No post and no real trading

No post as have just been too busy with work. I have also slowly had to accept the failure of my system. It still performs very well in back testing however the problem is I am not just getting matched enough on the profitable trades, especially when I increase my stakes.

I have been collecting data from 8am in the morning and believe I have identified 2 profitable systems where matching will not be a problem.

However because this involves manipulating much more data and calculating 2 different types of Indicators, I haven't been able to automate yet. I really hope I can this weekend.

When I write my bots I don't force it. Normally, when I am doing something different, a very clear method on how to write the bot comes to me. After that it takes about a day to code. When I force it the code is often not very efficient and I have to rewrite.

I think I am about ready now

I am also quietly confident.

Standing still

No post for a while as I have been tweaking and testing new things. I have started collecting horse racing data from 8am till the very end of the race and this threw up a lot of ideas to investigate.

My data threw up an in-play system which looked like it could give me £300 in one month with no losing days. After 2 days I lost over £50 and I will not be going near in-play horse racing anymore

My 10 minute pre race bot is just about breaking even because I won't leave it alone. Every time I look at the data I can't help making tweaks. Currently I don't trade maiden stakes, beginners chases, Wolves and Southwell. I also have an idea about how the early market influences the 10 minute pre race market which I will test tomorrow

I have noticed the best days are Saturday and Sunday, followed by Monday and Friday. Tuesday to Thursday lose or break even and I am not sure why. I will continue to trade level stakes until I know why this is

I have just had some money come in so will be implementing a massey system in April too.

My goal in April will be to let the bot run untouched. I have learnt and tweaked a lot I just need to let it run now

Diversification

P&L since last update £7.74

Trading Races
7-Mar £7.14
8-Mar £4.44
9-Mar £1.66
10-Mar -£16.50

Casino bonus £15
Laying -£4

I am trialling a laying system to small stakes and this has totally captivated me. I haven't worked on my Bot at all over the last 4 days and need to get this out of my system soon.

I made the £15 playing blackjack on coral using their monthly reload bonus

As my activities start to increase I need to build a better tracking spreadsheet

After much thought and although it doesn't make sense, I have decided to implement my daily stop loss again. It will be 6x trade stake (amount risked per trade) and target will be 10x trade stake. Once I hit 4x trade stake loss I will reduce stakes by 50%. If I hit another 4 x trade stake loss at new stake then I will reduce further to 10%. Will do the same with targets as well i.e if I hit 7x will also reduce stakes by 50%. If I hit another 7x will reduce to 10%. Right now will do this manually but automating this is one of the many upgrades planned for my Bot

This has been prompted by today's loss of -£16.50. I have been on £1 loss per bet for the last two weeks which makes today's daily loss of £16.50 truly shocking. If I was on £5 stakes that would have been over £85. So even though in the long term this doesn't make sense, with a limited bank it is the only way to go.

I just need to drag myself from betting forums and building a laying system to upgrade my bot and move on to bigger stakes

Reprogramming and Backtesting day

P&L since last update -£91.87

4-Mar -£1.08
5-Mar -£109.72 (Bot failure -£113.46)
6-Mar £18.93

Grim reading above however there a lot of things I am positive about. My new bot settings mean losing days are controlled.

This weekend I was meant to completely reprogram my bot but stayed up late trying to come up with a system for laying horses. I feel a better understanding of form etc will help my trading and trading will help punting. At least I hope the impact is positive and not the other way round. I even bought a horse racing game to help this process. Once the laying analysis is completed I will get about 1 year of results from the RP site to back test.

All this meant I woke up late and just managed to set up the bot and then went to sleep. Went out with Mrs Vital to a dinner dance in the evening so didn't do much programming.

I am not 100% sure my bot won't still make mistakes so unless I am watching will be using £1 stakes. I never seem to lose on Saturdays so I may use £5 or even £10 stakes on saturdays

Today I hope to back test the impact of the early morning price movements on the last 10 minutes in the horse racing market and also reprogram the bot to be able to track prices from early morning but still only trade in the last 10 minutes.

