A profit on horse-racing? Surely not.....

Daily Profit £15.90

I don’t know where to start….

At first glance, the profit above looks pretty poor. However, let’s get this into perspective. After 5 losing days in a row on horse-racing, to post any sort of profit is good in my eyes. However, it was about so much more than just the profit today….

I lost £23 in 2 races today. Add that back to my profit and wow, I had a good day. Take into account that I only traded 12 races and that I was using £10 stakes and a £16 profit is pretty good.

So, what went wrong (I mean right) today…..

After taking on board the advice of Leon in particular and other comments from Andrew, Cassini and a few anonymous people (you know who you are!), I decided to try out trading today. By trading, I mean pure trading. Not Dutching, not gambling, not risk free bets, not bookmaking, not any other type of gambling I’ve tried recently!

Pure trading. I basically read back through Leon’s blog and decided that I would try to follow his method. I would concentrate on the first 3 or 4 in the betting, study the relationships between the odds movements of each horse and then look to trade. I looked at 18 races today and traded only 12. This is probably the most discipline I’ve showed thus far, so I am learning!

Just to cast everyone’s minds back, I had only tried trading once before in my life. The first day I started to look at Betfair I tried trading. I lost £60 in 1 hour and it scared the living daylights out of me. Never again I promised myself…..

However, today may go down as a pivotal day as part of The Experiment. I may have found something I like doing and just maybe (a big maybe), I can become good at it.

I won’t describe every race and how it went but I traded on 12 races, won on 7, break-even on 2 and lost on 3. As I said earlier, 2 of the losses were large (£11 and £12) but this purely down to my lack of trading skills. I got slightly confused in these races.

The most pleasing thing though was when I managed to combine my knowledge with a bit of trading. For the first time today, I didn’t use the racing post or sporting life when trading the markets. I just tried to follow the money, which seemed to work OK.

However, the 2.50 at Newcastle was different. It was basically a 2 horse race and I knew the form of both horses pretty well. When I clicked on the race at about 2.40, I say that Noble Alan was 1.5 and Kealshore Boy was 3.5. I was amazed. There was no way that Noble Alan should have been this short. I personally thought it would win but it was never going to start at that price.

I had decided earlier in the day to increase my stakes to £10 trades, so I got clicking. I laid Noble Alan and backed Kealshore Boy for one tick profits. I did this continually for the next 5 minutes. I lost count of how many clicks I must have done, but I just kept doing it until their prices converged. I think they started something like 1.8 and 2.5. When I looked at each horse, I had created £12 on Noble Alan and £16 on Kealshore Boy. I was amazed. After 5 days of trying I had finally managed to create a decent profit from trading…..

I chose not to green up and it cost me a little as Noble Alan won but I was still pleased. If I was using £100 stakes, that would have been an £80 profit on the race. Obviously, I can dream about £500 stakes but let’s not get too carried away. I read 1 race correctly…..

So, in one race, I had managed to use my knowledge of form and trade for a profit. That’s what I’ve been striving for over the past month!

It wasn’t all great today. I got in a mess twice simply due to my lack of experience and how you go about greening up. In one race, I was trading the first 5 in the betting from about 10 minutes before the off. However, I had missed the fact that 3 outsiders were being heavily backed and this would impact on the odds. I got in a bit of a muddle and ended up with lots of large greens and reds on my screen. I then went to the ladder page to see what would happen if I opted for a current close on each horse. I started to look to manually trade out of the position but the race went into play.

Undeterred, I continued on my passage to manually backing and laying my way out of the situation and then one of my green horses fell at the first hurdle. Whoops…..

I was panicking a little and just greened up on each horse at the current odds. It could have been a disaster (would have been with higher stakes!) and I got out with a £12 loss. A few races on, the same thing happened pretty much where I was too busy concentrating on the odds movements and forgot to green up before the off. I was trading 4 horses and was doing well on all 4. However, the race went into play, I chose to green up after they left the stalls and unfortunately, 2 of the horses started badly and drifted wildly just before I laid them. Cost me £11.

I’m not too worried about these errors as these are the sort of errors that inexperienced traders make. I only have 2 days experience now, so I know I’ve got much to learn. However, I’m keen to learn and I’ll be trading all the time from now on hopefully.

I’m off to London tomorrow for a meeting, so that’s my full-time day at work. I’ll be back trading on Thursday afternoon though.

I’ve placed my bets on the golf for this week. I’m changing my strategy slightly this week as I’m going to look to trade the bets off in-play and not before the event starts. I know this increases the risk greatly but it probably cost me a good bit of money last week not letting my bets go in play, so we’ll see how I do this week.

Below are my bets for this week:

My target is to get my £21 back on the first day so that I’m riskfree and then look to trade to make a profit from then on.