New blog!

Right here:

http://jackofallbetfairtrades.blogspot.com/

The end and new beginning

I've started trading Betfair in January and started this blog soon after. I've learned a hell of a lot in that time and the more I learn the more I know nothing yet.

The way I've setup this blog with the name, the targets and the way I share my results have more and more started to feel like a ball and chain.

I'd like to continue in a different blog with a different name and share my adventures in a different format. Less P&L's and working towards targets and more on what I'm learning and how I think. I'm planning to trade a lot of different sports the coming year and become a jack of all trades. Guess it's going to be an expensive year for me :-)

I'm on holiday now and will come up with a new name once I get back. I'll post the link here as soon as it's setup. Hopefully some of you have been interested enough in my rants to follow me there!

Wall of text again

My apologies for the wall of text below but somehow Blogger is not in a good mood.

I made the original post with alinea's and when I saw they didn't make it to the message I edited to post to put them back again. But strangely enough all the spaces between alinea's have disappeared again and probably make it quite hard to read.

Hopefully it's worth it!

Wimbledon starts for me tomorrow

Not my best month!

Can't hide behind not having enough time. The time I did have I spent on making some bad decisions.

On the other hand I've been learning a lot again and as you can see have gotten my feet wet on a number of different sports.

Wimbledon has got me excited and I'm stoked about trying out some ideas I have about tennis trading. My last bet on tennis got me in red for over $33,- (ouch!) so the strategies certainly need some work but I'll be using much smaller stakes.

Here's a post I did on www.racingtraders.com/forum concerning my tennis activities up till now. I think it pretty much sums it up and could be of interest to people reading this blog:

I find tennis tricky in the way that it's hard to get out cheap if things go wrong.

The ticks move so much that it always hurts.On the other hand if you get it right the profit is also big.

I'm not succesfull at tennis yet so I can only tell you where I cock up.I've been trying to learn some extra strategies besides the TS one.

Seeing as the TS opportunities are not many and with the volatility in odds going on I just have to get in.

My lessons so far:Don't get greedy. I've managed to cock up a number of nice green screens just by getting in that one last bet in a situation where deep down I know I'm starting to move from being a trader to being a gambler.

Example in two sets for the win match:5-4 in sets I lay the server. If he holds his serve I can get out for about the same price, if he gets broken it's bingo. Worked well up till now. There is some timing involved as you want to get in at the price it'll end up if he HOLDS his serve. I use the Betfair graph for that.Then there's the tie break and I take a position. This is silly! It's a pure gamble. If he wins the tie break it's halleluja, if he loses I'm screwed. They are not even for nothing up till then! This has cost me.

But then I do the dumbest thing, I put in another stake because I want to make up for the tick loss. So I double my liability, get out of my comfort zone and the game has to turn (such a good idea, betting AGAINST the flow of the game..) for me to get even or maybe a bit of green. Pure n00b move!I should've taken the red on the chin and decide on wether to get in again or not based on the information at hand and not let myself be crippled by the old bet still being in there and feeling I have to compensate for that.

What I'm working on is finding more situations where there's a big upside and little downside. I suppose these are to be found more in the first half of the match then in the last half and if the green screen is there with a decent amount I should quit while I'm ahead. Also I have to teach myself to vary my stakes depending on the risk/reward ratio of the situation. Good example would be to use max stake in a TS situation as it's a proven strategy and use minimal stake in my experiments. Somehow I get caught up in this urge to maximise profits and I forget that by experimenting with max stakes I also maximise my losses and they are to be expected when starting a new discipline.Hopefully someone will learn something from the mistakes described above and I hope to be able to post some things you should do soon rather then what you shouldn't.

I've linked the thread discussing the TS strategy in an earlier post. So if you wonder what that's all about you can find it. If you're starting out trading tennis I'd say it's the best place to start!

So let's hope Wimbledon will be the start of a profitable tennis trading carreer. I am prepared to pay learning money though to try out several tactics and suss out where the money is and where I have to stear clear.

Where does the time go?

June is just whizzing by and I've had/made little to no time for trading.

But with the start of Wimbledon I'm going to get stuck in again. I'll be using the TradeShark manouvre as described in an earlier post with full stakes but will also try to make the most of all sorts of movement with smaller stakes. The TradeShark technique is great but the opportunities for it aren't always there and the volatility in a match is so high that more money is to be made there.

