Progress

A good afternoon pulled in £28.98 from in play trading, 9 greens (one was a small green scratch) and no losses.

I'm surprised that I've had no losses at all in the last 2 days, as I do expect to get them and need to not get over confident, as I know they will happen. But as long as an edge is there the losses don't matter.

My strategies seem to be working ok so far on flat races as well as jumps, although I tend to bail or hedge a bit earlier on the flat at the moment as I find it harder to read the races.

They often just plod round the track quite slowly until 3f out and then start the race...

A combination of preparation pre race and then watching the streaming charts as my main data and (delayed) live feed for commentary and additional feel for the race seems to give me enough information.

Started the month with just £15 so that I could deposit another £10 when I blew it, but I haven't needed to and am now up to £92... That's from 7 days of trading which averages about £10 a day.

The combined P&L from both accounts is fairly average this month, but I think I've finally started to get the hang of this trading stuff and am making consistent profits and avoiding losses and feel like I actually know what I'm doing sometimes.

The P&L for 2010 has already gone past £2000 which was the target I set at the start of the month. Wasn't a massive target with only £170 needed, but would have been annoying to miss it, and I have had a couple of not so good months so it was (and still is if it all goes Pete Tong in the next few days) a possibility.

Next year I can hopefully increase my profits to something more like an income rather than beer money.

Kempton On

There was Racing at Kempton today

It was all flat racing rather than my usual (so far) hurdles, which I think made my strategy a bit harder especially with the 10 sec delay I have on the RUK pictures. But it went well and I managed to green all 7 races.

I think a lot of it is due to preparation, going into each race with a horse and a strategy to follow pre decided. I only had to reassess one race due to a non runner. Preparation makes it clearer when to open the trade, what to watch for, when to leave the bet running and when to green/red up.

Often I don't hedge, if the price heads off for 1.01 or 1000 there isn't much point.

A couple of the races I greened up early when I didn't need to, but a small green is better than a large red... A lot can happen in 10 secs...

Here's some Linkin Park

Snow Joke

Another day off...



Also noticed in the news that airports are closed in the UK and the roads are not working.



I guess it's unrealistic to expect all the councils to pay for the equipment to keep the roads open when in some places it only snows a few times a year, and most people don't have winter tyres anyway...

But the airports should be able to cope.

Day Off

Uttoxeter and Ascot both cancelled so I have the rest of the day off.

None of the remaining meetings have races that meet my selection criteria. I guess the race preparation/analysis was useful practice, although I could have spent the time building a snow man instead.

Quite pleased with how the last week has gone for the In Play horses, and will be able to increase my stakes a bit next week.

The bot continues to plod along bringing in a few quid here and there. The month is running at about average P&L so far.

Off to Austria this evening for a ski trip, should be fun doing a 3.5 hour drive in the snow.

Tying to decide what new SatNav to get.

I'm getting fed up with my current one trying to take me off main roads to drive through little villages (regardless of what navigation settings I have set) before coming back onto the road it turned me off of...

Also it's a pain wanting to avoid tolls in one section of the route but use them in another as there is no way to do that.

What I need is something that lets me work out routes on the PC and then upload to the device, surprisingly there is a distinct lack of satnavs that have this fairly basic feature.

So far I have a choice of TomTom rider (which is meant for motorbikes) or a Garmin 1690 (still not sure if this does what I need). If anyone has any alternative suggestions that will accept pre planned routes at under £300 let me know.

Here's today's Linkin Park video:

3 out of 3 aint bad

Third day of In play trading this month and another green.



Made about £16 and could have been £18 but the BF video feed went down half way through one of the races so I scratched what would have been a winning trade.

I'm using the Racing Post subscription for Racing UK and the BF live race feeds (which appears to cover the ATR races) so I have all the races covered.

My maximum liability is £10 so to lose £7.30 in the 4th race was quite a big hit.

The positive from this is that I didn't get any emotion from the loss and it didn't effect my following trades.

For those of you with a good memory you'll remember I had a £16 red a few days ago, that was due to leaving an unmatched bet in the market when I went in at different odds, once it turned against me the 2nd bet which I forgot to cancel got matched as well...

2 reds out of 22 races isn't too bad. But there is no excuse for the £7.30 red, I just didn't scratch when it could have been a £2 loss. Half my afternoon was spent getting back to evens before I could make any profit.

