle written off and Lingfield delayed. I was looking for a simple straight forward consistent routine of trading today so I ignored the Lingfield races with poor liquidity and just traded the Newbury races. I didn't trade the evening races; I'd planned to go to another Bikram yoga session. Unfortunately I got there late and the class was full, so I had to turn and come back home! Anyway, a good result from trading the first 6 Newbury races. Sometimes trading intermittently can be an annoyance and have a negative effect on my trading, but other times it lets me focus much better on the few races there are. This is why in the Summer when there is much more racing on I will seldom achieve similar returns per race! A mentality I challenge myself to change.

An average day

2009-01-13T18:45:00.008Z

An average result, but not an average start. I stupidly lost £265.50 in one of the Thurles races, it was bad trade after bad trade. I think it was due to losing nearly a hundred in the race before. So that set me down over £250 and thought if I keep this up it will be my first losing day of the year. So I snapped myself back in to full concentration mode for the rest of the day and profited in 14 out of the 16 remaining races I traded on, losing only £43.

It seems like the timing of my posts have left me in last place for mentioning about the program on the BBC called Million Dollar Traders. It's about eight ordinary people from different backgrounds going through an intense two week training to see if they can cut it to run their own hedge fund and make money from being given a millions dollars. It was fascinating to watch. I think the scouser will come through and do well, he seems the most intuitive, but intuition alone won't make you succeed so we'll have to see! But the old man is terrible, I mean, getting confused with his own position and doubling up on his position instead of exiting his trade?!?! Mind boggling! Michael Baker as most of you probably know from reading his blog has gone into this sector and I wish him all the best. The life of a horse race trader seems relatively short lived from what I have gathered, except Peter Webb of course, who has been at it from the year 2000; that's great tenacity. Peter in his blog says that successful traders simply outgrow the exchanges; I can see the same thing happening to me unless I diversify and reduce my solitary confinement (I can see in a couple of years that it might start affecting me). But for now, I'm fine. The buzz of earning the amounts I do has only just started to fade away, so you could say I'm still on a high. My trading performances have also begun to plateau, which I don't like. I always like to push myself and achieve something better. Then again, I don't think there is too much room to improve anyway. I've always been fascinated with the financial markets, but not taken a dive into the financial trading yet because I feel some sort of guidance is best since the markets are much more complex, where as becoming a horse race trader is much simpler; there are no macroeconomic dynamics to learn. I have to say, watching the program definitely got me sitting in my seat with excitement thinking about the possibility of becoming a futures trader, especially since analytical skills and emotional skills I can imagine are very transferable between the two.

Back on track

2009-01-12T19:53:00.005Z

Over the last few trading days I had been in a bit of a low, doubting my ability sometimes, and worrying whether my trading success is sustainable. Commenting about my earlier post on confidence, I was clearly with a lack of confidence, possibly all stemming from a few bad trades. I started today with low confidence, and it showed with a big loss, however I seemed to forget about the last few days and got back on track and the day turned out to be a good one. I missed the last two Wolverhampton races because I tried out some Bikram yoga. They heat the room up to 40 degrees Celcius and for an hour and a half your sweating like you've never sweat before and pulling off stretches and moves for stability. I'd done some Ashtanga yoga before, it wasn't as hard work as that, but it was great for releasing tension and stress. I would definitely recommend it! I'm going to try and go once or twice a week. There's something about sweating loads that feels great.

I said I was going to take Saturday off, but if you've been following my blog from the start, your probably not suprised that I did trade! I traded with that lack of confidence, managing to make £437.56, which wasn't great; I didn't trade very well, but at least it's adding to my total to reach my target.

Off form

2009-01-09T10:53:00.002Z

Last two days have seen me off form. I don't like posting when I'm not doing very well, it just hurts more when I have to write the posts! Not suprising I guess! Everybody prefers to talk about success rather than failure. Now some of you will be thinking well your still making money, but I just haven't been what's called 'In the zone'. I just haven't been making the most of given opportunities. Anyway, you get your ups and downs. I made just over £400 yesterday and £100 today. Both days basically just saw me make plenty of silly frustrating mistakes. I am looking forward to the meetings getting back as usual. These are the times where the good days are needed to account for the bad ones. I'm very disappointed with myself and will surely come back strong as I always have done in the past. I'll probably take the weekend off as it feels like I haven't had many days off lately; a refreshing break should see me back more focused.

Mentally Challenging

2009-01-07T20:29:00.004Z

Today started off great, just like every day this month has gone so far. But then in the 15:25 (15:35 with the 10 minute postponement) I had a shocking loss of over £300. It was another mind-blank where I was in position and didn't do anything about it until the loss got huge. Maybe I shouldn't be so harsh on myself, the odds did tumble quite quickly, that can happen and there are times when you literally can't do anything about a sharp movement that goes against you. Most of the time I react quickly but I just didn't this time. Anyway, it felt like such a big set back mentally; from being up nearly £600 to below £300 in one race. I'm sure every trader knows what I'm talking about. A negative set-back always hits you harder than the exact opposite would in terms of confidence. Thankfully down to experience, I hit these set backs less frequently. Over the last few months I have begun to cut down the number of losses I have in a day's racing, which has directly contributed to my daily average increasing. So anyway, after being extremely angry with myself and teaching my boxing bag next to me a few lessons I felt like the remaining 7 races were extremely stressful and mentally challenging, all because of that big loss. Looking back I am pleased with managing to pull a good total in in the end.