I think the main thing is to know when to back off. I got in trouble one match when I started betting the first tie break in a 2 set match. And as soon as I popped the bet in I realised I had more to lose then to win in that situation and that if it went bad I'd have to be extremely lucky to get it back again. Extremely lucky I was as it went south but I could get out end of the match. But it definitely wasn't skill I was displaying there.

Up till then I had been doing pretty well betting the games but all my profit went down the drain and all because of Mr Greed.

Football is scaring me a bit. Somehow I don't have a clear image how to trade it yet although more then enough info is available on the forums. I probably just have to get stuck in and run with it from there. Small stakes is the key.

My interest in horses is fading a bit becuase of all these sports that I can watch and actively trade whilst being ingame. We'll have to see if I come back to it again, it is without a doubt the best sport out there to bet on if money is your sole motivation, but seeing as this is a hobby to me I'd rather dedicate the little time I have to trading stuff that amuses me more.

No P&L this time, just look at the one below it'll be quite similar to that one as I've been really inactive.

P&L May and some tennis

Here's my P&L for May:



Not entirely what I was hoping for at the start of the month but considering the very limited time I've had not a bad result.

I haven't had any time at all for US horse racing in June as my business partner is on holiday and I'm working 7 days a week and having to work to closing time in the bar every night. Seeing as I'm not in a position to let my life revolve around my sportsbetting (yet! :-)) I'll have to let my sportsbetting revolve around my life. So expect me to delve in a number of different sports coming time trying to make sure that I can make some cash whenever I'm free.

Here is june up till now:



I got a quick bet in at baseball and darts just to get a feel for it. I believe they both can be scalped. My subscription to the extra cable sportspackage is going to earn itself back easily I hope :-) A whole lot of new sports opening up to me.

The loss on horse racing is me coming home tired. Rushing to get in on the last race of the evening, not finding a situation I normally enter the market on and then force myself to "see" an opportunity elsewhere. With a $ 17,80 red as result. Serves me right. Good thing is that it made me more determined to lesson my dependency profit wise on the US horses and broaden my horizon.

My tennis strategy is really easy to learn and apply and wasn't thought up by me. This excellent beginners tactic was gallently provided to us by TradeShark on the racingtraders.com forum and seeing as I believe that credit should be given where credit is due here's the thread:

http://www.racingtraders.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2282

Excellent starting point!

I made $ 7,77 after comission on the women's final today using a $30,- stake. That's a whopping 25,9% return on stake! It's the first match I had the time to sit down, watch and bet on from beginning to end. The rest of the tennis profit from June and May has been made by quickly trying to get some bets in between running to work, walking the dog, having breakfast, etc etc etc. I'll be sure to be ready to rock during Wimbledon. If this strategy keeps as consistent as it has been up till now I'll up the stake also to the level reflecting the state of my totall bankroll.

I've noticed that a LOAD of players on the Wimbledon men's winner market are available to back at 1000 on Betfair. I wish my bankroll could sustain a little gamble backing them all as quite a few of them are bound to play each other and make it into the second round. If a couple then also play each other I'd say there's value to be found. But seeing as it's a theory and I'd have to devote nearly all my bankroll to proving it I've only backed 5 of them. Of which 2 are already shortening.

The 5 players I've backed at 1000 are:

Mikhail Youzhny (currently available to lay at 980 and back at 820)
Robert Ginepri
Jurgen Melzer
Igor Andreev (currently available to back at 800)
Rainer Schuettler

Let's see how they do. Max $25,- I can lose on this so no biggie and a nice experiment.

My exit strategy is very dependable on their 1st round opponents and the prices offered closer to the tournament.

Ideally 4 of them would play each other and the 2 of them that make 2nd round will play each other then :-) I should be able to trade out a 3d rounder nicely if he was first available at 1000. Also in the 3d round I'd hedge him over lesser remaining players giving me a higher guaranteed profit.

To give you an idea, Soderling who is in the RG men's final against Federer was available at 1000 too before Rolan Garros started! And was matched for $2200,- ! So someone will be having sweaty palms tomorrow afternoon as he'll stand to lose $2,2 million if Soderling beats Federer.

Tennis Tennis Tennis

This trading on tennis has really opened my eyes to how fun it is betting on sports you like whilst it being in play.

