A welcome result

Managed my first winning day for 7 days today. I used £35 stakes, which are what I had been used to, and didn't have any major disasters, although there were a couple of hairy moments where the market temporarily went against me big time, I was ready to close out if it went any further but I have noticed that if I am just a little more patient, I can scratch a loss or at least limit it. Of course, waiting too long to cut out could result in an even bigger loss, so I need to keep my wits about me, keep an eye on the other horses odds, and close out for a loss when needed.

I am fairly sure that raising my stakes was the main reason for the bad run. It just shows how weak my mental state still is, even though it has improved enormously. So its back to a gradual increase of stakes as I get to feel confident, rather than the jump to £150 liability stakes I was using before. The crazy backer guy hasn't been throwing his weight around as much in the last couple of days, and this helped too.

Pull myself together

After my last melodramatic post, things havent really improved. I have now had 5 losing days in a row trading the horses, my worst run for some months. My confidence has been severely dented, and I have now dropped back to smaller stakes to try and regain some of the skills and confidence I had. I have started videoing my trading again, and reviewing it to see if I can figure out where I am going wrong. It may not be a coincidence that it was a week ago that I raised my stakes to £150 liability, and that the bigger potential losses are making me more hesitant and indecisive. I have been feeling the same during trading recently as I did when I first started( when I was using large stakes), confused, angry, upset, baffled, like I am being pushed around by the markets, like every trade goes wrong, so its no wonder my results are similar. I need to remember all the progress and success I have made over the last few months, and pull myself together.

Really F*cked off

I dont know how much more of this I can take. Day after day of making a few pounds here and there, every day having huge losses that kill my profit and no idea of how to stop them. Some of it is due to the F*cking moron that keeps lumping thousands of pounds on the first 3 runners, maybe my edge has been totally wiped out by this f*cker, I certainly have made next to nothing over the last few weeks. I am making no progress, and every day I have to face the disappointment of wiping out my days profits in 1 or 2 races. Doesnt seem to matter if I back or lay first though, so maybe its not down to him at all.

Dont know where to go from here, Dont know how to turn things around. I am probably just wasting my time.

a bit scary

Just a note that I have changed my stakes slightly, I used to use level staking across all odds of £35, but now have changed to Liability staking of £150, so my stakes will vary depending on the odds. It is a bit scarey sometimes to be using stakes 3 times what I am used to, although a tick isnt a huge amount of money. I haven't made much with the new stakes, but I havent lost any yet either. When I was trading on a favorite at odds of 1.15 it meant that my stake was £1000, yikes. I did manage to make a small amount on that race, but I think I will be very careful until I am more confident on those sort of races.

Lesson learned?

Sundays trading didn't go any better than on Saturday. There wasn't much money about, which means that if you do get it wrong, it can go against you in a big way. This is what happened to me. I kept putting in trades in bad positions, with not much money coming in to the market. Another In-Play mistake cost me £10, and I decided to stop trading after 5 races.
The last 2 days did help reinforce things in my mind though. Not to go in play( kind of obvious, you would have thought, but it seems I need to be reminded every so often as I slip back into bad habits of trading too close to the off), to be very wary of trading in low liquidity markets, and to pick and choose which races I trade. On monday I tried to put these thoughts into practice, with some success. I was more patient, waiting for good entry points, I closed out by the official off time, I didnt trade some races that looked very low in liquidity, and everything felt a lot easier.
So have I learned these lessons? Probably not completely. Its a constant battle against greed, boredom, desire, fear, but one that I am winning, and will win.

Embarrassed face

Havent posted for a while, nothing of note, either good or bad, to report. I dont seem to be getting any better, or worse, at the moment, I can make money, but am missing some piece of the jigsaw.

Made a mess of things today though. Got caught out in play with a late back bet, the odds flew out, I closed out, then my original close out bet got taken, the odds flew in again. So I managed to lose more than my original stake. Lol :(

This hasn't happened for a few months now, so I think its just a blip. A good reminder of how much I need to concentrate.

March Summary

A fairly tough month for me, as can be seen by my PnL. I made less this month, using almost twice the stakes, than I did last month. I have started trading the greyhounds in the morning and this helped boost my PnL a bit( not included in the summary), but I am still a bit disappointed with the result, although really happy to be in profit at all given how difficult it was and how badly I traded.



You can see that my average losses were getting bigger and bigger as the month went on. This was due to a number of things. I had changed the way I traded slightly, and wasnt able to deal with the extra risk this method brought. I was entering at the wrong time, and getting constantly caught out. And The cumulative effect of the losses affected my mental state so that I was less able to cut out quickly when needed.



My strike rate doesn't seem to change at all, its the same every month. Im not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I don't seem to be learning anything new about the markets at the moment which will help me pick better entry and exit points. But what I do now seems to work ok most of the time.



So I will be looking for much better results this month. I'm still waiting for a eureka moment that will help take me to the next level though, as if I continue to trade in the same vein as before, then I can only expect the same results.