This post is difficult to write, whenever I hit a bad day I don't particularly enjoy telling everyone about it. Especially as the day was shaping quite nicely in time for Cheltenham festival starting tomorrow. I was taking the day cautiously as previous Mondays haven't been that kind to me and had £10 after the first 5 races. The next two were negative and I made a mistake that I thought I had drilled out of me of keeping a bet over into in-play. This resulted in a £60 negative bank. I made this up over the next 6 races and was actually going to record a £15 day which in hindsight I should've taken. Ever wanting more practice though, I took the next race on and had everything fine until the software wouldn't green up. I crawled through the logs to find out that to have placed the hedge (greening) it would have exceeded my liability that I had set to stop myself getting into expensive positions. This actually backfired - as it part hedged leaving me a negative £360, my biggest single loss!
If this wasn't bad enough, there was only one race left which I traded - and very well, but again when trying to close, couldn't and took another loss. Back to back, worst ever losses - leaving me a pretty depleted bank with one of the biggest festivals of the year tomorrow. Total loss on the day was £703.27, but I can't bring myself to think I traded badly. I am very concerned about the greening and will be looking to see how I can make sure that particular error on my behalf could've been avoided. An expensive day, and one that really is making me wonder about the longevity of trading for me.
Best named horse today was: Googoobarabajagal
I was always rather impressed Christine Bleakley had decided to do the Channel crossing on water skis for Sport Relief, and today came with better weather than yesterday. Rather amazingly she only fell off 8 times and completed the distance within 100 minutes! A big well done to you!
On the trading front, I took things a lot more cautiously today and had tallied up a steady £16 half way through the day. I got a bit lucky on the last race but I felt it was what I was expecting and it happened in front of my eyes. The day finished on a £60.91 profit which again is higher than I would've really expected. I was on course for a high £30 finish until the last race which is more in the region I was expecting. I will keep being this cautious for Monday's racing and then see what Cheltenham has in store on Tuesday.
I had a feeling yesterday was a lucky run and after the first couple of races today I was being proved right. I cannot understand how to read these markets they seem to be really erratic. Throughout the day there was overall more drifters than steamers, and when they went they disappeared. I was on the back foot from the off and took me the whole day to make even. I don't like this one bit, as I take far more risks than I should and it doesn't feel as comfortable as some of the earlier weeks felt. Overall I would say this feels like I'm just starting again and my results look similar to that of week 1 and week 2. I was positive on the day overall but as it was so random and again more luck than any kind of skill I am not going to put the figure up as it would be misleading; it was less than yesterday though!
Tomorrow I am going to play safe and cautiously enter the markets I feel have some structure. This will result in a smaller P&L but at the moment it is capital preservation that is key.
P&L: £73.54
Average P&L: £5.66
Today still felt a little erratic and I was much more cautious. Overall I would say the markets were more stable than yesterday but there were some I just couldn't read. I am hoping that I will learn over time how to read the majority of markets but at the moment some just stump me. I am really happy with my £73 today, but I do feel I was lucky a couple of times and the day could've turned out completely differently. At the moment with my slightly raised stakes I would be expecting £30 + or - £20. So today's result is far above what I would expect. The reason I felt it was lucky was because I was in the middle of a trade and the whole market turned round and left me stranded. I've been in this position many times before and as a trader it is something you get used to (I'm sure at this point I'm meant to say something along the lines that as you get better you learn how not to get into these positions!) however, I still feel like you can end up in these positions no matter how good you are. What I did next was close my position and then start again. At this point I was a long way from making a profit, in reality I was going to take a -£20 after greening. After taking this new point of view I actually ended up with a £20 profit after greening. The reason I felt this was lucky is because in effect, I turned round a loss into a profit. The market could've shot off again and left me in real problems.
At the moment, I am trying to figure out how much is market reading, how much is weight of money indicators, and how much is luck. I often get better results when I leave money on the edge of price ranges in a speculative fashion, but this too has gone against me in the past. Tomorrow will bring some answers as I expect the P&L to return to where I am expecting. However, I'm slightly concerned my raising of stakes may have been premature.
P&L: £27.40
Average P&L: £1.71
I'm not going to continue with the alliteration in titles! However, today was particularly tough. I found this last Tuesday as well and am hoping it isn't going to be a continuing pattern. I have stuck with my slightly larger stakes of £2 a tick. When the markets were behaving themselves this felt completely natural to be trading with this size of bank. For the majority of the day the prices went absolutely awol. I have been trying to think what could have caused such massive drifts but they were happening well before horses were on course and even when markets had fairly good liquidity the volatility was extremely high. This behaviour caught me out on the first race again like yesterday but I managed the position much better being slightly more aware that this could happen and closed out with a -£5.30 loss. The rest of the races I was focussed and ready for any strangeness the markets might have and finished the rest without a loss. This does take my profit and loss for the week into positive which I am very happy with. Will have to keep the momentum up for the rest of the week.
For the traders out there, if anyone else thought this was particularly volatile today then let me know your thoughts. I always like to try and work out why something is happening in the markets - this gives me a much better idea on how to play them. I am for the time being going to put it down to just one of those days but will be keeping an eye out for future movements.
Last night we had the pleasure of attending Dave Gorman's stand up routine at the Theatre Royal in Newcastle. My girlfriend and I have been fans of Dave's for a while. I first was introduced to him by another Dave in his Astrological experiment. If you get the chance to watch his BBC 2 series it is a definite laugh. He then wrote a couple of books you may have come across, his first "Are you Dave Gorman?" and then the Googlewhack adventure. His sense of humour and his friend Danny Wallace are two people I have been itching to see and when they came to Nookassia we jumped at the chance.
He's asked us not to talk too much about the performance so as not to spoil it for others but the basic premise is stand up comedy. I hope this doesn't spoil it for anyone. :) Another interesting thing is that his cardigan was definitely purple - and that looks blue, so either I drank too much or he was standing under a red light?!
From a trading perspective - today I had decided to use slightly larger stakes and my first couple of races saw a few issues with this. I made a couple of losses totalling £117. I felt a little phased at first but got down to trading like normal but with the larger stakes and it started to feel natural again. I managed to claw back most but not all of the loss leaving me with a negative day of -£26.92. This is going to sound a little silly, but even though it was a negative day I feel like I learned a lot and am raring for tomorrow to have a chance to take profit.
P&L: £23.68
Average P&L: £1.48
Certainly was for me - a very happy P&L for the day and my highest average P&L. All I need to do is keep this level of intensity up for future races. There were a couple of reminders today where I was getting very close to races going in play with one actually going but greening up straight away. When this happens it still manages to give me a mild heart attack which is enough of a reminder for me to keep an eye on the clock for the rest of the day. A few of the races today really benefited from being proactive and having orders lined up ready to be taken when the price looked to be swinging back in again.
I thought this race really showed how these markets differ from the stock market and have to keep a book. This means that the price of each runner in total can't go to far beyond 100%. In this picture you can see the green and blue doing opposites and the orange and red reflecting their prices.
Don't forget to keep posting your comments, and vote.
Yesterday P&L: £10.72
Today P&L: £15.69
Yesterday Average P&L: £0.56
Today Average P&L: £0.92
Today has been nicknamed Super Thursday (not really sure why) but for me it certainly was. The last two days I have felt much more on the ball and taking ticks when I can. I was happy with yesterdays progress after a hard Tuesday, but then today I really pushed on to make over my target. An interesting milestone was hit today - with my comparatively small bank of £1000 I have managed to turn this through the market several times and today I have a turnover of over £75,000. This really does make the saying "Turnover for vanity, profit for sanity" true as my profit overall is still negative!
Please continue to vote for my design on the A new look for a new month posting. Thank you all for your kind comments so far - it really does mean a lot to me. I've been adding the social bookmarking links to the posts so you can tag the posts you enjoy reading. I have been working on a new post which will be discussing ticks in some depth. I have a few more topics planned that I will discuss, but if you have any particular requests to do with trading then I will take a look at doing these as well.
P&L: £5.04
Average P&L: £0.39
Average P&L: £0.39
A much harder day today for some reason. The markets were more difficult to read - I am very happy with this P&L though as I found myself in some sticky situations that I took on and managed to save all but one which was a 62 pence lost. If I hadn't changed direction and saved some of the markets today it would've been a small loss. Slight amend here - due to Prince Charlemagne messing up the start of the last race I didn't make the final 20 pence of the day!
The more astute of you may have noticed that the blog has undergone a rather dramatic face lift. I was getting a bit bored of the blue and green default template and wanted something to better reflect the blog's content. This was quite a fun exercise and quite a lot of little issues crop up that I hadn't even thought about. One of the nearly awesome things Blogger allows you to do is host your pictures through Picasa. This is how the images in the blog postings are hosted so that the average user doesn't require additional hosting and an FTP client to just add a picture to their website. This can be taken quite a bit further as I have done with the blog to also host the top image and smaller images to make the blog look better than just some cobbled together CSS. The slight downside with this is that Picasa has a limit of 800 pixels for their images to be hot linked to. This meant that I had to be a bit creative with the 1000 pixel banner at the top of the blog! I'm unaware of the bandwidth limits - but I am fairly sure I won't be near them just yet. However, if you notice the images not showing up please let me know.
Comments, improvements, and any issues are more than welcome.
Do you like the new look and feel of Firedave trading Betfair blog?
P&L: £10.78
Average P&L: £0.67
I was in two minds as to whether to increase stakes this week and decided against it. My reasoning being that I would like to back last weeks performance up with another solid week. The first race I struggled to read and stayed out of it, from then on things looked good - I could see the trends and dip in and out with a small profit. A good strike rate and a pleasing performance. My aim this week is to keep hitting the £10 mark and if possible push it towards the £15. This will really help when it comes to slowly increasing the stakes.
Harry Challenor came in to win on the back of Portrait Royale today when all the favourites fell (nearly taking him too) I don't think he is a relative but there aren't that many Challeners!
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About Me
- firedave
- Hello! I'm David and have embarked on a new plan to trade for a living - I like a challenge! Since graduating in 2004, I've been working as an IT Consultant and am now hoping to put those skills into use and develop my trading capabilities. Looking forward to the journey...
