Tuesday 15 April 2008

Breakdown of Masters golf profit

Daily Profit £380.89

Firstly, I'd like to say thanks for all the support and encouragement over the past few days. As you can imagine, trying to study for an important exam at the same time as watching the golf is quite difficult and I probably neglected my studying a bit last night as I was so enthralled in the golf.

Thankfully, my exam went well today and that's another exam out of the way. In case anyone's wondering, I'm studying towards an ACII which is an insurance professional qualification. Today was my 8th exam over the past two and half years and so far I've sat 7 and passed 7. Assuming I passed today (I'm 99.9% sure I did!), I'll now only have 3 to complete to get my full qualification. Roll on October now!

OK, on to the important things! The US Masters.......

My overall profit for the weekend was £380. I'm really pleased with it and it probably vindicates my decision to try to get my hours back at work. As Alistair has said, why am I messing around with the GGs? Being honest, I still think I can make something from the GGs but it wont be from trading.

The breakdown of the golf profit is below with my return on investment:

Winner - £40 exposure, £331.80 profit, 829% ROI. (I forgot the Immelman return last night excluded losses on guys who missed the cut!)

Make The Cut - £25.71 exposure, £25.41 profit, 99% ROI.

1st Round Leader - £13 exposure, £40.28 profit, 309% ROI

Top 5 finish - £4 exposure, £4 loss

Top 10 finish - £12.60 exposure, £12.60 loss

Overall - £95.31 exposure, £380.89 return, 400% ROI

OK, so if I look at it in these terms, a 400% ROI looks mighty impressive. (This is maybe a little bit incorrect as I put £300 on Immelman at 1.05 to give my profit a tiny boost at the end, but we'll ignore that!)

However, how much time did I spend on Betfair winning this amount?

Wednesday - 1 hour putting in bets and lays

Thursday - 5 minutes to check to see if my 1st round leader lay had been matched

Friday - 5 minutes to see how market was shaping up

Saturday - 30 minutes to place lots of lays on my players

Sunday - 30 minutes at the end of the evening to ensure that I could trade Immelman if he looked like chucking it away!

Overall, I spent 2 hours 10 minutes on Betfair to generate a return £380.89. Nice work if you can get it!

Obviously, I probably watched about 10 hours of golf over the weekend but I would have watched the golf regardless if I had a bet or not, so no time was lost there.

I think the only disappointing thing is the fact that I only spent £40 on the winner market for the Masters. I was slightly worried my golfing analysis wouldn't work for the majors but I was wrong as it picked out Immelman easily enough as well as a few others who did reasonably well. Looking back, I keep saying that I'm going to increase my stakes on the golf but it was difficult to put much on a guy like Immelman who was 300 to win and 2 to make the cut!

Anyway, lets look forward now.......

I now have a bank of over £800 in my Betfair account now which is pure profit. I found trading with the bank's money a tad frightening to say the least but I'd already transferred all of that out of my Betfair account and into my savings account a few weeks ago. I was a bit annoyed last night though as I thought Immelman was a steal at 1.05 with 3 holes left and I would have put £15k on him at that moment. When he went in the water, I would have nearly died though, so I saved myself a heart attack there!

So, I'll feel much more comfortable trading with my bank now as it's money I've built up over the past 6 weeks. My strategy going forward is much the same as I outlined last week. I'm going to ask to go full-time again at work from the start of next month. This will mean that I won't be able to trade the horse-racing but I'll instead just use my form knowledge to bet on horses in races where I want to have a bet. I'll place my bets the night before but if I have trouble getting my bets matched, I'll just use Betfair SP.

With regards to the golf, I'll continue along the lines of backing players before the tournament starts and trading from that position. I'll continue to increase my stakes every week and risk more every week. At the moment, I have traded on 7 tournaments and won on 7 tournaments. My Profit is £700+ and I've never risked anymore than £95 on a tournament. That's quite impressive going by anyone's standards.

Assuming I continue along my same strategy, there is no reason why I can't scale my bets up on the golf. I've only been backing most players with £2-£5 stakes every week but there is usually much more liquidity than this, so I should be OK for the foreseeable future.

I want to spend a little time tonight looking for my next horse-race to analyse and I'll post up the race time on here. Will not be any earlier than Wednesday though as I'm busy tomorrow. I'll also do some golf analysis tonight for the upcoming tournament. As usual, I'll post my selections up on Wednesday night.

No comments: