Time Management

I had a bit of a rough week before my last post and due to various issues and I've had to empty more than half of my bot account into my bank account to pay some bills, but that's not a major problem, it will build back up again in a few months.

I also messed up on the horse due to unlucky timing, probably not not helped by a sticky API.

It wasn't entirely my fault, well actually it probably was, but hopefully it has taught me a valuable lesson...

What happened was I backed a horse and placed the hedge lay bet, but then decided to move it a few ticks, and in the process of placing the new hedge and cancelling the original bet, the first one was matched before it cancelled, and the 2nd was also matched, leaving me with a £140 liability lay bet that I hadn't intended on a horse that started steaming in!

So my back bet was correct and my hedge was correct, but I got screwed over for £115 because of bad timing. Then I couldn't scratch for anything sensible because the price went into free fall...

Unlucky, but that's the way it goes.

This means in future I will make sure a hedge is cancelled first before re submitting it at a different price, or just drag and drop the existing bet to a new position.

Lesson learnt (I hope) and with the bank almost emptied, I'm starting again on Wednesday.

Anyway, as I'm starting back at this trading lark in a few days I've decided I need to up my game so I'm going to be using time management as shown below...



picture courtesy of xkcd blog

Timing

Looks like I picked a good week to take of if today is anything to go by...

I spent a few hours adding Adrian Massey ratings to my race card analysis program, only to find out the site is closing down in about a week... So that wasn't quite so good timing.

There's a few other things I want to add, so plenty to keep me busy until Tuesday when I head off for the mountains.

Hope that BF sorts itself out soon. I've turned the bot off at this afternoon as last time there were problems I lost most of my profit for February.

Have a Break

I've finished work now until 14th April, and although I had planed to go straight into full time trading for a few weeks, I'm quite tired, I made some stupid mistakes yesterday, and I'm not in the right mood for trading at the moment.

So I'm taking at least a week off to go skiing and mountain biking and then I'll start trading again sometime after that.

Stress

Don't trade after people have pissed you off...

Am taking the rest of the day off while I am still up for the week and before I blow another £50

Lunch

A nice easy day today with 17/19 greens.

The Naas races were a bit annoying and I didn't bother with most of them... 28 runners and none of them with any form...? What is the point of that, might be good practice for the horses, but it's no good for betting or trading unless you're in the know.

Started losing focus around 3:30 so stopped for a short lunch break (only one pint though) before finishing the afternoon card.

I was a bit more patient with some of my trades today, sometimes the price goes the wrong way before coming back to where it 'should' be going, which is always a bit worrying, but sometimes the prices just don't reflect what is happening in the race at all, and if confident it's often worth waiting rather than scratching. Maybe there are a lot of people just trading the prices without pictures.

Breaking Even

Sometimes it's good to break even...

For example, when you have two bad trades at the start of the day putting you deep into the red... Making it back to even by the end of the afternoon is quite good for confidence.

But tomorrow I'd prefer not to have to do that :)

Horses

Another good day on the horses...

I had one rough race where I took a hit at the 2nd fence, but interestingly I'd made it back by the end of the race. I seem to be able to make much better profits when I'm fighting to recover a loss. Perhaps that means I'm normally too lazy and not trading hard enough...

Had a few red markets, three in total, but that's to be expected, especially in the sprints where you only have seconds to get in and out of the market, and a few decent greens will more than cover those. Wasn't an amazing profit, but green is green and it's all adding up.

I'm tempted to raise my stakes again, but I'm going to wait a while longer. I want to take a bit more out of the account first.

I'm having trouble thinking of interesting stuff to write in the blog, so I might have a play with the greyhounds this week and make some videos.

I would video the horses, but my laptop slows down too much and sometimes freezes if I try to use Camtasia to record while I've got the BF or RUK race feed running.

I'll see if I can get the race pictures on another machine at some point, but it probably won't be any time soon.

API Lag

My radiator temperature control dial started sparking and caught fire this morning, luckily I was in the room so I was able to unplug it at the wall and dump it in the garden before it burnt the house down.

The trading was much less exciting.

I did ten races, but the API was getting a bit laggy and I'm quite tired from last night, so I called it a day before BF crashed or I made any mistakes.

Hopefully a full afternoon tomorrow.

Sunday Trading

Today is my last full day of work for a while so I can do some horses next week, starting from tomorrow.

Not sure that tomorrow will be the best trading day ever, as I will have a massive hangover! But if I'm up in time I'll probably give them a go with small stakes ready to get back into it with full stakes on Monday.

I've managed to get to the gym every day for the last week before work, and if I keep it up for another 6 months I might be able to get back to not being a Fat *******!

I also want to do some sculling races in the summer, and at the moment I'm about 15kg too heavy for my boat.

So the plan for next week is to cut down on the beers, increase the gym time and get some profitable trading done in the afternoons.

Fab Feb

An absolutely amazing month...

Finished up with a huge £14.36 profit, which is over 50p a day.


There was one bad week, after the betfair problems, where my bot lost more than it made in the other three weeks, so I guess the lesson there is turn it off for a week (or reduce the stakes significantly) after BF outages.

Typically it coincided with increasing the stakes :)

Last week it was fine with the larger stakes, so I'm reasonably confident that it was not stake sizes causing any problems.

Could have just been a random bad week... But I will reduce the stakes next time the API has any major issues.

The manual trading went well and I pulled in an average of almost £15 per day from the horses, which I'm happy with for the stake sizes I'm using.

So although I didn't really make any money, I still think it was a good month. I learnt a useful lesson (at not too much cost) and I had good results from the horses which is what I need to be doing if I want to be regularly pulling in £1000+ a month any time soon.

I get a few weeks without work over Easter so I can see if I can get consistent results trading a full week.