Consistency
So the festive trading period is over and we now return to more mundane matters on the racing front.
Nothing outstanding occurred for me on the trading front, but Sprinter Sacre pulling up at an SP of 1.20 was probably the high or lowlight of the period depending on which side of the book you were on. You could hear the howls of anguish like never before coming from the crowd. Another reason why trading is much better than traditional gambling IMHO!!!
I hadn’t really intended trading much this year but family circumstances, mainly the fact that only one grand parent survives and they live far away, meant I did get the opportunity again this year. It only takes up about 4 hours max at this time of year and the rewards still make sense.
Having analysed the stats this morning one obvious thing sticks out, how consistent I was. Similar totals on each day but they thing you can’t see is that it came from a similar number of races. Over three days I traded in 31, 29 and 31 markets. There were many more races available to trade but I tended to pick and choose my targets. On a busy day several races clash and that makes it hard to trade them all effectively, but on a quieter day there is less of this and I can spend more time on each race available. I also traded the key EPL football, traded on Betdaq and did some automated stuff. But this all took place in that four hour window.
As you may know I didn’t come from a racing background, but one thing that attracted me to racing was the sheer volume of races and how quickly they are completed. A football match takes 90 mins, but you could have nine races in that time. A Tennis match, though unrealistic, could go of for infinity! So my trading varies depending on the underlying sport and conditions and, of course, the opportunity. Over the course of the year I’m likely to trade around 15,000 races. In January I’ll take advantage of the global nature of Tennis and start trading that in the mornings and the footy in the evenings. I will have a problem in Summer 2014 when I will have to juggle Racing, Tennis and World Cup football. It’s easy to pick the wrong market at that time!
You could argue that trading more races would have brought better rewards, but I’ve tended to find that hunting for the best opportunity and doing nothing if you can’t see it produces much better results in the long term. There is always a tendency to try and trade everything, but I’ve found that produces weaker results over all. So overall, while not my biggest set of results ever, it was successful and also remarkably consistent.
Category: General, Trading strategies
