Phootie Alpha Live

Thought I might as well post a little update.

So my first football bot Phootie went live on the 7th May. After a few successful days testing on the 2.5 goals market,  I added the 3.5 market to the equation, and after a few more days the 1.5 & match odds markets were also included. The bot itself is relatively simple and basically seeks out value and bets accordingly in-play.

I actually felt a bit gutted as it went live just in time for all the major European football competitions to come to a close. My prior analysis indicated that Phootie's tactic would be suitable for these higher liquid competitions. Plus I always feel that the end of a season is not the best time for football betting in general, as you can't help but feel that many teams & players are not quite as keen as they would otherwise be. This makes it a bit trickier to determine true value (particularly for my simpleton bot!)

I decided to continue testing during the off season anyway, mainly to gather data as I have no data for this time of the year. It would if for nothing else give me a good indication of whether to pursue with this tactic at this time of the season in the future. Surely enough, I'm noticing a clear difference in results even with this minimal data.

I've included a graph below of just under 2000 markets Phootie decided to participate in. This is not a particularly adequate sample size, but I thought I would include it here to demonstrate the clear distinction I'm noticing. Also remember this is split unevenly between 4 differnt market types and is mostly for football during the off season, as this was when all 4 were mostly firing. It would have been better if I had started all 4 markets at the same time but I needed to test the waters for a few days as I was not sure at that time if my bot was actually going to work. The green line shows approximately when the major football competitions ended and the red my starting bank.

So even form the above data the off season is looking like a clear loser for Phootie, however I will continue with it anyway for the reasons already mentioned. My staking here is tiny and the profit or loss made is not really the main purpose. What is promising is even for that small window when the major football competitions were still running, profits were being made & the bot seemed to handle a couple of busy weekends flawlessly. I don't think I will be convinced to really go for it with Phootie though until I have a full season under my botting belt.

As mentioned previously on the blog, I do like to branch out and will continue to do so. I am now working on a horse racing bot however due to the increased sophistication required for that project, it will take some more time to get that one up and running. My programming skills are improving but the learning curve has somewhat steepened as this bot will be doing much more than Phootie. Tennis, Dogs and perhaps even Basketball also look likely to follow. I also think some different football tactics might be worth pursuing. Happy to report roboguilt has subsided and I'm looking forward to getting stuck into these projects over the next few months.

Hybrid platform

Horse Racing

Unit stake: £8.44

Session P&L: £16.68

Average market P&L: £0.93

Racing Bank at end of session: £101.07

Unit stake for next session (10%): £10.11

What a difference proper focus and motivation can make. About this time yesterday I was posting about how dissapointed I was in regards to my performance. I would of been happy with just making back my loss but I almost doubled it without breaking my rules. It's certainly nice to be back on track.

Having used both Bet Angel and The Toy to trade the racing I felt they both had great features. I decided to combine them to make use of all the things I liked and make one optimal platform. I had to change the data requeste on BA to 2 and leave TT on the default of 15, so I'm not expecting any charges. First time I tried this and it worked very well, I think I will continue to use this from now on.

A bit better

Horse Racing

Unit stake: £5.66

Session P&L: £8.19

Average market P&L: £0.37

Racing Bank at end of session: £64.74

Unit stake for next session: £6.47

Bit better today. Took a long break after the 14:25 which was definitely beneficial. I really liked the Wolverhampton meeting, mainly as I was steadily feeling more comfortable the longer the session went on, and by that time I had found a good rhythm. Also having 30 minutes in between the races meant I got plenty of time to reflect and refocus inbetween races. Might not trade tomorrow as I have a plumber coming round to fix a few things that I need to get sorted before Christmas. Will try and get some markets in though if I find the time. Unfortunately my football trading will have to take a back seat again as I've got big plans for this evening - to relax!

Indifference

Horse Racing

Unit stake: £4.96

Session P&L: £7.30

Average market P&L: £0.37

Racing Bank at end of session: £56.55

Unit stake for next session: £5.66

A good start to December. Traded listening to Timeform radio (thanks for the suggestions Rick) for the first time today and it gave me the confidence to trade right up to the off. I broke one rule of having more than two trades open on 3 separate occasions which made me mad at the time. Looking back though these errors were all made in the last 5 races, and it is obvious to me that I was tiring and consequently losing my discipline. I'm accepting losing trades much better than before but I'm determined to keep drilling in these rules and not let up just because I happen to make a profit on the market. At the same time though I'm also aware of the dangers in having a perfectionist's mindset. As with many things it's finding the right balance. Overall though I feel slightly fortunate, as although I worked hard, I did break a rule more than once and got away with it. Up until that point things were going pretty smoothly. My focus time has improved as I managed three and a half hours trading with no proper breaks. I think if I had a couple of breaks I might not of tired and made those errors towards the end. Something to put right tomorrow.

Crickey, a whole Pam Shriver

Racing

Racing bank at start: £35.41

Racing bank at end: £41.29

Unit stake for next session: £4.13

Average market P&L: £0.29

Yes that’s right I made just over a fiver on the racing, and don't worry I won't go spending it all at once! Jokes aside though, today was different. I thought yesterday that the first 5 or so races were good for swing trading (with odds on favs) but today there were swings on almost every race. I just couldn't justify scalping as the movements today were all over the place. I was quite happy to see this though as swing trading was an area I really wanted to work on. If I had scalped today I would have really struggled. I also hit £1 hedged profit on a couple of races, which felt quite good considering my stake size.

OK so there are some good points. Now for the rest of it. The ups and downs were neverending, I had to constantly focus on the market as things were changing all the time and it felt almost like if I blinked I would be at a disadvantage! And despite all this I still found time to fit in thoughts of 'this swing trading isn't so bad after all'. I think its fair to say that this style does need a slightly different mindset. I also missed many drifters today, this came as no surprise though, with my bias to back first and catch steamers was almost exclusively responsible for the profits. When the fav drifted I caught the steamer whoever that happened to be. I noticed that I used the market overview much more than usual, really useful for spotting that steamer from the pack.

On one race towards the end of the card, when things were looking good, I noticed an almost self-sabotaging behaviour that I had never seen before. Up until that point I was always acting within my best interests but on this race I caught myself thinking 'just enter the market here, it's probably going to come in, no need to check for any other indicators, you're doing really well anyway, doesn't matter if you lose here or not'. It was almost like I wanted to lose some money as things were going too well? Needless to say this attitude didn't last long, I closed for the loss and after taking a few moments, focussed really hard to turn it around before the off. I was quite tired at that point and I think my lack of energy had much to do with this attitude, but I was shocked nonetheless. When reading a bit about financial trading in the past, this was stated to be common amongst profitable traders trying to push themselves further. It was found that their limitations were all psychological and once they overcame this they succeeded in yielding larger profits. It also might of been a sign of overconfidence, it's hard to tell but if I ever feel like that again I certainly won't entertain it. I'm happy to have spotted it early and reacted well in the end.

It's been nice trading two days in a row, but this little run will regrettably have to end now as I do have a day job to get to tomorrow! One thing I have confirmed is the sustainability of progress is much easier on a daily basis rather than having larger gaps in-between trading sessions. I'll be trying my best to trade the at every opportunity before the winter truly kicks in.

Football

Football bank at start: £35.22

Football bank at end: £36.31

Unit stake for next session: £3.63

Average market P&L: £0.14

Tried to get the most out of the scheduled  football. It's a shame so many games start at the same time as my bank could only really sustain about 5 markets with a couple of positions open at a time. I picked 2 games from the 7.45 KO trading a total of 3 matches in the end. As I had a selection of games I tried to pick the ones where I thought my tactic would work best, and it seemed to go quite well in the end.

Back to it

Racing

Racing bank at start: £32.40

Racing bank at end: £35.41

Unit stake for next session: £3.54

Average market P&L: £0.14

Everything felt a bit better today, although the mistakes are still plentiful, I am spotting them sooner than before. As I'm improving in certain areas I'm also uncovering new habits which I didn't notice before. One main issue I'm having now is taking the most profit out of my swings. I'm catching more of them now, however I'm taking less profit than I should. I only took about half the ticks on many occasions today, mainly when I saw premature signs for a reversal. I need to focus more on making the most out of these swings as I would of made a significantly larger profit (maybe even as much as double on most markets). I noticed a slight improvement towards the end of the session when I was more aware and focussing on it, and hope to sustain this into the next session. I also think it has a bit to do with the scalping mentatilty that has been my prominent style.

I felt midway through the card my focus dwindiling a bit, I needed a short break to get my mind back on track and finished stronger. Still cannot maintain that focus throughout the session but I'm noticing improvement so I'm happy to see progress. Not even sure if full time traders maintain that focus for the full card but I think it's important to keep pushing myself as much as possible.

I also changed the trading screen around again, no surprises there then! The main reason for this was to allow me to focus more on important information.  It was fine before but over the past few sessions I noticed I tend to look at the ladder too much and that I look at the far right of the screen the least. So I moved the ladder to the far right. The charting is now all on the left screen including the weight of money indicators chart (which I had also missed). I had almost neglected the weight of money indicator due to spoofing but I'm noticing it's usefulness most recently, paticularly whilst swing trading.  I also downloaded a useful free 'Post It' application that allows me to pin messages onto the screen. I use it to remind me of rules and make brief notes just before I start trading each market. This helps me understand the market a bit better after trading it, by comparing what I had written to what actually happened.

Football

Football bank at start: £34.35

Football bank at end: £35.22

Unit stake for next session: £3.52

Average market P&L: £0.06

I thought I would give the few available football markets a go. It's been a while since I traded these markets however compared to the racing they are pretty straightforward. I tried to trade all the under/overs and match odds simultaneously to get the most out of my scalping. Worked out alright considering I only traded 4 matches, and admittadly I almost forgot about the second one and only traded it for about 3 minutes. As the racing slows I can see the football picking up more but at the moment the racing seems to have taken the lead, even after that £15 gift in the Liverpool match I had at the beginning of the month.