This means instead of one workbook open with one sheet trading I will have between 2 and 5 workbooks open with up to 8 sheets trading. I will do all this using Gruss's betting assistant and excel as usual. I know my home Laptop can handle this but it remains to be seen if my 512mb ram VPS can. If not I will eventually have to upgrade the VPS but in the meantime will run bot from home Laptop. Problem with this is my Internet crashes about once or twice a week which is why I got the VPS in the first place

£100 plus cost of indecision

After a couple of stop loss issues with Gruss, I set up my bot to fire a stop loss after 5 seconds if Gruss's stop did not fire or did not get matched. This has caused me problems twice before today. First time I layed a horse and won 6 second time backed and lost 4. This was meant to be one of myfixes this weekend but it has come too late

My options were let Gruss's stop loss fire and hope to get matched in running or use just my stop loss

I was leaning towards mine but hadn't implemented. The thing is this is a really simple fix just take two digits of the gruss trigger. Daammn. A horse bot backed today, Chaninbar led to this loss. Both Gruss and my stop loss fired meaning I had a net lay and the horse duly romped home.

My bot runs a cycle every second. First it checks to see if Gruss's stop has been fired, if not a second later it cancels and then 4 seconds later it fires a stop based on my actual exposure. Somewhere within this 5 seconds something is not quite happening right so I am going to simple turn of Gruss's stop loss. Eventually I will turn off the tick offset too. The only other option is to let the stop loss and tick offset go in play but this is a little too risky

I still hope to be ahead this month and I am just happy still using relatively low stakes. There is no way I can do this without a bot as I trade all runners below 8.5, 10 minutes to the start and this weekend I am upgrading my bot to monitor and trade from 8 am in the morning all races and possibly all runners. Even if I had the free time I could not sit in front of the pc all day

So the good news is I think I can rectify the problem easily. The bad news is an additional £100 in bot errors bringing the total to nearly £1,000

P&L since last update -£26.86

I haven't posted for a while because of work and also I have been doing a lot of analysis to improve my system. Things haven't been going well on the P&L front but what has been good is I have allowed the bot to run uninterrupted.

For my current system I have been trying to improve profits by doing one or all of the following

a)Finding an indicator to enable me let trades run greater than my standard target of 7 ticks
b)Taking whatever profit is available if less than 7 ticks and if my indicator suggests the trend is weakening
c)Apply a filter to help me not enter certain losing trades - can't avoid all but the trades that do not go my way for even one tick and usually get stopped out almost immediately usually in less than a minute

The search continues but I have a few things to backtest first. I usually start by putting the indicators on a chart and just manually checking about 30 charts. If it looks good then I run a back test. I currently have quite a few in the pipeline as well as some I have discarded

I just now need to make the time to run the backtests and also to continue matched betting

Summary not happy not making money but really pleased about my discipline in letting the bot run.What has helped me is reading blogs where some people have long losing runs but stick with their systems until things turn round.

I am also pleased that I am still hopeful researching and analysing

Until next time good luck to us all

The Skinny

Feeling better

P&L Since last update

Horse Racing £22.35
Football -£0.90
Casino Bonus £71.50


Horse Racing
Thursday 18th -£4.61
Friday 19th £11.68 (includes a loss of £5 on a lay bet that didn't come off)
Saturday 20th £15.28

Trading has been at reduced stakes - max loss 5 ticks/£1.50 instead of 5ticks/£3.00

So back to break even for the month even though I needed a casino bonus to do this - hey it all counts. Also been happy with discipline and resolve to let bot trade uninterrupted. I am happier with reduced stakes as it appears that psychologically I can handle £10 daily losses but suffer when daily losses hit £25

I have another filter I hope to test in the next couple of days. Throughout yesterday I have been building a betfair tracker which can monitor markets long term. My plan is to collect horse racing data for two weeks and see if some ideas I have work in the longer term markets.

I have two laying systems which are easy to implement but find only 2 or 3 bets a week and I am still trying to decide if it is worth it. Also why I have dropped football betting as I feel there are easier ways to make money. My reasons
Firstly you have to be glued to the pc/tele to react if goals are scored
Secondly I was trading the correct score markets and I just wasn't happy with the gaps between best back and best lay prices. I have been spoilt by the efficiency and liquidity of the UK horse racing win markets. I actually tried the Irish and place markets and gave up for the same reasons.

