With a cherry ontop

Found out that the overtime I was due to do yesterday was not required and when given the option to work half of the shift or have the day off, I decided to stay at home and use the opportunity to trade.

Things started off quite difficult. For some reason during the first hour I just could not get into the correct mindset, and I kept having to try and focus really hard on the markets to prevent myself from making a daft mistake. I felt like packing it in at one stage thinking to myself it might be better to take a long break or even leave it for today. I was really struggling to concentrate and after about an hour of this I finally started to feel focussed. From that point onwards I felt switched on, and after I caught a couple of nice swings my confidence really started to build and time seemed to fly by.

I traded 34 markets in total, 26 racing and 6 football. As I managed to make a profit on both, the staking will be increased  for my next session. I'm hoping for this to be tomorrow however this depends on how my morning pans out.

Racing 

Racing Bank at start: £20.00 

Racing bank at end: £22.19 

Unit stake for next session: £2.22
Average market P&L: £0.08

On the first two races I used the bookmaking feature as they both seemed like suitable races for this. On the first one I was out at about 15 minutes before the off. That was ideal as the prices were quite stable. Was a bit trickier on the second one, I got out with a scratch at the 8 minute mark not wanting to risk getting caught by any big moves. Good thing was as I had been monitoring all of my positions for over 10 minutes I got a really good feel for that market and felt the favourite would steam in a few ticks with little support for the other main runners. I decided it was definitely worth finding out and after the price did come in I managed to profit from the race in the end.

I then had that awkward time mentioned earlier trying to get myself into the right mindset. I tried a few different methods until things started to click, one alteration was adjusting the layout of my trading screen . I basically moved the candle stick graphs onto the main left monitor with a 10 minute history, as I felt I could keep a closer eye on them being next to the ladder, and moved the overview screen to the right. I then increased the resoulution on the right screen just because I needed more space to squeeze in the market overview. I think this helped a bit in keeping me focussed on the longterm moves and I will probably try this next time to see if it works again. Here is a screenshot:

Football

Football bank at start: £20.00

Football bank at end: £34.35 

Unit stake for next session: £3.44
Average market P&L: £2.39

I had planned to trade a few more football markets but didn't have the time to catch them all, mainly because I was also trading the evening Kempton card and spending too much time in my kitchen making coffees. I was basically breaking even on the footy before given a free present. Up until that point it was all prematch scalping. Whilst watching the Liverpool game, after the first goal I noticed Liverpool's price rapidly swinging in a 10 tick range , I thought it would be good time to quickly scalp a few of these ticks before the market settles, by placing a few orders at the top of the range with offsets and wait a few seconds for the market to match my orders. Once I was matched I then decided to leave it at 50p green before Lyon got a chance to score. What surprised me was when I next glanced at the screen I had about £15 greened up across the book? Scratching my head I was struggling to see how I generated that amount with a £2 stake. Looking at the log it was made clearer, someone had money sitting to lay Liverpool at 9.6! which is what I managed to get filled at. A warmly welcomed bonus to round off the day!