Lucky Luke

Racing
Racing bank at start: £29.33

Racing bank at end: £32.40

Unit stake for next session: £3.24

Average market P&L: £0.24

Again it felt like tough work today. After the last race I needed to go for a walk and get some fresh air to clear my head. I got more involved in the markets by trying to formulate an opinion on what will happen in the 10 minutes before the off, before actually placing any trades. I think this helped with my resolve but It did take up more energy, which explains why I felt so tired after just over 3 hours of trading.  I also feel that I was fortunate again on a couple of occasions and it's almost a miracle I didn't have a losing race today. Particularly the last race where I botched it up and ended up in a large red about 4 minutes before the off, after which I redded out and carried plugging away with the view to reduce the deficit as much as possible. A large order gave me a nice 4 tick swing which resulted in a small green in the end. Still, as I've had a few go against me in the past, it might just be karma evening things out. I was particularly happy with the way I traded the 14:00 Lingfield, I felt very relaxed and reacted quickly to the opportunituies. I think out of all the 13 markets that was the only one where I felt like that, still working on how to encourage and sustain that state for longer. Trouble is as soon as you're aware of it you start losing it, and before you know it you're thinking more about your state of mind instead of focussing on the markets. Evidently this is still a work in progress!

Will leave it at that for today as I'm busy this evening, shame as I would of liked to give the evening card a go particularly as there are two meetings. Friday will hopefully be the next day for more trading.

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!

Revive

First day back trading the horses for a while with mixed feelings in regards to my performance. The profitability was good however my new rigid set of rules were not fully met. I will need a few more sessions to get back into things before I would consider myself ready to start increasing stakes. I also felt my focus often wavering mid session and dropping considerably towards the end. My new rules are much more specific and when I was applying them quickly early on things were running very smoothly. The longer the session went on the more I noticed my bad habits creeping in, which is why I decided to not trade the full afternoon card and take some time to relax instead. I actually came back from a trip to Denmark late last night and feel that I was still a bit tired from that. I'm glad I gave it a go though, as the new approach is looking promising. Particularly as a couple of bias' I am trying to reduce (scalp and back orientated) were noticeably less frequent. I managed a couple of drifting swing trades that I found quite satisfying.

I decided to make a few changes to my PC in the evening as my free Windows 7 upgrade arrived this morning. I created a couple of partitions, one for Win 7 and the other for Win XP, whilst still keeping the Vista partition as is for backup. The plan is to use a stripped down version of XP solely for trading, and 7 for everything else for a couple of weeks. If all goes well Vista will go and I will also install a Linux OS on anoher partition. This would be just for my interest as I've read much about it over the past couple of years and would like to give it a go. From what I gather Vista is the most resource hungry OS so I'm expecting the changes to optimise my system. Let's see how it goes.

New approach

The learning process is progressing well. I'm on my fifth and final book covering trading psychology, which is Brett Steenbarger's 'The Daily Trading Coach'. I must say so far this book has been the most useful for me, not so much for the theories and ideas, but more so in a practical sense (in regards to applying techniques to introduce and sustain reconditioning). It is arranged in a lesson format which is great for separating and focussing on developing specific skills.

My trading time has suffered somewhat as I am trying to get through all of the material first. I think by now I have learnt from the mistake of just trading for the sake of it, without having specific aims for each session. If I kept doing that I would almost certainly repeat all the bad habits without addressing them properly or even acknowledging them at all. Approaching the close of the year, with the racing cards reduced in both quality and quantity, it's not such a bad time to be focusing on establishing a good learning process. Although I will be trading in order to build up market experience, I can only expect it to take some time to digest and apply what I am currently learning.

One aspect of my new approach is implementing an effective feedback process where I go over each trade and learn from the process regardless of the result. The most valuable trades would be the unprofitable ones, as this is where I can focus on why it did not go well and bring to light a solution next time I am in a similar scenario. Previously I had a poor feedback process which involved watching videos and making detailed notes (too detailed), it was ineffective as I soon ran out of time to do this for each trade and effectively compromised the analysis to the extent it was not achieving its purpose. As a result I have refined the process and am also gathering information for each type of market scenario I encounter using the favs SP as a primary key. Overtime I am expecting to build up a database which will help me identify potential scenarios for each market I encounter.

The more I learn about this game the more scientific and less mysterious the whole process seems. Having said that though, and having faced my fare share of challenges in life, trading is one of the most challenging tasks I have ever committed myself to, with my motivation to succeed growing as I evolve.

Weekly check-up

I have 6 recent trading sessions to report. On the racing I decided to simplify the staking and use the minimum £2 and for the football £4. The first was an evening session on Friday 18th.

I had a really good session profiting an all 9 markets, 7 racing and 2 football. I felt much more in control and reacted quickly when the price moved against me. I recall thinking that I needed to remember the state of mind I was in, as it felt comfortable and I seemed to be making the right choices faster without much hesitation.  I also traded without any auto stop losses and opted to close out of all trades myself.  I did scratch noticeably more trades than usual.

