Losing!

I wanted to do a quick comment on this. I’ve had a fair amount of criticism across the last few months about my attitude to losing on here and I wanted to defend myself.

Firstly, anyone who likes losing shouldn’t gamble/trade in my opinion. I hate losing more than anyone! What I would say is that when I write blog posts straight after a loss, you always get a view of how I feel at that particular moment. Most days, I’m really annoyed and pissed off with myself and it ends up in a rant.

However, one thing I would say is that I am a ‘good’ loser. I never bear a grudge and I never let it affect me too much. This month, I was losing £200+ at the start of days and it had little impact on my trading. Over the month, losing consistently at the start of every day and trying to get back to break-even took its toll on me and I caved in at the end. I think many people would have been the same.

I think the other very important point about losing is that I can’t afford to lose! I haven’t really spoken too much on here about my personal circumstances but at the moment, my trading bank is my overdraft. Some people would say I’m crazy and should be phoning GA but as I’ve said to Andrew many times, I have never gambled with money I could afford to lose. I haven’t ever been in that position!

When you are at school and at university, money is going to be tight. When you buy a flat at university, money is going to be incredibly tight. When you move to a 4 bedroom family home last year that cost a bloody fortune, money is going to be amazingly tight.

The reason I started this whole experiment was to try to earn some money for us to help improve our life and give us some extra disposable income. It wasn’t some half baked attempt from some rich kid to try his hand at gambling. Anyone who borrows £15k from a bank, gives up a ¼ of their work and tries to trade with zero knowledge isn’t someone who is playing about. That’s someone who needs to earn some extra money! I wisely ditched this idea after some good advice from Andrew and without him, I’m sure I would have blown that £15k I borrowed and not kept it in a savings account!

The first few months of profits from Betfair helped us get out of overdraft for the first time since we started university. Last month’s loss has put me back into overdraft now as I was hoping that I could earn £500 a month from Betfair to help us out.

It’s true that it’s a hobby for me but I am not trading with money I can afford to lose. At university, in certain months, the only thing that allowed us to eat and pay the mortgage was my winnings from gambling. I used to sit and sweat with a bank of £100 in a bookmakers on a Saturday to win £100 by doing multiple bets on handicaps. That was pressure.

This is a different kind of pressure I have now as I know I can still pay the mortgage win or lose. However, when I lose now, I know I can’t afford it really and it affects me more than it should.

I don’t really want to spend any longer discussing this as it is not important to The Experiment. However, I hope it maybe lets other people understand my reactions to losing sometimes.