Record loss

Daily P&L -£90.71

Horse Racing -£14.24
Football £1.83
Bot Error -£78.30

Mind is not clear enough to write now so will update tomorrow. Once again after changes to bot program suffered big loss

So far I have lost -£70, +£180, -£500, -£70, -£40 and now -£78 to Bot errors but this is the worst so far because

1) I was watching
2) It wasn't really a programming error but I was running two bots from 2 pcs using betting assistant and also manually interfering with trades and the whole thing got confused. About 3 minutes to the end of a race I manually closed all position (I thought) and went of to do some DIY before the next race. 10 minutes later I saw my betfair balance was 163 instead of about 240. I was so shocked I initially thought someone had hacked into my account

Throughout the day I was constantly messing about manually exiting trades. At 15 loss I implemented stop loss, promptly won the next two and started trading full stakes and lost the next two

If I had let my bot run I would have been down £5 for the day

I am nearly £1k down to Bot errors and wonder if/when I will overcome this. I guess the very expensive lesson is weekly reviews not daily. Also I just have to have faith in the system.

Making decisions during the trading session has to stop

No more tweaks to the bot until March. I will just let it run at 50% stakes no stop loss.

Funny thing all my versions of my bot if I had let them run undisturbed would see me up for the month. As it is I have given away all my profits and really wasted my time

I have been home all week and all I have done is trade and program/backtest the bot

Tomorrow will be a complete break from bot analysing and coding. In the evening I will trade the Fulham and Roma games if I have nothing better to do

Still believe I can end the month up but now will be depending on matched betting

Slow progress

PL since last update £0.32

Yesterday £4.95
Today Horse racing -£1.83
Football -£2.75

Got back briefly into profit for the month yesterday but lost a small amount on today's poor quality racing after Folkestone was abandoned. I haven't done well historically at Southwell so traded carefully and actually made money. Unfortunately lost every trade at Newcastle to be down for the day overall. This is actually my first live trading day at Newcastle so will watch out for this course

Spent the last 3 days coding and back testing my "killer" filter which turned out to be a false dawn as it actually worsened results. I had to learn some serious coding to implement this which I will use in future. It would be an understatement however even if I say I am totally gutted by this as I had high expectations reviewing this indicator on my charts.

So now I have reviewed by Course and by Odds range. Today I will look at results by race type and will leave it at that. I will now move on to collect data from 8am for horse racing and do some match betting and casino bagging

On the positive side my bot has been very stable and I feel I can trust it now.

I also traded a correct score strategy today I copied from another blog. Unfortunately the first day was a loser but I am happy with the theory and possibilities of the system. I traded the AC Milan v Man United game which I and the spreads expected to be low scoring. I risked about £8.50 but traded out with a loss of £2.75 at 75mins when the score was 1-3 to united. Game eventually finished 2-3 to united and I say I am happy as even though the game was totally against expectations the loss was quite small. I wll trade 10 more games to decide if I will continue. This can't really be automated fully and involves a lot of judgement before the game for match selection and also in play. I am also using this as a hobby and to collect inplay football data so will not be dissapointed to make £200 a month on this. This actually helps with the Premium charge

Fighting back

P&L since last update £18.29

Fri -£8.62
Sat £13.00
Sun £13.91

Friday was the third loss in a row so I did some major analysis

Actually Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, if I hadn't implemented stop loss would have done much better however the advantage of the stop loss is after just 2 winning days I have recovered from 3 losing days. I will keep the stop loss but increase it to x 5 of trade stake (currently £3).

From my analysis I have implemented some filters. I was reluctant to do this as I feel I need to get much more data and avoid the dangers of back fitting however I got frustrated with the whole 2 days up 2 days down thing (mostly my fault as if I just let the bot run I would have been profitable).

Filters for now are implement odds range filters for back and lay trades, avoid Wolverhampton and Exeter (after today), only back at Southwell and trade all odds at Kempton my best track so far. When I say avoid I mean trade at 10% of normal stake to gather data.

I am at home now for the next 7 days for half term and I have a few things I need to implement.

Then move on to matched betting and looking at trading the horses from 8am. Also I think information I gather here will be useful in my last 10 minute trading.

So much to do so little time. Now that I have green I am enjoying and hopeful. I know I can triple my stakes and the market will absorb easily however I will stay at £3 risked per trade for the next one week at least.