I'm swamped at work so I'm still overdue a good post but I promise that I'll make up for it next week with some tactics I learned you can use on Wimbledon.

I wish I had more time to get stuck in Roland Garos but such is life.

More to follow, just wanted to give a small sign of life!

Tennis and dogs

I've been doing some small peddling in tennis last couple of days.

Tomorrow I'll try to do a number of trades during the matches I watch and see if I can turn a profit.

By the first looks of it I can see myself doing well and hopefully I've found a new market to exploit.

I've finally managed to hook up BetAngel to Excel but boy is that hassle for people who don't use an English Vista. I will rant about this later. But as I try to always stay positive I'll also offer solutions after the rant but I'll tell you now that I'm not too impressed with BetAngel and their support on the forums at the moment. Their silence is telling me a lot as I'm sure they've read my problems on their forum.

I'm going to try to get some dog data out of it and see if I can find some golden rules. Somehow the fact that the dogs are always 6 in a race and the odds are more "connected" (if that makes sense) between dogs then they are between horse races where you have sometimes 15 selections give me the idea that patterns can be found.

Of course together with me numerous other people are trying to break the code so I'll probably will end up mumbling to myself years from now staring at millions of lines of Excel data but at least I'll be happy in my own special way :-)

If I'm completely barking up the wrong tree please let me know but I feel that the dogs odds are much more reactive to each other then the horses are. The big outsider in the dogs is always related to the shortness of the others. If you add up the odds you mostly get in the 34-40 range and with 40 you have a real outsider in the field. Otherwise it's mostly close to 36. With horse racing you sometimes have a horse that has a huge amount layed at 1000 odds begging for backers. The sum of all the horse odds are sometimes ridiculously high which makes you wonder what some of the horses are doing there, as apprantely everyone agrees that they can only win if every other horse breaks at least two legs. A horse can go up from 450 to 1000 without really affecting the other horses a lot odds wise. With the dogs if one dog goes up or down by a significant number you'll see the others move too to balance things out again.

My father is helping me with the Excel and statistical calculations. He's much better at that then I am and regardless if it bears fruits or not it's fun to be sussing things out together and if I learn from it that I'm chasing windmills that is good to know too so I can move on.

My tennis report and all about my big scare I'll post within a couple of days. Also a monthly wrap up but I'll tell you now some weird stuff will have to happen tomorrow for me to even come halfway my target I set at the beginning of the month!

Messing around

As you can see I've not been making progress bankroll wise. To be honest I've been messing around a bit. But in a constructive manner I like to tell myself :-)

My obsession with the greyhounds is still there and I got it into my head that I should try some creative Dutching. My theory was that since you have 6 dogs in a race, them having on average a 1 in 6 chance of winning you have to gather more then 36 odds to be sure of profit in the long run. This is assuming that the Betfair market is efficient and the odds on each dog reflect his true value.

Now with Dutching you'd simply back the whole book when it's under 100% giving you a guaranteed profit. You'd use different stakes for every dog to make sure that the profit is the same whatever dog wins. I've seen some Dutching opportunities as BetAngel makes it very easy to do it automated but it's only there for a splitsecond and I'm pretty sure there are quite some people out there trying to earn easy money that way thus closing the window of opportunity real quick.

So this is where I tried getting fancy.

My idea was to try and back every dog as high as possible and thus getting a total sum of odds over 36. My goal being at least 40.

If this is still abracadabra to you I'll give a quick example.

Dog 1 I back at 3,8, dog 2 at 4,7 and dog 3 at 8,7 I now have gathered a total of 3,8+4,7+8,7=17,2 and will need to back the last 3 for a total of approximately 23.

My thought here is that if I succeed in this I should make money, in the long run, on the straight bets in itself but if I can green up before the start I'll do that. I fired in $5,- bets. It went well the first couple of attempts and I greened up for around $1,- But to my detriment I had a red screen on one, which also happened to be only 36,9 odds in total as I didn't manage to back high enough, which I decided to let run true to the system.

I didn't realise that one dog was only backed for half a stake and of course he won. I would've lost a bit if the favorite won but this should've showed me a small profit instead of a $12,57 loss.

