Tuesday 3 November 2009

Melbourne Cup

Decided to stay up and trade the Aussie markets. Still using minimum stakes I managed to profit in each race, although I did have a couple of hairy moments.



Will keep it short as I need to get some sleep having to be at work in a few hours. Next day off will be Thursday and I plan to trade the full UK card. It will be the first day of my staking plan and I expect things to start getting more interesting soon after.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Was it really worth staying up to 4 just to win £1.41 ??

JS said...

You're falling into the most common trap of thinking about success in terms of P&L. The more important questions are: Was it worth staying up and trading for 4 hours to prove that you can consistently achieve a 1% ROT and a 100% strike rate in the Aussie markets? Was it worth participating in markets where you know your strategy is fully scalable to 1000s pounds? Was it worth achieving 4% of your trading goals? Was it worth maintaining a habit of success and extending your confidence to profit in challenging markets (in particularly uncertain and strenuous conditions)?

You need to try and think out of the box Mr Anonymous, if you read my blog (particularly the intro) I'm not trying to make money at the moment. I'm developing my skills to trade well.

Anonymous said...

To be fair the only success that really counts is the pnl, you'll find few traders that care about 100% successes or 1% rot's.

Was it worth staying up and trading for 4 hours to prove that you can consistently achieve a 1% ROT and a 100% strike rate in the Aussie markets? Was it worth participating in markets where you know your strategy is fully scalable to 1000s pounds? Was it worth achieving 4% of your trading goals? Was it worth maintaining a habit of success and extending your confidence to profit in challenging markets (in particularly uncertain and strenuous conditions)?

If you think the Melbourne Cup meeting is representative of Aussie racing I assume you'll be up again tonight but somehow I'm sure you won't as you should know by now any big overseas meeting is easy to trade for a variety of very obvious reasons. Maybe you could scale up to those 1000's tonight at Flemington.

To put it simply you've spent four hours trading one of the easiest meetings out there for £1.41, assumed you can now scale up and acheived some great leap forward. I think you'e in for a big shock come thursday when scaling up to these 1000's on a crappy UK card with two AW cards that will bear no reseblence to a G1 where the odds have been set weeks in advance.

neil said...

nice result, JS, £1.41 from £2 stakes is good trading. especially on markets that have huge sums of money in them, so that if they move it may take a long time for them to come back if you have got on at the wrong time.

JS said...

Thank you for your thoughts but I have to say you are failing to see and understand my position. I know that the Melbourne Cup is the only race that attracts this kind of liquidity, this was obvious just looking at the card this morning. What you are doing is looking at my trading and comparing it to a full-time trader’s perspective. What most people get by reading my blog is that I am in an early stage of development and that at this stage building confidence and consistency are the most important factors. Of course when using minimum stakes my P&L is not going to show large profits, this is also an obvious point most people do not fail to understand.

Now let us move onto some more pressing issues, perhaps let us look at your motivation for being negative and placing counter productive comments on someone’s blog who is trying to improve. I’m sure you would have gotten away with it and achieved whatever you are trying to achieve if you had selected a blogger who was weak and felt intimidated by your comments, however you are sadly mistaken to have made this assumption about me. Also why are you maintaining an Anonymous status? if you have an opinion about something you should at least identify yourself so I know who I am conversing with. I think it is only fair that if you do care to make another comment, and fail to identify yourself it will not be published. At least this way you take ownership of your behaviour and can not conveniently disappear into anonymity.

At the end of the day if you chose to continue your argument or not you would be inherently wrong to do so, as focussing on P&L figures when attempting to develop trading skills early on is known to be a recipe for disappointment and studding development. I suppose it’s a matter of how much energy you are willing to waste before realising you are being ineffective and move on.

JS said...

Hey Neil thanks for the positive comments. It was definitely an interesting morning. I found it particualrly interesting to see where the money was actually being matched with so much of it sitting around.

afropunk said...

Nice one :)

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