February P&L

Sorry for the lack of updates in the last few days, it's been a hectic week with the Lent Bumps on from Tuesday to Saturday, and then today I have been recovering from a Massive Hangover!

I still managed to get in a few dog races before 12pm most days and the bot has carried on trading without me as that's what bots do...

Total for the month £138.15



I've filtered the bot trades a bit more and although it's too early to make any definite conclusion it does look as if the second half of the month was more successful, so it's now only trading Basketball, Handball, Ice Hockey, Rugby (both versions) and Football. I'm still monitoring other sports and trades.

All of my manual trading is on Dogs and Horses.

I should be able to trade all afternoon tomorrow as I have a few days rest before I start coaching again.

Enemy Number One

Finished reading Patrick Veitch's book yesterday.



The book is split into three sections, the first part mainly background, the middle section a diary of bets and P&L which I also has some good stories in amongst the P&L figures, and a final section which gives a few more clues to how he had/has things set up and useful advice and pointers about what personality traits you need and things you need to be aware of to be able to make big money out of gambling.

Don't expect instructions of how to bet, what you do get is a few nuggets of really useful advice. It's not a trading book, but I thought it was interesting and I would recommend it if you are interested in horse racing.

My Trading

I'm quite confident that this month I'm going to turn around my recent run of reds. Only four days to go in February and I'm currently in the green on both the bot and on my manual trading.

[Update:] lol... Just had the worst run of trades on the dogs I've had for ages today... serves me right for being confident I guess. I'm stopping until later this evening while I'm still have some profit profit (-£10 on the day so far and at least I closed them all out and took no gambles). I'm about a million miles from the zone today.

Random Other Stuff

My left calf is now only 2cm wider than the right, and it appears that the swelling from my ski crash in December has almost gone. I'm hoping I can fit in my ski boots in 3 weeks when I'm out in Switzerland again.

And a video

Going Down

Not sure which is worse, my ISP (virgin) or Betfair... If one of them isn't going down the other one is...

Made a few quid on the dogs despite the problems and managed to get to the gym for the first time in a couple of weeks.

It's difficult to motivate myself to get to exercise at the moment as I'm up at 5:30 every morning for work. Finishing by 9am does get me home in plenty of time but I'm usually more interested in having breakfast or falling asleep.

Progress

Enjoying trading the dogs and horses at the moment, and I finally seem to be making some progress again.

Last couple of races were a bit wild, but mostly this afternoon has seemed quite straight forwards.

I'm still keeping the stakes quite low. £5-£10 on the dogs (as otherwise it can be difficult to get matched and/or scratch quickly) and £20 on the horses.

Once I'm consistently making > £10 a day I'll up the stakes a bit.

Internet connection is playing up badly today, so I've had the mobile ready to phone in bets just in case, but so far haven't needed it as the drops have been at convenient times.

Computer Says No

VB 2010 beta decided to stop working at the weekend so I wasted the whole day today sorting it out instead of trading

By lunch time I'd decided it was completely hosed and installed 2008 instead.

Then I spent the afternoon figuring out how to get round the not being able to register 2008 problem that made me use 2010 in the first place, importing the code and recreating the GUI.

On the plus side the bot now loads/runs faster and is more responsive... so maybe it's done me a favour.

That's it, no trading, no interesting occurrences... just a boring day sorting out computers...

Hope you had a more exciting day than me.

Saturday

Spent today at the races, but was boat races not horse races.

Had been in for a few hours when I realised there were still some evening races on, so I traded the 8:50 and the 9:20 at Wolves and made about two quid.

Interesting spike in the 8:50 where it looked like someone hit the wrong keys and price jumped down from 4.1 to 2.0. I'm guessing it was something like backing £1000 at 2.0 instead of £2 at 1000.



Luckily I had no money on or waiting when it happened, as would have been annoying even though the price did soon come right back up again.

Ordered 'Enemy Number One' from Amazon this evening as it looks interesting. I could probably download it as a pdf but I've run out of books to read while I'm travelling so I decided to get the proper book.

Scratch & Win

Had a good afternoon on the horses today, £12 profit from about 2 hours of trading.