I'm on to something I believe but there's a good chance that I'm reinventing the wheel or making something real simple real difficult for myself. It did get kinda hectic with all the bets being matched and if you try to hedge the 6 dogs in one go all the bets getting fired in with some being matched and some not. I also tried to simply hedge the dogs that showed profit and wait for the others to improve until closer to the off but that was messy too. I wish I could have 6 ladders next to each other (within the same software), that would make my life so much easier with the dogs. I have 2 24' screens so the real estate isn't a problem.

I've tried to connect BetAngel to Excel to gain better insight in the dogs but seeing as I have Dutch Vista and Dutch office it doesn't work. I think BetAngel can only deal with the English language package which sucks bigtime! Hopefully this will be fixed, I did notice that there were no replies from BetAngel staff in my thread so there's always a chance there stonewalling it. In that case I'll have to nag them all day when I finally get the money together for the course! :-)

So the dogs have been a losing discipline once again but I am enjoying thinking up strategies and giving it a go.

The $15,- I dropped was due to a thread on www.racingtraders.com/forum where someone pointed out that Bari was getting odds as a huge underdog while they were 1st in the Italian serie B and playing the number 18. I first backed them at 10 for $5,- and the draw at 19 for $5,-. Then just before the off I saw that Bari was up to 32! So I just had to stick another $5,- in. This match was attracting 4 times more the liquidity then any other match in the serie B was and it was all due to a LOAD of mony being layed on Bari winning and the draw so obviously someone knew something I didn't.

I was working and thought I'd just try to trade it out for a green screen early in the match. The draw had already come down to 10 and I was thinking of laying that but decided to wait for a couple of minutes as it was coming down so quick.

Well Bari scored real quick! So I quickly popped up the Betfair website to green up for a huge amount and was already composing a raving blogpost in my mind about what a great opportunist I was and how betting is all about finding edges and exploiting them when I found out that this match didn't go in running on betfair...

And not so surprisingly Bari lost 3-2, figures.

But I must say that it gave me a lot of entertainment and at least I could think of myself as really smart for almost a full hour before it went all pear shaped. I did decide though that with the start of the new season I'll be also betting as much football as I possible can is it gives me a lot more pleasure watching the game at the same time then the horses and dogs do where mostly I have no live pictures and I really don't get too excited over seeing them running.

I made some money back with the US horses which I haven't been trading seriously this month really up till tonight. I sat down and focused and get an easy $27,- proft and I thought that a lot of races weren't optimal tonight. So although I'll abandon my target of $400,- this month I will try to sit down for a couple of more nights and do some bankroll building with the US horses. Mainly so I can blow it on other sports again! But I'm sure all this practicing, number crunching and coming up with out of the box strategies will pay itself of in the long run. Besides it's fun!

Still here, still busy

Just a quick not to let you all know I'm still around. I'm really busy in my business at the moment but hope to post something somewhat meaningfull somewhere this weekend.

Bankrollwise I'm having a terrible time but not due to bad running but due to a lot of experimenting. I'm quite confident that this will repay itself infinitely in the future and I'm severely enjoying doing it. Learning a lot!

More soon.

Sorry for the wall of text below

I put in alinea's but somehow they get taken out when I publish.

Maybe to long a post?

Time flies

Wow where did that month go? Have hardly been able to trade and it's almost half over!

Guess I'll have to step it up a bit to get to my target. Although the target is just there for fun. I'm not going to trade more then I can do whilst being concentraded as I'll otherwise just be setting myself up for losing.

Although I don't have a lot to show for this month up till now I am having fun. I'm trying some new tactics and some new markets and it's fun trying to get my head around them with minimum stakes.

Basically I'm learning more about the mechanics. Also if you play with small stakes you have the luxury to not have to compete with the big dogs. I read a lot on forums that people have been trading for x time but still never win. I'd say they'd have to go find their niche like I do instead of trading the favorite UK horse 3 minutes before the off. That's when all the heavy hitters are scalping the market and it's no place for the lesser gods to be as long as there are greener pastures elsewhere. That's my tip for the day. Look at different horses and longer before the off if you haven't been able to turn a profit. Watch the market carefully and see how money gets matched. Then think long and hard how you can exploit it.

One weird thing I saw was a $1000,- lay at 1000 odds giving this guy a liability of 1 million!

This is on a UK horse 14 hours before the off. Just to give you an idea where I'm roaming around looking for an edge ;-)

Now this looked too good to be true, there was still $696,- open. I was racking my brain wondering why the hell someone would do this. Worst thing is, it's a 6 horse race!! So I'd say any horse that's at the start should have some sort of a chance. Really don't get why anyone would do that but seeing as he has at least a million $$ in his Betfair account I'd say there's a good chance he knows what he's doing. So I've backed it for $10,- just to see. I'm hoping to lay it back a lot lower.

