The Eagle Has Landed!

I must say I was rather optimistic to think I would find the time to trade two full days this week. Monday was supposed to be the first, however come 13:50 I was sat down ready to place my first trade when 'ding dong' there goes the doorbell. Who could that be at this time? The new PC has arrived! So there I am signing and accepting the delivery feeling completely distracted by about 2pm. Thought about resuming trading immediately but felt too distracted and could not focus on the markets. After about 10 minutes of agony I decided that my mind was somewhere else. I switched off my retired old PC and focused on setting the new one up. I couldn't argue with the logic that I would need to spend some time setting it up anyway.

Took me a couple of hours to get it all up and running. I decided to test Bet Angel briefly and traded the last two races of the card. The difference in performance is striking to say the least. For instance, I usually trade on 500ms refresh on the ladder (which seemed sluggish but bearable on my old system). I decided to try 200ms to see how it would effect the performance, and it seemed like Bet Angel was on speed! So fast, but too fast I thought, I felt it was taking more effort and energy to monitor market information at this speed. After 5 minutes I switched back. My old system struggled to keep up with anything under 500ms.

One important factor was the recording whilst trading, so I tested this for a while and I was happy to see no noticeable slowing in performance whilst recording BA. I then recorded both monitors simultaneously and again no noticeable difference in performance. No doubt once I figure out a comfortable set up with the dual widescreens display it will help me make quicker decisions.

Quite looking forward to my first proper trading session with this PC, I feel it will make a huge difference for me, not only to the speed but having the videos to review afterwoods is what I am most looking forward to. So when is the next trading session likely to be? I'm planning to trade the whole card on Monday, will be my last weekday off for a while and after that it will be mainly the weekends. No evening racing but still 20 markets for me to get stuck into. Will probably use the time in the evening to review the videos, so should be quite a productive day.

On a final note, I have been reading a lot this week, particularly some articles by Brett Steenbarger who has been a great inspiration to me recently. I am going to be very careful on my next session. There is much to be said about re-occurring bad habits. Not repeating them for a couple of sessions apparently is the easier first step, getting them out of my automated responses is another thing altogether. I need to be realistic and look at facts, to date I have only had one racing session where I have not succumb to going IR. Evidently this is a minor victory in itself but only the first step in a long sequence of reconditioning. I can forsee these next few sessions being a real battle but as ever I am going to go in as well prepared as possible.

Happy trading everybody and keep it green!