Dissapointing

Day's P&L -£1.81

Very disappointing after an early high of £18 but could have been worse as hit a low of -£10

Painful but correct decision

Day's P&L -£9.79

Day didn't go according to plan. Set up my bot at 12 then went for meetings until 3pm. Came back and found out because Carlisle was abandoned Gruss's betting assistant got stuck after a few races. Came back and saw had lost about £2.50. Started the bot and then lost a further £7.50 so implemented my stop loss i.e. reduced stakes to 10% of normal.

I say painful because I went on to win £1.99 which means I would have been up £7 for the day

There is no logical reason why I have the daily stop loss and this will seriously test my resolve to keep it. The reasons why I have the daily stop loss is to avoid volatility as I build the bank and road test the system. I am still learning everyday as even though I know what the system can do in back testing, live trading is different.

I have discarded at least two systems that performed very well in backtesting but failed live

So will keep the stop loss but may make an exception for "feature bets". One thing I have noticed is my Bot seems very successful at some courses like Kempton today while it performs poorly at Wolves. I don't want to implement these filters until I have about 300 bets at least for each course

Another good day

Day's P&L £14.79

Another good day. I am beginning to feel good as I still have a filter to apply which looks very good in initial testing. Next is back testing then live testing. If it passes both stages then I will implement hopefully this weekend.

Nearly break even for February now

Good day

Day's P&L £32.68

I am not sure why but things went swimmingly.

Today was a bad day but lessons learnt

Day's P&L -£20.10

Gave up 100% exactly of yesterday's winnings. Lost the first 6 trades and was down £10 so panicked and implemented stop loss mode meaning I was trading at 10% of normal stakes. I was watching, noticed I wasn't getting matched on winning trades and feared my bot was too slow again. Won the next 2 and went back to normal stakes. Won another 2 and was almost at break even then lost 8 of the next 11, panicked again and went to stop loss stakes.

In the end if I wasn't watching I would have lost about £6 instead of £20 as everytime I went to stop loss stakes I won. I have to conclude this was a bad day at the office as I checked and about 26% of my bets didn't get matched. The normal range is between 19% and 28% so far

This really calls into question my daily stop loss principle. If however I had stuck with the stop loss after 6 bets would only have lost £10

I even checked to see if Sunday was a bad day but it was actually OK. Also checked the courses and there may be something here. Southwell is not great historically but I just don't have enough data on Muss and Ling yet.

Should I stop the daily stop loss ? I just don't know. My preference would be to scrap the stop loss and gather as much data as I can. The problem is if there is a fundamental change in the markets I could do my bank. Also large daily losses would affect my confidence.

So I guess my answer is keep the stop loss. I still gather data by trading at 10% of normal. Also today would have been -£10 instead of -£20.

I also reviewed history by day and found out historically Mondays & Tuesdays are not great. I won't rely on this as I have only about 6 weeks data.

The chart below tells the story. Red is actual trades & blue is if I had not messed about with my stakes

I need to stop watching and changing the rules as I go along. One reason I watch is because my homemade excel bot has let me down before. Also you learn when you watch.

May also implement a target where once reached go down to 10% stakes. Hmmm

Fighting back

Day's P&L £20.10

I was fairly confident I knew speed was the problem with my BOT and was proved right. I still need to make changes to improve win/profitability ratio as although I am profitable I am simply losing too many trades. However I will thoroughly test before going live. It seems my first settings are almost unbeatable but we'll have to see. I used reduced £3 stakes instead of £5 when losing so this should/could have been about £35. Anyway won't complain about a win.

3 steps forward 2 steps back

P&L Since last update -£60.32

Twice I changed settings after back testing and both times very costly. The first I simply increased my target by one tick. Luckily I figured out after 1 day's massive loss.
Clawed some of that back changed settings again this time to filter out odds where historically I wasn't profitable. Problem was this slowed down my bot in placing bets meaning I was missing the profitable trades & only picking up the loss making ones. Didn't figure this out for 3 days and finally I changed today, still lost but it was clear that was the difference. Hoping for a better day tomorrow. Will try to speed up Bot tomorrow

So that's 6% of my bank and much of my December profits gone. The big lesson here is always test changes on very small stakes. Also always use a stop loss without this loss would have been about £30 more.

