Tuesday 1 December 2009

November review

November has been a really positive month for me. At the beginning of the month I was quite uncertain about my edge, or even my style, however I do feel the few days I took off work to focus more on trading, coupled with the more frequent sessions, has finally started to make an impact. The time I spent researching and learning about trading psychology in October has also been important, particularly in helping me to understand much about my reactions and how to deal with them more effectively.

I'd also like to say thank you to Rob (Cash or Crash blog) MG (Mind Games blog) and and Steve (Pro trader tip blog)  for sharing their analysis spreadsheets. I have found them very useful in analysing my results, particularly as I wouldn't have a clue how to build a decent one myself!


Horse Racing

The racing started with a £20 bank and £2 unit stakes. At the end of the month the bank stands at £49.25 using the progressive 10% bank staking plan. I did not have any losing days but I will reduce my unit stake accordingly on losing days as I do think it's important to earn each new staking level. I managed to squeeze in a total of 144 markets on my part-time schedule where I averaged £0.20 a race. My style seems to have changed particularly towards the end of the month, with me not scalping half as much as I used to. I was aware of my high strike rate but it does seem rather too high averaging 96.5% per market. I think this has a lot to do with me just scalping for most of the month, and also in relation to my stake size, as it is very easy to get filled with £2 stakes. I'm expecting this to drop next month. As long as it's high enough and my average loss is similar or lower than my average win then I'll be happy.






I'm quite looking forward to December although as the weather gets worse the opportunities will surely dry up. As long as I can continue my rate of progress I'll be happy.

Football



Similarly with the football I started with a £20 bank and £2 unit stakes, the bank now stands at £37.24 using the same staking plan. Most of this profit did come from one fortunate win of £14.34. Disregarding this, I managed to fit in 40 markets averaging £0.09 per market. My strike rate was also quite high standing at about 96%. I would expect this to not drop too much considering the low risk scalping tactic used for the footy. It is good to have another sport to get involved in as the racing slows and I would like to trade more football markets in December providing I find the time. Towards the end of the month I found trading a few markets at the same time more interesing and productive and will continue with this approach.

6 comments:

Ronnie2ticks said...

Hi JS, your doing very well love the graphs, read further down that you dont have tv picures/races, you always listen to timeform radio online they obviously talk about the upcoming races, delays and drifters etc and can gave some useful information.
cheers
Ron

Robbie Chicago said...

Very impressive stuff JS, keep it up!

neil said...

Wow, nice going! You made more than me, even though you traded less than half the races i did, and you used less than 1/3 the stakes. Im totally jealous now. How did you manage such an awesome strike rate? I found scalping hard this month too, and am generally looking for swings.

JS said...

Thanks for kind words guys.

@Ron
All the graphs are from MGs spreasheet, I have a link on this post if nyone wants to check it out. I really like them too, thay have made it very easy for me to analyse my results, thank again MG! I will need to look into using radio, read somewhere will hill radio is also good, will need to test them out soon, thanks for the info mate.

@Chicago
I'll try my best mate although December racing trading is going to be tough month for us I think.

@neil
I've also found swing trading to be much more profitable this month (particularly towards the end). I'm not so sure about the strike rate, I was quite shocked when I first saw it. Sometimes if I'm in a red with adequate time left on the clock, I close and switch my focus and trade another runner's price movement. More often than not this breaks me even or gets me a small profit. I then go back later and think about why my initial trade didn't work to try and learn from it. I think this has also helped me accept losing trades quickly whilst keeping my strike rate high.

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JS said...

Not sure if you wanted both added or not, but I added both URLs to my blogroll. Good luck.

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