Review of First Month

Well, that’s the first month over for The Experiment. I just wanted to have a quick review of the month and comment on how I think it’s went.

At the start of the month, if someone had said I would have made £380 profit, I would have been over the moon. As I said at the start of my blog a while ago, I expected the first 2 or 3 months to be very difficult and I didn’t expect to win much at the beginning.

If I’m 100% honest, I actually expected to post a loss in the first month as I knew it would take time to understand the Betfair markets and that’s part of the reason for having the £15k betting balance. I expected to be dipping into this balance a fair amount but I think I quickly realised that it would be foolish for me to trade with large stakes in the first month and therefore, the £15k has been largely untouched.

I transferred £1,000 across to my Betfair account at the start of the month and I’m pleased to say that I still have £1,000 in my account today. I have transferred out my £380 profit through the course of the month and it’s quite satisfying to know that I’ve made a 38% return in 1 month.

My cumulative profit for the month looks like this:

As you can see, it was quite a slow start to the month but things have really picked up in the second half of the month.

I think the one thing that is slightly disappointing for me is the make-up of my profit for the month:

As you can see, the majority of the profit has come from golf and not from horse-racing.

Horse-racing

Number of days traded – 10
Number of winning days – 6
Number of losing days – 4
Profit - £34.33

Overall, I have made £34.33 from trading 10 days this month. On average, I have earned £3.43 per day for around 3 hours trading a day. Hence, I’m earning £1.14 an hour from trading horse-racing!

Golf

Number of events traded – 5
Number of winning events – 5
Number of losing events – 0
Profit - £351.08

Overall, I have made £351.08 from trading 5 golf events. This is an average of £70.22 per event. I reckon I have probably spent 4 hours on each event as I’ve only been trading my pre-tournament backs and I haven’t been trading in running apart from 2 hours at the World Golf Championships.

Hence, I’m earning £17.55 an hour from trading golf tournaments!

Summary

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that I’ve been much more successful at trading golf rather than horse-racing. This was difficult for me to understand at first but I think I’m now starting to know why……

I find that the horse markets on Betfair are very efficient and very few errors are made by traders in the horse-racing markets. In comparison, I find the golf markets quite inefficient and there appear to be numerous errors made every time I’m watching the golf market. Therefore, I think there are far more opportunities for traders to exploit the golf markets and that’s what I’ll be looking to do in the future.

The Future

As you know, I have a full-time job but at the moment, I have reduced my hours to enable me to carry out my horse-racing trading 4 days a week.

Clearly, I am unable to justify working reduced hours at work when I’m only earning £1.14 an hour from trading the horses. I could be at work in the afternoons earning a guaranteed £30+ every afternoon and instead, I’m earning £1 an hour on Betfair!

However, as I said before, I expected the first month to be very difficult and therefore, I’m not going to give up on the horse-racing just yet. I’m hoping that I will learn a great deal from my first month of trading and this can allow me to push on in month 2 and increase my profits from trading the horses.

Clearly, I’m having great success from trading the golf markets and I will continue to trade the golf markets in the same was as I have been recently.

Scalability

Clearly, now that I have one month’s Betfair experience under my belt, I need to look to increase my profits. At the moment, I’m much more confident with the golf market than the racing markets and I think I need to use this to my advantage more.

So far on the golf, I have only backed players for £2-£5 stakes and I’ve managed to make ‘supernormal’ returns. I think the time is right to increase my stakes and try to win more.

From this week, I will be backing players with £5-£10 stakes and I will be happy to have an exposure of £100+ going into any tournament. I need to have more confidence in my ability to pick golf players at decent prices and not worry too much about the fact that I may lose some money. I’m 100% in terms of generating a profit on the golf at the moment, so I shouldn’t worry about having a loss at an event.

On the horse-racing, I will continue to trade with £10-£50 stakes as I really don’t feel comfortable trading with higher stakes. When I traded with £50-£100 stakes, my trading was very erratic and I was having some massive wins and massive losses in the same day which is not good for the heart!

In the second half of the month, I will look to increase my stakes on the horse-racing if I feel more confident. If I don’t gain the confidence to trade with higher stakes on the horse-racing, I will stop trading the horse-racing and return to work. I will then trade golf and other sports as so far, I have only dabbled in the golf market and the horse-racing markets. I’m sure there are other opportunities for someone like me to try to exploit.

I’m trading every afternoon this week from tomorrow and I’m really looking forward to Aintree this week. I’ll be trading at Aintree which will be the first big meeting I’ve traded at, so I’m looking forward to it.

Lastly, I’d like to say thanks for all the nice comments I’ve received over the last month or so. I know I don’t respond to everyone’s comments but I do read every comment and think carefully about what has been written. My lack of response is usually due to lack of time on my part but I’ll try to be more proactive in responding to comments going forward!