Confidence

2009-01-06T18:52:00.007Z

Confidence is so important when trading. If you aren't confident in your ability or just generally not feeling very confident at any point whilst trading then things will just go against you, and you may feel like trading becomes a struggle. In the second race today for some reason I had no confidence, I felt like I was trading but at the same time not having a clue what I was doing. Straight after that awful loss I had a loss in confidence; as soon as I felt that I knew I had to take action. So I stood up, stretched a little and got my usual pint of water beside me and changed my mindset and way of thinking, basically just refocusing. The liquidity was good again today, fuelled by the absence of the Sedgefield meeting. The weather right now is really diminishing the racing on!

I try and keep posts not too long; so I don't bore anyone, but also I know there are many days ahead where I will want to discuss certain points. So instead of throwing it all at you in one go I'll spread them over the year. My most recent poll (shown below) asked readers what their Internet connection is for trading with. I thought there would be more people with 8Mb connections, but 2Mb would be sufficient for trading with, even 1Mb should provide enough bandwidth to for Bet Angel to refresh at a rate of 200 ms. Personally I have a 24Mb connection (it works out more like 19Mb) as I really want to know that my Internet connection can handle anything thrown at it, especially since other applications probably running in the background might be consuming bandwidth, such as antivirus software updating. High bandwidth speeds is definitely one of the advantages from living in London.

Making the most of a poor racing day

2009-01-05T20:16:00.003Z

I had previously set a rule of not trading if there is only one meeting on so I could spend my time doing something else. I was very tempted to just take the day off when I heard Wolverhampton had been abandoned and just go shopping. Then I thought, instead of worrying about my daily average statistics, focus more on the year-long target; so I traded, just as I would on the Wolverhampton or Kempton evening racing. It paid off and knocked off a nice sum off my target. There was good liquidity today, undoubtedly because the Lingfield races were the only races to focus on for everyone. I traded well on all the races except the 14:45 and 15:15 where I think I was overwhelmed with how well I had done in the first 3 races. I just hope all of tomorrow's meetings go ahead!

Commitment

2009-01-03T16:34:00.002Z

I woke up today not sure whether I was going to trade today, since I have traded the last 5 days straight. Usually when I don't commit myself to a day's trading I make a mess of it because it's like a half hearted attempt. Once again I was disappointed at the abandonment of Sandown and Wincanton. I started off on the first race okay, then lost on the second race. At this point I was thinking why am I trading today, then I realised that I've got my blog readers to show that I'm not just going to give this challenge a go, I want to go and smash it. So I picked myself up, thrashed a good result out in the third race and was motivated to trade the rest of the day. I am sure this will be one of many times where blogging and knowing people are following your progress can really give you a kick up the backside when needed. I've had a few comments/emails saying that this blog has inspired them to do their own blog and take up trading. It's great to see. I was at the gym yesterday after afternoon trading and I happened to meet Wolé who won the Last Man Standing TV series competition on the BBC this year, I asked him how much it had boosted his mental strength and he replied saying that it had given him the mental strength and determination to get through anything life throws at him. He said all he has to do is remember what he went through. Anyway, an inspiration and a great guy, not to mention built like a brick house!

Continued progress

2009-01-02T15:08:00.005Z

I made some good progress today given Ayr being abandoned. They delayed the Southwell races by 5 minutes which I thought would have had a bigger impact on the liquidity but I was wrong, I think maybe because it was a planned delay. Anyway I carried out some good trading this afternoon until the 2.35 race at Folkestone, where someone in the betting ring or parade ring unfortunately collapsed delaying the racing considerably because they needed an air ambulance. Seeing that there was only two meetings on it messed up the liquidity/fluidity, mostly in the rest of the Folkestone races. By fluidity I mean the usual flow of money that takes place coming in on the back and lay sides of the market. Any delay on racing causes the betting industry to lose money (or rather saves the public's money!); it certainly prevents me from making some!

Anyway a good day, a good total. Assuming I work 220 days this year, I need to average £681.81 a day.