Also hope to start match betting as hoping to make at least £1000 this month

Betfair still playing up

Daily P&L £0.54p

Nuff said

Unfair Loss thanks Betfair

Daily P&L -£3.91
Gave up because of serious issues with the betfair site. Dissapointed but I am sure many including betfair will lose much more today

I'll take it

Daily P&L £14.03

Increased stakes to £5 per bet. This is where the stop loss will kick in. Exposure is £200 max

Applied some filters. Encouraging

Have a killer filter to apply which hopefully will be the seal on the system. Still worried BOT will go wrong as has cost me dearly in the past. Biggest loss £500. Most recent £41 in January's P&L

I have to make hay as don't know how long edge will last.

Daily P&L £1.61
Extremely dissapointed. Increased stakes to £3 per trade plus 4 meets, 22 races and 51 trades meant I expected to make between £40 and £100 (my record so far)

Still no major loss

I made 1 tweak towards the end which should help and will backtest something tonight to help me take maximum profits and not let trades go against me. 3 meets tomorrow so expecting to make money

The Journey

Heading in the right direction

Daily P&L £3.12
All from trading

Restart

Just P&L for now

P&L £4.21

All from Trading

Monthly P&L

Dec P&L £122.49

Absolute Disatser

Result since last update -£13.24

Everything I have touched has simply gone wrong.

£10 of the total loss came from two under 2.5 goals bets in the Portuguese league.

Biggest horse racing loss of £1 came while testing the latest version of Gruss's betting assistant. I reversed the ladder as usual but when I clicked on the pink column to Lay I found this backs instead.

On the trading front I traded 15 races losing 11. What I did was after my successful outing last week I decided to read a lot of technical analysis articles to tweak my systems and possibly avoid losses. The end result I turned a winning system into a loosing one. I guess the answer is to go back to the system I used last week. Today when I did the bulk of the trading my talk talk broadband packed up for the first two hours meaning I lost 50% of the racing. From there I just couldn't recover and my timing was always slightly off. Exiting bets too early or hanging on too long. I lost 5 ticks on 3 races which meant my stops got hit and the trades never went my way as I use a 5 tick sliding stop. Anyway I will study those races to see what I can learn. I am dissapointed as mentally I wasn't with it at all.

Anyway I have resolved not to trade when there is only 1 meet as it is just a waste of time .

I probably will do some trading Thursday or Friday using Logmein at work

This is what we are talking about

Profit since last update £9.76

Made up of Football £5.23, Horse racing £4.53

Apart from the £ won I am pleased the horse racing seems to be coming together.
On Saturday I won 6 & lost 1, Sunday won 7 lost 3.

Football profits came from backing under 2.5 goals in two Greek games.

I am taking the day of tomorrow and if I can win again I will increase my stakes. The mental side is still really hard and I have to work on it. I really panic when I enter trades and they initially go against me. I am still exiting trades too early but green is green. Of the 4 losses two were trades I shouldn't have gone in and one I lost because I lost my internet connection for about 5 minutes. I was really pleased with a race I scratched. I layed the favourite but noticed that the 2nd and 3rd favourites had started drifting to so quickly exited trade. 30 seconds later favourite had shortened by about 6 ticks.

I am really excited but need to keep my feet on the ground.

Still No Cigar

Results since last update -£2.40

After waiting for a whole week to trade and after all the charts I have studied in the last 2 weeks when I lost about £2.70 on Saturday I have to say I was 24 hours from quitting. If I had sufferred a loss today I would have.

I wouldn't have given up all this but would have restricted my self to match betting.

Anyway yesterday I lost 17 ticks in 3 races and won 7 in 2 for a net loss of 10 ticks. Today I lost 14 ticks over three trades and won 10 over 5 trades but still ended up about 30p. Today my trend/momentum system lost 14 while my ranging system won the 10. I would be easy to give up my trend system but it would mean I could have only 4 trades in a 5 hour session which would be huge waste of my time. I have found that I need to be concentrating and can't really do anything else even if I have 30 minutes between races. I would be happy if my momentum system could break even but I will give it some more thought and a few more days before I decide. Today was the first day I didn't break a single rule so I am happy about my discipline. I am also becoming better at identifying risky trades. The problem is too much time watching and not doing anything and this is a recipe for disaster for me.

Typing this I have answered my dilemma. I will just have to train myself to utilise the time between qualifying races. I will also double the stakes on my ranging system so the trending trades don't hurt me so much as I try to get them to work.