At the end of the day I made £16 so not bad overall.

I now spend about an hour in the mornings selecting the horse in each race that I'm going to trade and this makes it much easier going in to each race with the strategy that I have to follow already decided.

So three days of in play this month and three days of profit and have more than doubled the starting bank. Hope this trend continues.

I have a lot more confidence in what I am doing now with in play than what I was doing in the pre race markets last year.

Video of the day today - Limp Bizkit

Changes

My bot has done nothing at all in the pre race horse markets in the last 2-3 weeks. It was making about £150 a month, but since the cross matching was introduced it hasn't even done one trade. A big fat zero!

I'm expecting the dogs to go the same way when they introduce cross matching on that as it uses similar strategies. Maybe the lower liquidity will leave some opportunities, we'll see...

[edit 16/12]
Apparently the cross matching isn't in the pre race at the moment, it was just a trial, so there must be some other reason for the lack of activity, maybe the weather. Thanks Fred for pointing that out in the comments.

Fortunately other markets, especially basketball, continue to make good progress and are now using bigger stakes which partly makes up for losing the horse income.

My in play horse trading seems to be going ok but I'm still using small bank/stakes, bringing in £10 ish per day and only trading a couple of days a week. Building up slowly but I can see a lot of potential here.

Ooops!

Almost a good day trading today... until...



One little lapse of concentration is all it takes...

But at least it still ended green.

Went skiing in Swiss land at the weekend but the slopes we did were a little bit steep and bumpy for my skill level so I'm looking forwards to Austria next weekend where the slopes are a bit wider and flatter and I can also book a few more lessons.

They also have practice ramps and a big air bag!

I did do a small jump this weekend (unintentionally though as I didn't see until it was too late, but I landed it ok)

Raining

Snow is too wet at the local resorts today, and I didn't fancy a 2 hour drive each way to get higher mountains so I stayed in and did some horses instead.



Not a bad start to this months attempt at keeping my bank, or possibly even increasing it a bit...

I'm trying out some stuff with pictures and I only have RUK pictures so was limited to Kempton. If I start making decent money then I'll invest in ATR and possibly Sky or something, but at the moment it's just RUK that comes with the Racing Post subscription.

The delay is not ideal, about 15 secs in Basel compared to 10 secs in UK so on either I can't really do anything other than get a feel for how the race is panning out and look for signs that I could be in trouble. But for my methods it doesn't matter too much, it just means I end up playing safe and scratching a few trades that I might not need to with faster pics.

Here's some Placebo

Skiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

Car is loaded and I'm ready to head off to Switzerland this evening.



Not a bad weekend trading in spite of the snow. Most of my profit this week came from Basketball.



If you haven't tried trading basketball you should take a look, matches can turn around really quickly, and it's ideal for laying low odds late match and picking up a nice profit when the losing team come back to win.

You need to be prepared to scratch a lot of trades and take many small losses, the hit rate is low, but the downside is small and the upside is big. The profits are there to be taken if you have the patience.

Haven't done any in play horses yet this month... But I might get time next week if the weather is bad.

Cross Matching

I can understand having cross matching in a two outcome market, but not when there are three or more outcomes. Surely the idea of an exchange is that one person offers a price and someone else takes up that offer.

When someone tries to take up your offer but BF decide to match them against someone else's offer on a different selection instead (and possibly skim some of the profits from the non exact odds that result from the process) then I think that it is moving away from being an exchange and into the territory of bookmaking.

You may (as BF are keen to promote) have more chance of having a bet matched when it is near the LTP because it can now be matched on any selection, but you also have less chance of getting your bet matched if it is a few ticks away from the current price, or you are trading both sides of a gap in the market, or if you are being more speculative and looking for value.

How will it effect the markets?

Time will tell, but I'm guessing profitable customers might have to work harder to make less profit if the markets don't have as many opportunities.

It may help people who have no edge to lose less. But if so will they just make more bets until they make the same losses?

No doubt Betfair will be amongst the winners.

November

Final figures for November now in.

Total profit of £391.40 which is not bad, but it could have been better.
I had a few too many stupid mistakes on the horses.

Having a separate account for manual trading of horses should limit the damage in future...

Now have six months of P&L data in excel and have a better idea of which markets are profitable and which aren't.



Dogs are back on top again this month and still my highest overall earner.