I posted it on the http://www.racingtraders.com/ forum to see if someone else had a clue why this was happening and went to check http://www.racingpost.com/ to have a look at the race and the prognoses. Something I should've started with of course! But still learning.

Turns out that this is probably the worst horse in history. Wouldn't be surprised if it has 3 legs. No chance at all of winning. Terrible record, terrible trainer, terrible jockey.

This is what they had to say about the horse:

Dancing Wave
Guaranteed sixth place prize money if she completes but major surprise if this 6f AW claiming winner is not well tailed off.

So the person putting the lay bet it probably perceives it as a free $1000,-

Still if you have a look here:

http://www.racingpost.com/horses/horse_home.sd?horse_id=702205

Out of 34 starts the horse won 2, got in 2nd 8 times and 3d 4 times. I have much too little knowledge of horse racing to compare tracks, conditions and competition but I'd still say that you'll have to be pretty sure about yourself to stick a million on this one and say that even if you'd do this race a 1000 times it would never win.

I'm off to bed and will see how things look tomorrow. It would be great if I can lay it back at 500 or so. Then I can green up for the full $10,- stake. Although I'm also contemplating going for $5,- on the other 5 horses and have a $5000,- freeroll on this one. The fact that it's only 6 horses is making me nervous, it just seems to me that the chance of this one winning is much higher then 1000-1 The racingpost has her at 500-1, that's where I pulled my lay price from I'm aiming for. I'm not putting it in yet as I don't want to wake up tomorrow and find it at 150 -1 selling myself short for a nice sum.

I bit of redemption

Seeing as I've been withdrawing money and am aiming for different monthly goals greyhound and horse wise I'll be posting my P&L up till now in May from now on.



Looks good huh!

I was trading a US horse and I noticed that the back side was much much higher then the layside, we're talking more then 50 points higher here, but some of it was eaten regardless. Jammed $5,- in there thinking I could do a nice little green up if it got eaten.

Only $ 1,36 got eaten and of course I can't lay that back as it's below minimum bet, and seeing as I was the lowest backer I couldn't green up either. Layside was still being matched quickly so I decided to wait until the suspension. If at least $ 4,- gets matched I'll lay it and green up. If the $ 1,36 stays I'll consider it a loss and let it ride.

The horse won! Earning me a nice $ 87,93 after comission. Best thing is I had livevideo too and saw it happen!

Now if I would've been able to green up I would have done that for sure, but I think that the odds I was offered were so good (especially as the layside was getting matched for quite some money a lot lower thus to me reflecting the probable real value) and my stake in it was minimal versus my bankroll so it wasn't worth redding that up.

So my Betfair bankroll is up to $ 424,69 now and that's after the $ 25,- withdrawal. So new all time high and back on track again.

As for the greyhounds. My idea of sticking to $ 5,- stakes until I make $ 100,- and then going up to $ 10,- until I hit $ 200,- etc etc seems like a good idea and I'm $ 0,11 cents closer to that hundred then when I started this month :-)

I realise that the letting it ride stories are close to each other and you might get the idea that I'm turning to the dark side but don't worry I'm not looking to gamble. When put in this exact same situation again I'll do the same though. As far as I see it the market thought this horse was going to win 1 in 40 races and I was getting over 90 to 1 on my $ 1,35 and no opportunity to green up. I think I made the correct decision, that the horse won the first race and I didn't have to make this decision 40 times to see a return is very very lucky though.

April P&L

Here's my monthly P&L:

Considering I blew $ 158,- on that lay bet that suspended before I could back it I had a pretty good month.

So what to do with May?

I think I'm going to go bold and say that I want at least $400,- out of this month. In other words I'm going to try to more then double my bankroll this month.

And just to complicate matters I've had to take out $ 25,- to cover the attheraces.com subscription which I've been using way too little up till now.

Moving to Korea

Bankroll $ 338,68

As they eat dogs in Korea and they've been severely pissing me of again.

If you've read most of my blog you've probably noticed that I have a love-hate relationship with the greyhounds. One day I'm over the moon because I've had one or a couple of good sessions and the other day they've been raping me again and I hate the mutts.