I should have won an easy £20 over this weekend from sporting index's all losses refunded mobile betting offer. Unfortunately I couldn't get my xda orbit or blackberry to run their software

Next trading day will be next weekend but after this week things should ease up a bit at work and I will be able to trade using logmein

Until next weekend good luck with all your trading

Better

Daily Result £3.51
Horse Racing £1.15
Football £2.38

All green today and it could have been much better. Going into the last 2 games I was 12 ticks up. Lost 5 in the penultimate and 3 in the last to finish just 4 ticks up. The bulk of the horse racing P&L, about 95p came from a lay of a horse i.e a non trading bet. Soccer came from a back of under 2.5 goals between Xanthi & Larissa in the Greek league.

I think the reasons for my improved results in trading the horses is because I have slowed my refresh rate in Gruss's betting assistant. This has meant I am not being stoppped out by noise. It also means I am not getting into trades as quickly as I can but overall I think this is much better for my trading.

In the last race I actually saw a 3 tick profit but queued for 4 ticks 3 and then 2 and watched as the price ran away from me. Really dissapointed and I am toying with the idea of quitting when I hit a predetermined amount but I won't as this doesn't make any sense.

I am happy because in the last 2 races I made mistakes I will eliminate.

In the penultimate race a clear favourite was drifting and I thought my chart was showing a head & shoulders formation meaning the price was about to reverse. I jumped in before support at the neckline was broken and I paid the price.

In the last race I suffered another rush of blood and entered 1 tick higher than I had planned. These are aspects of my trading I can and aim to work on.

Now for a 2 mile jog to clear the head.

Close but still not there

Result since last update £-0.75p
Horse Racing -£3.83
Football £3.08

Not a disaster but not great. The cornerstone of all this is trading horse races before the start with football & match betting as sidelines so I am very frustrated that this is not working yet. Won £3.09 on a football under 2.5 bet in the game between Nice & Auxerre and this is what dragged me back from the doldrums. The good news is loosing causes a lot of introspection. Every time I lose I spend time studying my charts and apply new tweaks to the basic strategies. One thing I have decided is that I will place fewer bets. The problem with this is that if my shortlisted races are about say 30 - 40 minutes apart in a 5 hour period there is not much I can do in between.

I feel my strategies are not far away. One thing I will do is slow down my refresh rate to about 4 or 5 seconds so my stops don't get hit. I still need the stops as I am not disciplined enough without it. I am using betting assistants sliding stop and I will keep this too for now.

Again I am seriously thinking of ordering a few meets from Fracsoft as the data I collect is about 3-4 seconds between each refresh which means strategies I design based on this data do not work in real time.

Anyway luckily I can try new things tomorrow and this will probably be my last trading day until next Saturday. I have an under 2.5 goals bet tomorrow in the game between Xanthi and Larissa in the Greek first division and hope that brings in some cash.

Premium charge delayed

Daily Result -0.95p

Today was a real struggle for me. I had not traded for a while and also woke up too late to get myself into the zone mentally. The evidence of this was I was using my £5 safety stakes instead of my full stakes and didn't even realise

I lost 12 ticks over 4 trades and won 5 ticks over 3 trades. It was one of those days where my rules did not signal any bets so in the end I started jumping in and relaxing my rules. I traded the two available meets, 1 in Ireland which I don't normally do but enjoyed. My spreadsheet is built for only about 24 runners and at least 2 races today in Ireland had 25 or more. This means I will need to rewrite the spreadsheet. Soon

One of my problems is I am not full time and my trading days are few and far between so when I have the time to trade I force myself even if I am not mentally in the zone.

This is why I may give up trading but only after 30 bets each on all systems, hopefully by the end of January. To clarify I will still trade but I will have to be very selective. I trade the over/under 2.5 market very well sometimes having no bet in 2 weeks however when I sit in front of the PC I can't stop myself placing speculative bets or gambling.

Found a few blogs today and it seems almost everybody is making at least £200 a day some about £1,500. Good news is that this is proof that the money can be made and also I may be able to pick up a few tips from reading them.

For now I will spend the next 2 hours doing some more graphical analysis, basically looking at all horses that drift or steam more than 15 ticks in the 10 minutes before the off to see if the charts yield any clues.