A messy start

2009-01-01T21:19:00.003Z

Woke up at 12:30 with a hangover, from a great night out. I got some cereal and sat straight down to make some pennies, with the attitude that the pennies make pounds (or in my case the pennies will help me hit my target!). The markets were not perfect for trading, probably because New Years Day would hardly be a day for people to study form and have a bet, I might be wrong. I was quite sloppy in my trading (expected with a hangover) and managed to miss an hour of trading. In the 13:40 I got what I call either 'absolutely f****d' or 'totally shafted'. Some guy while I was in position totally screwed me over with their massive bet in a change of direction of about 8 or 9 ticks. I was not happy, and it's amazing the kinds of swear word combinations you can come up with when something goes wrong or you make stupid mistakes! My flatmate and I could fill a whole dictionary with them. We credit each other when we come up with original lines!

The Challenge

2008-12-31T17:04:00.000Z

Here comes 2009! I'm very excited about it; I think it will bring some diversity for me in all areas of my life.

Okay so the challenge:

I know some other blogs have gone from a relatively small bank of about £1,000, but personally I prefer a larger bank to make the most of opportunities when they are thrown at me. So I will start with quite a large bank of £6,000. This done not mean I am constantly making trades of £6,000, it means that when (if) the opportunity arises where I can use all of it confidently then I will. I agree with Peter Webb on his blog that it's easier to make a higher percentage return on smaller banks, because smaller sized trades are much more easily absorbed in the markets and therefore you can always utilise the whole of your trading bank, plus it can get quite messy when using bigger stakes because of net stakes lying around. So most of the time I will only require a substantially less amount than £6,000, but again, it's there if I need it.

I will be using the software Bet Angel on Betfair (and hopefully Betdaq soon) to do all my trading with. It is very reliable, efficient and easy to use. Reliability is so important since when I'm risking large amounts of money I want to know the software I'm using will still be running smoothly when I exit any trade.

I will edit this post tomorrow because there's a few more things I want to add, I've got to go now, going to Oceanas in Kingston for New Years, I've never been to a club before on New Years; I like doing something different every year. Happy New Year everyone!

I couldn't help myself

2008-12-31T15:53:00.002Z

I woke up this morning and didn't have much to do. I saw that two of the three main meetings had been cancelled and thought it was going to be a day for relaxing and watching TV until the evening. Seeing that I lost about £150 yesterday I thought I'll just trade on the Lingfield races every half an hour to make up yesterday's loss. I made it back up in practically the first race! Anyway, I had remembered Peter's post on his blog about how on the Monday he traded the whole day including the Irish meetings, with just an aim to squeeze a tenner or so out of them. I thought to myself, just because the Irish races seldom have enough liquidity it doesn't mean that money cannot be made from them. So I thought, why not, ten races with a profit of £10 makes a hundred so I gave them a go. It turned out the liquidity on them wasn't that bad at all. So from now on I am going to trade the Irish meetings (unless they are absolutely awful). So maybe not a bad end to the year after all!

Poor end to a great year

2008-12-30T15:40:00.006Z

I wasn't focused at all at the start of today, I was day-dreaming leaving myself in ridiculous positions while no decisions were processing in my head, screwing me over basically. After being over £350 down I pulled myself together for a while but again lost my focus at the end, making ridiculous decisions again and not cutting my losses. They are massive losses and probably the biggest losses I've incurred all year. What a mess. I don't want to trade tomorrow so this was my last trading day for the year. As the title says, a poor end to a great year; a year where I exceeded all my expectations given I placed my first few trades in August last year. I gave myself 9 months from September 2007 to make a living out of trading, I succeeded after only 2 months reaching a £100 a day after 3 months. In 2009 I have set myself this £150k target which I think is a good target. I feel (I know) I can improve in certain areas of my trading, but instead of focusing on those areas specifically while I trade I will let my instincts and natural learning ability help me improve; I hope!

In 2009 I hope to diversify my sports trading into football and tennis (successfully!). I'll do this on a separate account. I've already been trading on some football matches, but only occasionally.

Some average days

2008-12-29T16:17:00.006Z

Well so far, this month has gone very well; my best month on record (in terms of average per trading day). Its helped by not having a losing day - they dramatically bring my average down. Sorry if you've sent me an email but I haven't replied yet, I've been quite busy (and lazy) over this Christmas period, but I will reply over the next couple of days. My New Year's resolution will be too never get lazy and lethargic like I have over the last few weeks. I am going to head over to the gym straight after writing this post whether I like it or not.

Anyway, today was less than impressive for trading I felt, the markets started off quite sluggish and they took longer than usual to fill up with liquidity. If you've been trading for a long time, you can always guage what a market 'feels' like. If you can't, and you've been trading for over a year, I would recommend finding something else your good at, or maybe trying a different strategy to profit from the markets. There are many ways to profit from the horse racing markets, it's just a matter of finding which trading style you are most comfortable with and that suits you.

Some people have been saying that I will "easily" make the £150k target, but I disagree. I think it will be a healthy challenge. Since writing this blog I haven't had a losing day, which significantly helps. Also, I plan on taking at least one holiday in 2009 - that will take out up to 3 weeks off. I decided that if I really do storm my way towards the target, then I'll change the target to £150k after Betfair Premium Charges. I'll post monthly graphs showing my progress.

Today

Saturday 27th December