I next traded on Wednesday 23rd, where I also managed to have another clean sweep on the 11 markets, 6 racing and 5 football. Again I opted for no auto stop loss and it worked out well. No major incidents I can recall, it felt more like a routine, one I would very much like to get used to.

Moving onto Thursday 24th where I traded 8 markets. I made a real hash of it on the second race where I was trying to monitor 3 positions on different runners at the same time, and they all rapidly and simultaneously moved against me. I tried to close out on all three as quickly as I could but they all kept moving and by the time I closed the third position the book was showing a red £1.63 with about a min until they were off. I took the loss and decided to just keep at it as I had quite a few more markets available. I was grateful for the 30 minute break inbetween the evening races on this occasion, as it gave me plenty of time to refocus. Profited on all of the remaining markets, and with a couple of good trades on the football I managed to make an overall profit by the end of the session.

Friday 25th was short, I only managed to trade just over an hour whilst  killing some time before I went out. Profitted on all 5 racing markets which was a nice result once again.

I was quite looking forward to Saturday as I knew I would have an opportunity to trade higher liquidity markets with Ascot being on the TV. I didn't actually watch the racing as I forgot to switch over to the channel! I'm so used to listening to music now whilst I trade that following it on TV did not occur to me. Should really have given it a go as I am curious to make use of any new opportunities. Am planing on having Sky installed in February/March when I move flat. The reason I haven't got pictures already is that there are too many trees surrounding my building preventing the dish from receiving a clear signal. If all goes to plan I will probably need a few more months before I'm using significantly larger stakes anyway, and I'm happy now knowing that there will not be any reception issues in the new area.

Saturday was another good day where I managed to profit on all 21 markets, 20 racing and only 1 on football. My preference was always racing whenever there was a clash and there were many on Saturday as you can imagine. I also used my new rule of 2 hours max trading on a full card (between 13:55-15:55). I then had my minimum 1 hour break and traded for another couple more hours until 19:45 where I decided to call it a day. I enjoyed the more liquid markets more than I thought I would. I have read mixed traders opinions and wasn't quite sure what to expect. Granted this was not one of the biggest festivals but still the liquidity was noticeably increased, particularly in comparison to the AW evening racing meetings I have been trading mostly recently. In general I found that the trends were more defined and that larger orders passed through the market without making a huge impact. I prefered this as it made identifying the patterns much clearer. This has motivated me to try and trade one of the big festival like Cheltenham or Aintree.

I did experience a little bit of lag on a few occasions, which I can imagine is a direct result of increased weekend traffic, but nothing serious enough to put me off.

I decided to give Sunday a go after a nice brunch and Hamilton looked to have the GP in the bag. Really wanted to make the most of the Ascot opportunity as I'm not too sure when I will have a chance to trade higher liquid racing markets again.

The racing went well considering I was using £2 stakes. I traded for just over the 2 hour mark as I felt focussed and wanted to try and finish the card if possible. Another clean sweap and overall I traded 30 markets. 15 racing and 15 football. There were a couple of occasions where things were noticeably slower than usual. I did see later that Leon made a post about this. There are some figures displayed at the bottom of the Bet Angel software, not sure what these should read when the API is good/bad, perhaps somebody could fill me in on this if anyone reading this knows, would be much appreciated. I did sit through it until things seemed better, and just carried on trading when bets were being submitted at an acceptable pace again. Did not really put me off, whenever this happens I now just take a short break and by the time I'm back things are usaully much better and as a plus I feel refreshed.

My prematch football trading has also been going very well and I decided to increase my stakes to £5, although I often had 2 scalps open at a time, so effectively it was like using a £10 stake . I think this is a good move as it is giving me a taste of larger stakes on a stable market. This will ease the transition when the time comes to up my stakes in the racing. Most of the trading was prematch apart from a couple of matches which went in-play for about 5 minutes before I got matched. I feel uncomfortable when this happens as the risk of a first minute goal could cause a huge dent in my P&L. I've mentioned it before and I will need to ensure I close in the first few seconds at the latest. I think I have a decent enough sample size to see that removing this risk at the expense of a few small red P&L figures is definitely worth it. I will expect to see many more small red figures on my P&L now as my new rule is to aim and close out at KO.

Racing Trading Style

Despite all my efforts to date I am still noticing a bias towards my old style of trading. This style is back first and scalp orientated. It is evidently working well but I feel I need to consciously push myself to lay first or go for more than a 1-3 tick profit. I'd say roughly speaking we're talking about 80% of my trades are initiated with a back and 90% are 1-3 ticks, with the majority of this being 1 tick scalps. Even when I see an obvious drifing opportuity I am more inclined to back one of the other favourites who are likely to come in then just simply lay the drifter. I think the removal of closing in parts has allowed me to slip into my old bias, but as it stands I feel lmiting my risk is my priority until I have adequate market experience. I'm at a stage where I am still learning on almost every market I trade. The incremental closures is a good idea and I will re-introduce this when I can break down my closures, but for now I think I am going to push myself to lay more and hold onto promising positions longer. I might even trade a few races with a strict rule only allowing me to lay first. I'll pobably missout on many opportunities but this should help me focus on laying opportunities. If anyone has any other ideas on how to tackle this I'm all ears.

I have of course been experimenting with my trading screen again and am starting to feel much more comfotable with it:

I am now looking at both screens more equally and do not sit as close to the monitors as I used to, which allows me to view as much information as possible (I noticed form my videos a bad habit where I was looking at the ladder far too much). I now undock the charting screen and place it next to the ladder. The market overview has moved to the far left with some handy information at the top. I then under pin the guardian and unmatched bets screens which can be easily accessed when necessary, with a longer term candle stick chart for the 3 favourites. Having short term 1 tick charts and longterm 10 min candlesticks is helping me get a good feel for the market at a glance, particularly with the overview being right next to the ladders. This is the set up I used for the weekend and it is unlikely to be refined much further unless I get another screen. I would actually like to see the odds displayed from the thebettingsite.racingpost.co.uk on a seperate screen but I dont feel an upgrade of graphics card and an extra monitor is warranted just for that. Definitely an idea to consider maybe for next year when profits can pay for it. Would certainly be a nice little reward to work towards.

Right I better get back to work!  Will update in about a week or so. Stay lucky.

Inexperience

This Saturday was a good example of why I need to ensure I can maintain the rules and disciplines before ever contemplating raising my stakes. My inexperience got the better of me and although I was mentally strong enough to hold my resolve for most of the session, I was unable to keep it for the entire time. Included in my errors was taking one race's closures IR (£7.64 loss) which occurred right at the death. I am glad it didn't work out as it reaffirms my mental state towards the end of a session, and has triggered me to address this issue more specifically. I ended the day with a total loss of £3.93.





Escalating downward spiral
At some point towards the end of a session, whilst I am feeling drained I make a sequence of poor decisions. This sequence is what I now identify as an escalating downward spiral, which if allowed to take its full course concludes with an IR closure, and ultimately results in a huge relative loss.

When I started trading parttime, shortly before starting this blog, I was taking about 25% of my races IR. Just thinking about that now is quite shocking. My efforts so far have reduced this to maybe one a session depending on whether I manage to hold out until the end of the card. Catching this spiral early is what I am managing to do most of the time, but not consistently all of the time, and on every session. In my head I have counteractions for each stage of the spiral but have not written them down or analysed them with the attention that I now feel is necessary. I feel this is key in the next stage of my development.

Methods for breaking the spiral
Having analysed the poorly traded races, broadly speaking this is what I have noted as the main stages of this downward spiral:

1. Poor trade entered into the market
2. Fail to close trade quickly when market moves against me
3. Do not focus on market information (remaining married to my opinion)
4. Enter another trade (or two) attempting to scalp the deficit down (typically against the market trend)
5. Realise the red increasing dramatically and hesitate to react
6. Place full closure on first green increment on ladder (typically 5+ ticks out of the money) and hit ‘Keep all’
7. Wait for race to go IR and hope for the speculative closure is matched

The first stage is inevitable. I need to enter trades into a market to make money and accept the risk that comes with this. My strike rate is quite high and my analysis has given me the confidence to be assertive when necessary and ensure that entries are based on quality information. They will sometimes go against me no matter how good the trade looked.

Stage 2 is the first opportunity for me to end the cycle. This is a tricky one as it can differ depending on each scenario. For instance a small mini-move of resistance might cause me to go into the red temporarily, but would not be adequate reasoning for me to close as the main market trend will soon push the price back into the green. However on some occasions the move is not a mini-move at all, but a sharp reversal of the main trend, and the sooner I decide to close the more money I save. I think it is apparent that the only way I am going to know which is which is through solid market experience. As a safely net I feel closing early on each occasion will limit the risk so I am inclined to do this more often than not, even if it means I miss out on the odd swing and would have been correct to hold on. I will reintroduce strict stop losses from now on, as admittedly I have been complacent and not placed them for each trade. This counteraction alone will eliminate the possibility of a large trend reversal going against me at the expense of a small percentage of my profits and reduced strike rate.

Stage 3 links to stage two in regards to reacting to what is on the screen. Whenever I am in the red I sometimes remind myself to refocus on the market data and forget about the red figure. This often works when I am fresh and not tiring as it requires more energy. I feel implementing automated stop losses will help here until I can build up my ability to focus harder at critical moments and for longer periods.

Stage 4 is what I need to cut out completely. The risk to reward ratio here is too high. The stop loss should have taken me out of the market at this stage, however if I am in a situation where it has not I must focus on closing my existing trade before starting a new one. I think closing and immediately re-entering on the opposite side is often not profitable, as it is quite impulsive (often not based on quality info) and would mean that the trend would have to continue for a few more ticks for me to make any significant amount from it. With the footage I have analysed, it is just as likely to reverse once again which would leave me with an increased red figure if I had re-entered. I will not rule it out but will only do this if I feel it is the beginning of a strong trend.

