Disapointing Week

I was hoping to make some headway since my last post as things seemed to be getting better. I was even entertaining the possbility of upping my stakes, perhaps even as soon as next month. In those seven days I actually managed to make a loss of 66p. I felt rather disappointed at first but on reflection I have learnt so much from these sessions, and if somebody had told me on Monday last week that for 66p I could learn so much, I would have bitten their hand off.  

I'll start with the football as it is much simpler. This is the first P & L where I have been using my new rule of close @ KO no matter what. And sure enough the first match I traded (Man. City Vs West Ham), Tevez scored in the first 5 minutes, they could have been 2 or 3 up by then to be honest. If I had held on to my position IR I would have lost a large percentage of my stake. I was happy to see my new rule justify itself so quickly and can't actually believe I was so silly as to not have implemented it sooner.

The other match that stands out was the U20 USA Vs Cameroon where I profited with 67p by KO, there were so many gaps in the market here and I just kept putting in value orders at the front of the queue and got matched pretty quickly. The other matches were simple scalping efforts, as you can see I had a couple of scratch markets where at KO I just closed any open orders.

The racing was not quite as straightforward. As you can see I made an overall loss of £1.74. Taking a closer look at the P&L I actually profited on every race except one, and surprisingly this one race was not the race I was most disappointed with. The relatively massive loss of £7.95 was due to me having an open lay order in the market when the API temporarily lost connection about a minute before the off. Regrettably having no backup close strategy yet, I was helpless until I had been reconnected to Belfair. After a couple of attempts to log back in with Bet Angel I received a message stating that the API was having trouble and that I should try to connect with another connection mode. I decided to try to close with my browser but by the time I logged in and got to the race it was already over (7f). Although I knew it was bad luck that this sequence of events all seemed to happen together, It did bother me more than it should of and I felt deflated. I was amazed at how one event like this can change your whole perspective and I just couldn't find the strength to focus and trade well after that. I stopped trading and felt like I would try again later depending on how I felt, after a couple of hours I resumed and made a consistant profit on 6 consecutive markets. I was then forced to stop as I was planning to go out for the evening.

Backup
I know I would never be in such a desperate situation if I was using larger stakes. I would not only have adequate funds in a Betdaq and /or WBX account to hedge, but also have the option to close over the phone as my bets would not be under the minimum permitted. In addition a laptop with a 3G Internet connection would also be available in case my ISP was at fault. With minimum stakes I do not feel this is necessary but it was good to experience my first API crash as I did not realise how jutified it is to have a sound backup . As Leon has mentioned, having a laminated information sheet is a great idea, as that minute passed so quickly, every second saved counts.

Now onto the biggest disappointment of them all. I started to trade Sunday and things were going very well indeed, in fact looking at the P&L you would notice a clean sweep. Normally this would be great but what the P&L doesn't tell you is that I closed one of these races IR!! - Uttoxeter 15:05. I could not believe what I had done and within 10 seconds I was lucky and got matched. I then traded the Prix de L'Arc de Triomphe as I had been looking forward to this race all day. While I was glancing at slow motion replays of Sea the Stars' magnificent performance, I found a moment to reflect and felt truly shocked and decided to stop trading for the day, at that point the card had almost finished anyway. My mindset had somehow clicked into a routine I thought was finally starting to fade.

Mindset
Last time I closed a race IR I went a bit militant and repeatedly analysed my videos until I came up with what I called the escalating downward spiral, and a solution for each stage of the spiral. I feel that other factors were present this time that were not considered previously. In particular the large loss from yesterday was still somehow bothering me;  and also the fact that I knew I was not ahead for the weekend was always on the back of my mind. Psychologically I did not accept the loss on this market, as I would usually do, and before I knew it, I was getting matched IR. It's almost incredible how easily these traits dominated my decision making process so quickly having been dormant for so long.

I have therefore decided to devote sometime to work only on my mindset, and as a reward I will trade when I feel ready. There are quite a few exercises and other techniques I have come across whilst reading up on the subject which I will now structure into some kind of lesson plan. Had not tried many of them as I felt it was not necessary at the time, but after this weekends performance I will be be looking to use whatever is effective for me.

Ten-pound Trader
Peter's little experiment has been a real eye-opener for me. At the moment I'm averaging roughly 20p a market whilst using predominantly £2 stakes. In terms of ROT it works out to just over 1%. I felt this was good but should be improved before increasing stakes. It seems I was wrong about this. After 2 sessions he was averaging 11p per race with £10 and £11.76 stakes. Granted he was also trading with large stakes on another account and probably wasn't trying too hard, but even taking this into account my ROT is actually quite healthy and I should not be wasting too much energy on trying to improve this. I also had another experienced full-time trader comment on my Relections post about this. Collectively I can see that once I feel my discipline and mindset are better I should start to increase my stakes gradually. This will be done incrementally, something like 5% of my bank and will also go down if I have a losing day.

So in summary more work on my mindset is necessary before I feel I can progress. I started reading Mark Douglas' first book 'The Disciplined Trader' today and am finding it very good so far. After that I will implement some techniques gathered from a few different sources and review my progress before I start trading again.