The thing I've been lacking is structure. I use the same stakes I use with the horses and if I get destroyed I get destroyed bigtime.

Last night I came home from work and earned a quick $ 9,- on the US horses after work. Today I did some greyhounds and lost a quick $ 9,- before work. Lifes all about balance huh! Thing is, why use the same stakes as with the horses when I'm not consistently profitable over a longer period? It's stupid! Why pay more if I can get the exact same experience with minimal bets!

It only starts making sense raising the stakes when I'm consistently profitable, because I then maximise my profits. I'm done maximising my losses. So there. :-)

What I 'm going to do now is make a virtual dog wallet. I'm going to use minimal stakes until I make $ 100,- profit of the dogs from the first of May. Once I hit $ 100,- I'll move up to $ 10,- if I fall below $ 75,- I'll go back to $ 5,- again.

This way I'll keep building bankroll with my US horse profits and not have to give up on the dogs. As I shall crack'em! Can't stand not being able to do well on them. Strange thing is that I've been profitable on them overall this month. I'm up $ 23,44 on the dogs in April up till now. But with way too many ups and downs and good sessions followed up by terrible sessions. The fact that I've dropped almost 1/3 of my monthly dog profits in 5 races (without getting caught and having it go in play) today shows me I need to work on consistency bigtime.

Tonight I did well on the US horses so I'm happy overall. As you can see by my bankroll I'm slowly but surely recovering from the $ 158,- hit when I got caught and the race got suspended with a lay bet open.

In May I don't even want to make a big deal of that dreaded $ 400,- mark but just go right over it and move on to $ 500,-

US horse racing resources

Bankroll: $ 302,45

As promised I'll let you in on what I've found out about US horses.

Lot of credit goes to Geno, who commented earlier and I chat on MSN with. He pointed me towards a number of sites.

Correct post times that get updated so refresh while you get closer to the race:

www.ebetusa.com/racing

Here you can find a lot of streams etc:

http://www.ildado.com/horse_racing_live_broadcasts.html

What I've found up till now:

Golden Gate and Hollywood:

http://www.calracing.com/video.php register here and you can stream them both.

Keeneland:

http://ww2.keeneland.com/racing/frames/livecoverage.aspx

Philadelphia:

http://www.philadelphiapark.com/video/asx/PPLive.asx

Tampa Bay:

http://stream.robertsstream.com/stream.asp?stream=tampa_bay_mbr&referer=TampaBay

Turf Paradise:

http://totalwebcasting.com/live/turf/live.aspx

I have all the streams as a bookmark in a folder on my desktop. So I can keep the mediaplayer open and only have to click on the name of the track and get the stream. No messing around with internet sites etc etc.

What I'm looking for desperately is a stream for Mountaineer Park and Penn National! If someone can help me here that would be great! They usually attract a lot of liquidity. Anything I find myself I'll update in this post and will let you know it's updated in the newest blogpost.

If you have a stream of any other US track that Betfair allows wagering on that I might have forgotten I'd be very much obliged if you'd let me know.

What I do now is simply ignore the Betfair time. It is useless. I check the ebetusa site to see which race is up next as the order the races are posted in on Betfair are wrong too!

Then I put on the livestream so I can visually see when the race is about to start. I'm noticing that I don't really like trading the races without a stream as my edge is so much bigger with it. Sometimes I get an extra couple of minutes of trading even after the post time of the ebetusa site! And the real money comes in then while at the same time people without the streams are getting desperate to get matched.

In my experience up till now the race won't suspend on Betfair until a couple of horses are in their box at the starting line. So if you stick to hedging once they're about to load up the first one you should be fine.

DISCLAIMER: Please see for yourself when the races get suspended, the stream might be a bit in front or behind compared to mine and it can be detrimental if you take my word on something that is potentially extremely costly to you.

I will take no responsibility at all :-) I provide the links, you can provide the common sense to use them to your best interest yourself. If you look a couple of blogposts down you'll notice that I'm not the king of not getting caught and I'm still recovering from the last time I got caught with my pants down.

I hope this helps some of you to be able to trade the US horses better. It sure has helped me!

Getting back in the saddle

Bankroll: $ 283,18

Just a quick post to let you know I'm still around as Geno has been getting a bit worried judging by the comment by him in my last post :-)

Basically I've been spending a lot of time getting setup in a fashion that this won't be happening again. That and losing money at the dogs and making it back and a little bit more at the horses.

I'm planning a big US horse racing post in which I'll combine all the info I've found with links and everything. In short you'll be getting all my hard work for free and I don't even have Google adds on this page! But if you've stuck around long enough to read all my ramblings I probably owe you some so it's in the pipeline.

I've pretty much dealt with the loss and know how to avoid it now. Also Tinerzz who posts on www.racingtraders.com told me to only back for a while and although I still find it silly to pass up good lay opportunities when you see them it has helped me. And I did pass them up because if you try something you have to give it a fair chance.

Not only because you don't have that extra pressure of having a huge liability becuase I'm not too worried about that as long as I have the off time correct, but more so out of a learning perspective.

I think people tend to be either back or lay persons. So they will instinctively prefer to get in on one side. And I'm a layer. By forcing myself to look at backing only for a while I've learned a lot about the market.

Oh and for you Greyhoundtraders out there.. I said earlier that this: http://live.williamhillradio.co.uk/radio-main.php?st=HR is a good spot to listen to dog commentary. Well it still is but I also gave some bad advice. I said that if you wait for them to say "here comes the bunny" or something to that extent you'd still have time to close your position.

Now that depends very much on who the commentator is and how much he had to drink the night before. I got caught the other day, luckily with a back bet, and no of course he didn't win, and have noticed since then that it's certainly not consistent enough to trust it.

That's all for now. Hoping to end up between $ 325,- and $ 350,- for the month and pas the $ 500,- mark in May but we'll see how things go. Certainly not going to force anything just to hit a certain goal as that is a recipe for more disaster and I've had my share for a while.

Disaster

Bankroll: $ 254,29

Worst case scenario has happened. An US race went of 2 minutes earlier then posted on both Betfair as the website I use. I had a liability open of $ 158,- and the odds of the horse were 8 so an outsider. And the bastard won.

I guess the $ 400,- mark is bad luck because every time I break it something happens.

Good news is that I won't have to worry about that bad luck as it'll be some time before I'm back up there. A quick look at my older blogposts showed me that I was at this bankroll amount at the 3d of April so 3 weeks of trading down the drain.

What I learned from this is that the website I use (www.ebetusa.com/racing) shows the correct time but they also update it as it can change closer to the race. What I did was write down all the times I could see on the screen so I wrote this one down about 40 minutes before the off. When I checked the other times I wrote down I noticed that some of them changed too. So the solution is to double and triple check closer to the off.

It's terribly frustrating but as I can see where it went wrong and what I can do to make sure it doesn't happen again it's just a bit of learning money. Better now then later on when I have even bigger amounts open.

I just wish I would've gotten caught with a back bet open on this horse that race!

Frustrating day

Bankroll $ 379,98

One to forget quickly.

I had a great start. Went over $ 400,- in the first two trades and then went up to $ 417,-. I was already seeing myself going through the $ 500,- mark in no time at all. If it wasn't going to happen today, tomorrow for sure! This is easy!!

As usual that is the moment everything goes south..

So I started doing one stupid trade after the other. Can only blame myself, for the first time I've been trading I felt my old friend tilt creeping in. Luckily I know the feeling well and I stept away and took a shower. I was at $ 189,- then.

Just got back in and did a couple of good trades and started getting my confidence back when I just got destroyed by a freak amount of money being dumped in completely against the market with 30 seconds to go. So that was another $ 10,- down the drain. I know this happens and it's part of the game but the timing sucked. On the other hand I was pissed of enough with today that this didn't really matter anymore.

Time to quit as my motivation is completely gone and I would trade with scared money if I'd continue now.

Milestone

Bankroll: $ 398,79

I've been struggling to break the $ 400,- mark. Not that I've had that much trading time since saturday but somehow the milestones seem to affect me a bit. Maybe being a bit too eager and looking for bigger wins but certainly not consciously doing so.

I had the same with the $ 225,- and the $ 300,- milestone. Got there quickly and then needed a couple of sessions to clear the last bit. The solution would be to set my next target at $ 250.000,- and see if I'll get to the $ 249k quickly and then take the money and run like a bandit :-)

Anyhoo, my better half has promised me to go enjoy the nice weather outside with the kids for a couple of hours tomorrow afternoon so I can get some greyhound time.