The best (and most profitable) trade of the day was where I layed at 7.0 only for the market to turn and go against me. I immediately scratched at 6.8 for a small loss, backed again at 6.6 to start a new trade, then added to it at 6.4 when more money came in, finally closing at 5.8.



In the past I'd have hesitated to scratch quickly and then I'd have been tempted to let it run and run hoping it would come back, and I would have no doubt ended up closing for a big loss just before the off.

The price eventually carried on down to 5.1 but I think my exit point was at the right time as the move stalled at 5.7. I had nothing to indicate whether it would continue down or go back up at that point.

I'm currently using £20 stakes as this seems comfortable and I'm mainly scalping one or two ticks.

The bot is mostly breaking even, sometimes a small profit, which is good while I'm logging results before deciding which markets/trades to continue with long term.

Currently Ice Hockey, Basketball and Football look most promising.

Happy Monday

Apart from having to get up at 5:30am it's been a good day today.

Caught up on loads of paperwork this morning and found an invoice that I'd forgotten to send in so that's a bonus for next week when it gets paid.

Did about 9 races on the horses this afternoon (stakes £5-£20) and made just over £8 with greens ranging from 20p to £3.40 and no reds

I actually feel like I'm reading the markets much better now and I'm able to chill out and wait until I see an opportunity without feeling the need to start trading when there's nothing there to trade.

I don't know if today's markets were more predictable than normal, but I just felt like I knew what was going on. Stopped early because I started feeling tired. No point throwing away profits by falling asleep and not concentrating.

Had a good day on the horses, so here's an Amazing Horse Video:

Down and Up

Has been an interesting day, too many mistakes early on, but some good trades this afternoon that pulled the day back into profit. I'm feeling good now that I ended up in profit without chasing, but was still annoying to get 6 trades in a row go Pete Tong at the start of the day...

GF had her ski's stolen today
On the plus side she now has an excuse to buy some new ones...

I bought a cheap guitar amp for my mp3 player so that I don't need to use headphones to listen to it

It also means all my neighbours can hear it as well!

Busy weekend so won't be trading tomorrow or Sunday. The crews I'm coaching are racing at Peterborough, so we have a nice day out in the cold/rain and hopefully some trophies to bring home.

Haven't had time for any programming the last few days but the trading has been fun.

Have a good weekend

VikingBlond

I should have backed Nigel's Nap of the day on The Geeks Toy forum today... VikingBlond... it romped home at 44/1!

http://www.geekstoy.com/forum/showthread...

Apart from missing out on that it's been a good days trading, I made about £12 on the horses which is probably more than I've made in one afternoon on horses since September.

I also found time for some database design and have been working on the spec for my new MegaBot. It's going to hook up to both Betfair and Betdaq exchanges and feed event/market data into an SQL Server database. Then various GUI's will connect to the database rather than to the API's for read operations, and will use a common interface to my API classes to place bets/trades on either exchange.

Sounds easy... but I reckon it won't be finished any time before June... maybe longer... (maybe June 2016...)

Seat are launching a new 265 horsepower Leon Cupra R



I had a 225 Cupra R and it was Awesome!

I changed it for a FR TDi 150 about 4 years ago as I do a lot of driving across Europe and needed something more economical than 18mpg and that could tow boat trailers. The TDi is still plenty powerful enough for road use and it has the CupraR body kit, but The Cupra R was much more fun to drive as well as being Yellow!

I'm almost tempted to switch to the new TDi FR 170... But I don't need a new car so I won't.

This looks fun:

Hang Up

Don't answer the phone when you have an open lay bet on the dogs...

Might cost you £50!

January

January started well, a nice upward trend on the P&L chart...

I lost over £100 on the horses in the first few weeks, but was still in profit overall. Then last week was a bit of a disaster, in part I suspect due to the API going tits up.

I think I need to turn the bot off when there are API problems.

Despite the £97 loss it's been a valuable month for data collection and experience. I've also started to feel relaxed and make some small profits trading the pre race horses.



My only consolation for last weeks loss is that Betfair have probably lost a lot more than me...

Here's some Bowie: