Change Of Plans

My daughter came down with my bug and was off school, so I had to cancel any plans of visiting my client for this week. The benefit of course was that I was able to do a full day's trading. The drawback is I'm seriously out of pocket as I can earn a hell of a lot more spending the day with a client, than I can trading.

I did my usual routine today. Started with the dogs until the horse racing started. Unfortunately, my dog trading still isn't doing as well as it did in Sept/Oct. I'm managing a profit, but not as much as I have in the past. So I was disappointed with the £10 or so I'd earned by the time I switched to the horses.

For today's horse racing, I took the decision to increase my stakes by 50%. Very quickly, I was pleased I had done so as I had one of my better trades in the win markets in the second race, netting over a fiver. My pleasure was short lived though as I then started to lose money over the next hour when I found myself almost back to where I started the day.

I spent the rest of the afternoon slowly making my way back, but it was hard going as I would frequently lose money the race after I'd just won it. Come the end of the afternoon, I'd only managed to make £3.50 from the horses.

My frustration wasn't helped when I went back to the greyhounds and started losing some more. I just wasn't able to read the markets at all for some reason so I stopped before I gave away all of my meagre profits for the day.

Even the matched betting I had planned to do in the evening turned out to be a bit of a non-event. Although this brought me £10, I only managed 3 races as the odds available were very poor with too many short-priced favourites and large spreads between what Bet365 were offering and the corresponding lay price available on Betdaq.

I was using a stake size of £30 so it was still worth doing, taking up a total of 15 mins.

In between the Sky televised dog races, I paid the odd visit to Great Leighs where I managed to bring the total for the horses up to £10.

Only another week to go in my attempt to get to grips with the win markets. I'm only just in profit on the horses since I started at the beginning of the month. Hopefully, the coming week will see the consistancy I've enjoyed this week continue.

I'll continue with my current stake levels for the next few days and then increase it once again come mid-week, assuming things continue along the path they are going. I'd certainly like to see a bit more profit coming in now as this month certainly has taken a hit due to the focus I've had on the win markets.

Back On Track

I felt much better today, though still a little 'chesty' and this improvement was reflected in my trading.

I managed a small profit in the horses, but I was disappointed with it as I had my two worst trades in the last two races of the afternoon. These effectively halved my profit from the win markets.

I faired better in the greyhounds, even though I started off with a £3.60 loss. I steadily built up a profit of just short of £20 with most of that coming in the hour or so after the horses. I'm finding the greyhound markets at that time of the day to have generous amounts of liquidity, compared to normal.

The evening races died a death as the football matches approached, so I quit early tonight.

A while back, I mentioned I'd set aside £100 to use as a small bank to address and gambling urges I may have. I use 5% on things like double and trebles and any other madcap idea I might have. It's not going to great, as the fund is now down to £9.84.

The latest failure was a double of Iran and Australia in the World Cup qualifiers. Australia managed a 1-0 win in Bahrain with the last kick of the ball, but Iran could only draw 1-1 with UAE. I really must stop relying on tips from others. No matter how good the tipster is, I always seem to get involved with the tip that's doomed to fail.

Always best to trust one's own intuition and knowledge.

I won't get much trading tomorrow as I need to visit a client who I should've seen on Tuesday before my illness intervened. You'll probably find me in the chat room tomorrow evening as I'll be doing some matched betting on the televised greyhound meeting.

What A Shocker!

I made a few mistakes today. The first, and most crucial, was getting out of my bed this morning. I awoke with a splitting headache, sore throat and coughing my lungs up. There is no way I should have sat in front of a computer today.

The signs were there right from the first dog race where I lost £3.50. I've just finished for the day having lost £11.00 in the 16:57 greyhound race at Sunderland. Strewn in between is shocking trade after shocking trade with barely a decent one in there to separate them.

It was one of those days where virtually everything I touched went against me. In both the horses and the dogs, I was continually laying on the peaks and backing in the troughs. Time and time again, I got caught by big reversals that happened so quickly it was virtually impossible to get out for less than 3-5 ticks.

So, having lost nearly £18 on the day, more or less evenly split between dogs and nags, I think I'll just write this day off and put my feet up for the rest of the evening. A new day tomorrow.

Tempting Fate?

I managed to post another profit on the horses today. Just short of £10 over the 12 races I entered. This is particularly pleasing as I am still using small stakes ranging from £10-£30, depending on the odds.

At the risk of tempting fate, I'll carry on with this for the remainder of the week. Assuming this profitable trend continues, I will start to increase my stakes to a more sensible level.

Today's profit was also boosted by the greyhounds this evening where I managed almost £20 which I was really pleased with considering the evening markets were pretty quiet in the main.

I'm still looking at a system for the greyhounds and the data collection continues, and the earlier promise it showed is still there. I will continue with the paper trials for a few weeks, possibly until the end of the year. After that, I'll start implementing it to small stakes initially - assuming all goes well with the trial of course.