Stage 5 is a sign of my inexperience. Although this is happening less and less if I let it get this far I am typically quite uncomfortable and unfamiliar with the situation. I have read much about handling these situations and one method to accelerate the development of the coping process is to expose yourself to these scenarios repeatedly until they become familiar and the correct reaction is consistent and automatic. I will be implementing this strategy, perhaps not specifically to getting out of poor trading positions, but more geared towards my reactions to losses. I think it will be along the lines of finding something challenging to lose at repeatedly to familiarise myself with experiencing loss. Bit experimental but I feel it will help (I have never been the most gracious of losers and I think improving this will directly improve my trading).

Stage 6 is my last preoff opportunity to get out, and although will leave me with a large red figure on my P&L, if I get to this stage I have to close out no matter what. Messing around with placing my net stake closures and clicking on ‘Take SP All’ I feel is not helping and just wasting time. If I get this far down the spiral my only option has to be click on current close.

Needless to say stage 7 should never happen unless some technical issue has forced me IR. If I find myself in this position I need to hit current close at whatever price available.

I think I am going to print off a small list of this spiral and have it on display next to my monitors when trading. If I ever find myself in one of these stages I expect it will help prompt me to react in the correct way.

Methods for increasing my mental stamina
I think it is a bit ignorant or perhaps even arrogant for me to think I can match the concentration, discipline and focus of fulltime traders straight away. What I have been trying to do upto now is trade for a whole day (like what I would do if I was fulltime) and then take a six day break. This is far from ideal when I am trying to drill in new, demanding and strenuous disciplines, for two main reasons.

The first is the single long trading session is too long for somebody with my experience. The quality of my decisions disintegrate until the errors pile up and negatively affect my P&L. Obviously the aim is to trade for this long eventually, but to try to do it immediately is just not being realistic. As with other aspects, such as staking, this will need to be built up gradually.

The second is the 6 day break, this gives me plenty of time to forget what I have learnt, and allows me to re-establish the old bad habits. My learning process although very analytical, is not very practical. Ideally to learn something efficiently I would need to do it repeatedly throughout the week as opposed to many hours on only one day of each week.

Working fulltime Mon-Fri makes trading daily harder to arrange. However I do have options as we have evening racing each week from Weds to Sat at the moment. I will need to incorporate this as much as possible into my schedule. I will have a word with my boss to see if I can finish work at 5 on these days, this will allow me to be home by 6 and wikk give me about 5 races or so a day on Weds, Thurs and Fri. I will keep trading Saturday but not all day. Will trade for two hour sessions, with long breaks inbetween sessions. Once I can prove to myself I can handle 2 hours without my concentration diminishing I will increase these Saturday sessions gradually. By implementing this I now have at least four trading sessions a week on at least four different days.

In short this will not only allow me to build up my mental stamina, but also learn more effectively due to the repetition on four days a week as opposed to just one.

My analysis of the footage will continue as I feel this is helping me build up market experience. Instead of waiting around for 30 minutes inbetween races during the evening meetings, I will try to use this time to instantly review each race straight after it has gone off. I'm hoping this will save me time as I will not need to make time to analyse them later.

Right I think that's it for now, I will report back roughly in about a week.

Goodnight out there, whatever you are!

Blue Monday

Rather frustrating day today. First off I had a bit of a nightmare setting up my new PC to record effectively. Tested everything 2 hours before the racing and it was working just fine. I was encoding in Xvid giving me about 4.3MB per min of footage. I was happy with that. About 30 minutes before the first race I tested the recording for the last time and I kept getting an error message telling me that Xvid was busy, when closing the window I received a ‘Not responding’ message. I tried this several times. Needless to say the recording was not working. So I ended up installing a couple of other codecs to see if I could get something to work without using 14MB files per minute (which was what the standard setting was). Already quickly running out of time I settled for a codec called ‘ffdshow’ which seemed to work and gave me about 5.5MBs a minute.

I felt flustered and a bit uncomfortable with the whole new setup. This was to be expected though as it is the first time I have traded on this PC and with a dual screen. I also needed to spend some time setting up Bet Angel in the way that I liked it, and getting all the settings adjusted. I didn’t realise how much I had customised the settings until I was faced with the default settings again! Though this did make me appreciate how versatile BA can be. By the time I got everything working there was 5mins to go on the 3rd race so I skipped this race and moved straight onto the fourth.



I started off badly as you can see from the first couple of races. I really need to take more time to focus early on as this is not the first time this has happened. Not too sure how to help with this issue, it’s not as if I can reduce my stakes until I get into a routine! Evidently with the rush to get things working, I did not watch any videos before so I will need to make sure I do this next time. Rushing into it again probably didn’t help matters wither and I will probably stick with the ffdshow codec for peace of mind. The whole recording session was approximately 1GB, and that was for 3h20mins – that’s good enough for me. Just to give you a rough idea if it was encoded in Xvid It would have been about 860MB. So I’m not going to get too bothered over 140MBs, particularly as I have a dedicated 500GB hard drive for all my trading material. Besides it is likely to be a conflict and I’m definitely not going to spend hours trying to figure which codecs are conflicting, life’s too short!

