Friday 5 February 2010

Branching out

The little trading break I've had has got me thinking much about where I am headed. At the moment I have traded profitably on two sports, horse racing and football, both of which I was attracted to by the liquidity and opportunities to profit. More recently, particularly when the challenge to profit was not so apparent, I have become increasingly disinterested in trading horse racing. I'm not entirely sure why however my efforts to learn more about the sport, listen to commentaries, watch more races and even trade in running have not really made the impact I thought they might. When I started trading on my days off, it seemed like a challenging and exciting activity, recently this rarely seems to be the case, and my enthusiasm is just not what it used to be. As stated from the start of the blog  my preference was always racing due to opportunity, and the less trading time I found myself with, has eventually left me just trading racing and nothing else - not really what I had intended. I don't feel that the racing is particularly boring as such, but the exclusion of everything else to focus on it alone has made me feel bored due to the lack of diversity.

I think the solution to this is straightforward. I need to have a more varied schedule, which would mean to not only include football equally again, but leave time to experiment with other sports also. I will continue to trade the racing as part of the new schedule. Although I have never mentioned it before, tennis has always been a sport I much prefer watching, probably even more than football. I think now is a good time to explore these trading opportunities. Ultimately I'd like to have a diverse portfolio and be able to trade all the major events at different times of the year, for this to happen I need to start branching out and tennis will be the next sport I attempt to trade.

Reading around the forums and other bloggers it seems that there are quite a few tennis strategies being discussed which I have found interesting, particularly the mechanical and momentum orientated ones. I'm not such a big fan of the punting side based on price but if I find a strategy that looks profitable, I'm likely to give it a go initially just out of interest. My research has been limited so far but it is already apparent that TV pics are not fast enough anymore to scalp IR - a bit of a let down as this was the first tactic I was looking at (mainly as I could watch the match whilst I traded).

Anyway that's enough rambling for one post, if I do this right February and March should include racing, football and tennis. Let's see how it goes.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi j.s,you could do a lot worse than sign up to tradeshark tennis.The fella who runs the site is called paul and in my opinion is honest and straight.Memebership is £23 for the year

JS said...

Hey playslip thanks for the comment. I actually already signed up yesterday using some of the recent racing profit. I'm quite interested in the Skype sessions being offered as part of the membership, definitely worth it imo to view an experienced tennis trader in action.

Toby said...

Hi JS, I've been following the blog for a while. I've recently finished developing an exciting piece of software (which has now been fully Betfair approved) that acts as a charting tool for betfair. I'm keen to get feedback from successful traders so please get in contact if you are interested in further details. You can view further details on my youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/quantsportscouk). Sorry in advance if this sounds like spam (I don't expect you to publish this post). Regards, Toby (support@quantsports.co.uk).

JS said...

Thanks for getting in contact Toby. I've decided to keep your post on the blog to hopefully get you some more traffic, it does seem like a great product and I wouldn't remove it as spam as long as it is a one off. Will send you an email now as I'm definitely interested in testing this software and providing you with some feddback.

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