How to lose a tenner in the middle of the night

Horse Racing

Unit stake: £5/10

Session P&L: -£9.70

Average market P&L: -£0.46

Racing Bank at end of session: £84.39

Unit stake for next session (10%): £8.44

A mixture of insomnia and boredom led me to trade at 4am in the morning. In hindsight not the best of ideas, not necessarily because of the time, but more to do with my state of mind and approach. That is, I had no tact to my approach whatsoever, and this meant no graphs or even a site like racing.betfair.com.au (which I had bookmarked but just couldn't be bothered to monitor) and of course no pictures or feed at all. Basically I just went in blind, tired and demotivated expecting to profit. Very silly of me indeed and I paid for this on the last race where a huge order pushed the price 9 ticks the wrong way to never return, I finally took this as a hint to stop. I got caught with my net stake in a market and lost about £11 near the beginning, as the race went off exactly on time, again my fault as I should of hedged at 10 seconds but held on for that one tick. Without that I would of actually made a small profit in the end, but still the whole session was based on boredom and really shouldn’t of happened. The fact that I was so tired was just making it worse, as I usually need extra energy to trade well and that was evidently severely lacking.

After I finished trading I still couldn't sleep and had to be back at work for 9am, rubbish. So here I am knackered and I thought the best thing to do would be to write a post. Blogging my progress gives me a feeling of relief, psychologically as soon as I publish each post I feel I can put it to bed much easier and move on. Also I have said from the beginning I would post all session P&Ls, no matter how good/bad.  My unit stake has been reduced due to the slight decrease in my bank and I feel that is scant punishment for my stupidity. Will need to work to build it back up and I'm hoping this post will serve as a reminder of how not to trade!