I soon got into the rhythm and had a solid run making £1.98 from the next 15 markets and then promptly lost it all at the Wind 17.05. I made a schoolboy error and placed two poor trades, but only had one close in the market with Take SP set, when I thought both had been set to this. Of course you can guess what happened next. Race goes off and I realise near the end of this 7f race, by that time the favs price was so long I couldn’t close out. Poor error on my part and although it’s not as bad as going IR intentionally I really should have checked my closure settings properly. At the end of the day if an error like this has the potential to wipe out all of my daily profits, I will need to make note and double check everything at 1min to go and once more at 30secs and finally at 10secs. I was quite mad at myself as it could have so easily been avoided and I was in the red not due to my poor trading selections.

On a more positive note, I picked myself up quite quickly and was determined to get in profit for the day. I knew I needed about 61p from the last 2 races and I pushed myself to make 66p in the end! Granted we’re not talking about huge amounts of money here but I am happy none the less with my mental attitude in the last 2 races. I was in the red on both at one point but I closed out quickly and made some good trades in to push things in my favour. Have not had the time to review the video footage properly but I do have the next few days to go over this. Next trading session looks like it will be Saturday so I have some time to watch it all beforehand. Will update the blog with anything I feel might be useful to include in this review once I have finished watching it.

Other observations include the new screen setup mentioned briefly earlier:


No doubt I will move things around a bit once I get accustomed to the space. I found at times I almost forgot about the second display and needed to remind myself it was there! On some races I found having the market overview larger was much easier to pick out the moves. And today for the first time I did jump on the 2nd or 3rd fav when I felt the price was going to come in a few ticks. This did make me think about trying to have the 3 ladders open at the same time. Might give this a go next time. I did not swing trade as much as I would of liked but I did see many opportunities today. I am hoping the videos will help me identify these opportunities better. Also I did not get around to using Green UP radio but I will give it a go next time, sounds like a handy tool particularly for me as I am trading without pictures at the moment.

That’s it for now. I will leave you with a quote from the one and only Albert Einstein which I found inspiring this morning:

‘In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity’

Trading Review 12/08/09

Oh dear where do I start today. I suppose I will go through the P & L in time order. Needless to say after yesterdays loss there was no increase in stakes.


Started off by looking at a couple of vids and reading my review from yesterday. I felt confident and better prepared and jumped straight into the first trade. First race was a disaster, ended up going in running with 8 unclosed £2 scalps. Of course it went tits up and £16 was lost. Relatively speaking this is a complete catastrophe. My learning bank is roughly £20 so putting this into perspective I lost 80% of my bank! The fact that I had 80% of my bank at risk is just ridiculous thinking about all the principles and rules of money management. But it was risked in-running which is the most disappointing flaw of them all.

This was then followed by 3 losing races where I traded poorly, still frustrated from my decision to go in running, I was reading the market very poorly and made bad trade after bad trade, it seemed to never end. On a positive note no matter how bad the red was I did close all trades pre-race and did not feel the need to going in running. However, this discipline wore off gradually as the day went on.

Fourth race onwards I actually started trading properly making more successful scalps then unsuccessful ones, and making steady profits throughout the card. I was feeling more and more in flow with my decisions and this lasted for about an hour or so. At some point I noticed I was feeling tired and it was becoming harder and harder to keep fully focussed and maintain these seemingly foreign and awkward disciplines. Indiscipline eventually caught up with me and I made some poor trades, instead of closing and accepting this I did go IR a couple of times and managed to get away with it – cannot remember the precise races but it was on at least 2 or 3 around 5-6pm (two of the 50p gains).


At the 19:45 however I was caught out again risking and losing about 75% of my bank in running. Felt like I was really going backwards at this point. Was already tired and finding it hard to keep focussed, and once I had started to take races in play again I was almost repeating it until it KO’d me out of the game. I knew deep down that it would catch me out eventually (felt much like my rational and irrational minds were fighting and my old rational – now evidently becoming the little devil on my shoulder – was winning this duel when I was tired and unable to focus on maintaining consistency).

I then proceeded to trade one more race mainly to show myself that after such a catastrophic error I have the ability to get stuck into the next race without letting the emotions affect my focus on the next race. I actually traded it well making 5p, about one 300th of what I had just lost on the last race. Putting it into perspective like this is making me realise just how damaging going in-running is. 300 races with a couple of good scalps per race will be needed just to break even for that one error. Going-in running is quite simply suicide in this game.

However instilling this discipline and completing this reconditioning phase is proving really difficult. I know it is possible though, as if it was not I would of taken all reds in running. I recall quite a few occasions where I was fighting with myself and won the duel and redded out, so beating this bad habit can be achieved. Achieving this consistently however is where I am failing at the moment. Roughly speaking I am taking about 25% of my races IR. I know to succeed this has to become 0%. The task here is to make this discipline part of the routine. Automating this rule and to never have to fight it, and just do like any other natural reaction.