Lucky Winnings

Profit since last update £21.41

Above looks very good but came from a match betting error and under 2.5 goals bet.

I placed a qualifying bet on Panseraikos on their game vs Iraklis originally scheduled for 3rd January, backing at Interwetten and laying at betfair. The game was postponed and since betfair hold on to your cash for 3 days (the bet stands if the game is replayed in this period) and Interwetten like most bookies cancel the bet, I made a mental note to remember to back if the game was rescheduled to be played within 3 days. Very busy at work and completely forgot, looked into my account today and I had won £18.16 after commission. I am happy I won the cash but not happy that I wasn't on the ball as this could cost me a lot in the future.

The second was more straightforward. Backed under 2.5 goals in the Braga vs Bellenses game which finished 2-0 to Braga.

Not much has happened on the trading the horses front as I have been busy at work and didn't have the time to try to use logmein from work.

I did do my research on a strategy I had used previously to win about £150 over about 30 bets. I then tried to improve the profitability of the system by increasing stakes lowering my strict entry rules and lost about £200. Tried very hard to get back to the initial strategy but just couldn't.

One reason I tweaked the system was that you could spend two days watching the races and not find a match. I tried to find a way to bet more and also win more per bet and the result was a disaster.

I needed to do a big review as I knew I could get back to the original system. I thought of getting some data from fracsoft initially to do a review of about 100 to 200 races but I decided to first use the data I had collected no matter how small. The results were impressive

Wins 12 bets/25 ticks
Not matched 15 bets
Break Even 7 Bets
Losses 1 Bet/ 4 Ticks

Above is the best case scenario and timing of the exit is crucial . Some of the break even bets could be 1 tick losses and some of the wins were 1 tick wins and could be break even in real time but no matter what I believe the strategy will be profitable if I can stick to the rules. I also believe I will find up to 2 - 5 qualifying races daily assuming there are at least 3 meets.

My next trading day will probably be Sunday as I am very busy at work until Saturday. Also from next week hope to be able to bet using logmein from work.

I am busy at work for the whole of January and I know if I try to trade it will cost me but I will use this strategy which doesn't require too much time on the computer as I simply select the races in the morning and set a reminder about 15 minutes before the start. I will need logmein and Gruss's betting assistant as I will need to use stop losses and ladder interface and also excel logging to see my indicators.

On to matched betting. I have placed my last qualifying bet to enable me complete the wagering requirement at Interwetten as I just couldn't stop winning. At first I was irritated by this but then I realised it is actually a good thing as this will stave off betfair's premium charge. Only for some time I hope.

Disaster at the Dogs

Daily Result -£3.93p

With only one low quality meet today I should have walked away but honestly this did not even cross my mind. Since I was home and after today my next trading day would not be until Sunday, I decided to trade the meet at Lingfield then go do a few chores. All the races were not the kinds I like to trade with few runners and/or clear favourites. After 3 races and a total of 1 hour 30 minutes at the computer with no single trade the inevitable happenned. I started trying to force trades. i couldn't find one single system trade and all the trades I took today were purely based on WOM. I actually won 3 ticks from 2 trades and lost 6 ticks from 3 trades for -3 ticks & -0.95p overall

I had a list of things to do like dry cleaning, haircut etc however since I was down for the day and after reading a post on a forum today which suggested that you could trade greyhounds just using WOM I switched over. 2 hours later I had lost £2.98p. I won't make any excuses and say it doesn't count. I just hope I have learnt my lesson as if I have £4 is a very low price to pay. The greyhounds came thick and fast and I just couldn't drag myself away. Also stupidly instead of trading with £2 or even £0.50p I traded with £5 and paid the price.

Like I say this lesson will serve me for sometime before I get it out of my system as I can't imagne I won't go on tilt again but hopefully not for a while

I don't think the dogs are too difficult to master but I have enough on my plate with horses, matched betting and football.

Also something I have learnt is everytime I read a new idea in a blog, forum post or ebook I always want to try it out. There is nothing wrong with this but the best way probably is to back test and if not possible trade with very small stakes

The availability of the dogs can be a positive or a very big negative. They can be used to earn daily cash but also can be used as an escape from boredom when your main trading events are not available like today. This is one of the reasons I am happy I am writing this blog and hopefully never again will I waste time and money on the dogs