I initially felt I could overcome this by adding it to the list of other disciplines I am trying to implement, and slowly enforce them into my routine. However it is evident from today that psychologically I am not strong enough to overcome this particular discipline with this alone, especially when I am losing focus. I have noticed now that I only seem to take trades IR when I am either not warmed up properly (not into routine yet) or tired and not able to maintain rules constantly. Notably though I do manage to win the duel when I am in a flow and trading well. Also when I have the energy to maintain focussed, even if I am not in the flow, I do manage to overcome the IR temptation at these times. I think focussing on my mental attitude on these occasions and replicating it when necessary is key to overcoming this IR issue.

The need to place more energy on removing IR closures is apparent. I am now dedicated to this cause and if I lose money all session, without taking a closure IR, I would consider this a successful session. This aim has been elevated to top of my priorities, sort of a primary mission objective as opposed to a secondary one as it has been viewed in the past.

What I intend to do now in order to achieve this?
- Close trades early if they go against you. (Ideal and the best prevention action)
- Have only 1 or 2 open trades at any one time in each market
- If 30 secs to go and closures are not met use Take SP all function.
- Edit audio in Bet Angel to state ‘Take SP All’ at 30 seconds to off
- Whenever I feel I am losing focus take a moment to re-focus. Take a break if necessary.
- Think of the specific example of 300 races needed to just break even whenever you feel tempted to go IR

Final observations for the racing include the slight change in the trading screen.


I have moved the clock time nearer to the ladder, to be more aware of the time as I am starting to notice money movement patterns at certain times and am trying to build up a better understanding of this. I have also starting using the ‘Trading Profit Calculator’ to close trades, although effectively the same as the ‘Trading profit’ closure option on the ladder, I find it quicker sometimes to just click on ‘Current Close’, particularly when I am in the red and need to kick myself and snap out of any indecision to red out. Also I am using the back price, long average and envelope on the enhanced ladder real time chart. I find this provides more appropriate information for catching swings.

Observations in my trading style: I am still approaching almost every market with the view to scalp. I know this is just not the way forward and I need to learn how to swing trade, or mini swing trade range bound markets. I did catch a couple of mini swings today and am trying to look out for these more and more rather then just automatically scalping.

At present I do not preview the racing card and try to trade every race as I need the experience. Once I have a good sample size of results I intend to analyse this closer to see if there are any patterns in regards to which races I tend to profit from and what tactics seem to be working. However to do this I need an adequate sample of races where no IR tactics are used. This is notably another annoyance of IR closures, as it effectively ruins any potential unbiased results analysis for the whole session. The sample has to be purely pre-race for it to be accurate, and contain redding out closures for me to see which races are truly profitable pre-race.

I have also noticed that I had a bias to enter a trade with a back first, sometimes I even did this when the trend clearly showed otherwise (looking to catch a tick or two of the resistance). Today I felt comfortable laying first, and profiting on each occasion has given me more confidence to lay first when the signs are there. This is good as I know I need to develop a more diverse style if I intend to profit from all available opportunities. I’m also noticing that favourites do drift more often than I had initially anticipated, and sharper than they come in. By catching these moves you can open and close most trades within seconds to profit quickly, minimising market exposure. Also trading blind (no pictures or commentary) did used to affect my confidence, but after thinking about this for a while I am now realising that laying first can actually be safer when you don’t have pictures, as most of the time these drifts would catch out those who back first, whist everyone with pictures is laying taking the price out quickly. Add this to my reasons why I want to back first and I feel I am starting to approach the market with a more neutral perspective.


A brief mention of the football is due, and this was a silly error on my part. Have successfully scalped a few matches pre-match I was looking to get more experience doing this whenever possible. Added a load of International friendlies that seemed appropriate candidates to my market guardian. Liquidity and activity was poor however instead of scraping this idea for these matches, I decided to continue until the England vs Holland match as I felt that this match would at least have descent enough liquidity.

What happened in the Malta vs Georgia was that I didn’t check whether the game was going IR or not. This was not to trade IR, but to allow me to trade to kick-off comfortably and close in the first few seconds of play if I happened to have any open trades. Assuming it was going IR I traded close to the kick off, and off course it went off about a minute early! This of course left me with a £12 bet on the favourites Georgia who evidently went onto lose the match 2 – 0. Silly error on my part as I had no backup exit strategy. I did not let this affect me too much as I knew it was just bad preparation on my part. Was seconds away from getting closures and my trades were actually good. I now know I should always use this scalping strategy on matches where the liquidity is good and for matches that are scheduled to go IR if I intend to trade to kick off. This is much easier to implement and I will continue to scalp footy matches pre-match only if these 2 conditions are definitely met. Sods law I actually missed the England game scalping opportunity as I was focussing on a race at the time!

So in summary I intend to focus now on implementing the points highlighted above to eliminate any IR closures for racing. That is my main aim for my next session and achieving only this will decide whether it has been a success or not. Profiting and ROI are not feasible for analysis when IR closures are responsible for any part of my P & L.

On a more positive note, my flat will be sparkling clean by the end of the week if I maintain this relentless display of indiscipline!