Saturday 27 December 2008

Painful....

Loss since last update £349.65

One of the reasons I’m keeping this blog going is simply due to the fact it has helped me so much this year with keeping my discipline. When I’ve been through some bad times punting this year, the blog has helped a great deal and after the last two days, I’m hoping to use this to let off some steam tonight as I’m fuming with myself.

As I’d said on the last blog post, my own trading hadn’t been going that well recently and being honest, I hadn’t really been on fire with the tips. I seem to go through good spells and bad spells with the tips and you could easily see that by looking at the graph of my P&L.

I was looking forward to Boxing Day as there is a feast of racing and with me being off work, I knew I’d get some quality time to spend on my analysis and I was hoping for a very good day. I also knew today would be a busy day for me also, so I was looking forward to getting some trading time and picking some winners.

26 trading races later and 17 tips later, not a single winner to show for it and as you can see above, a hefty loss to go with it. A £350 trading loss to go with a 16 point loss to suggested stakes with the tips and it’s pretty much a disaster for me and The Form Analyst.

This is painful to look at but here’s the P&L graph after the last 2 days:



So, where do I start? I’m not posting my BF P&L for today as it shows nothing apart from small losses in most races and a couple of hefty losses. I’ve tried my best to not show shitty P&L shots on here as it does nothing for my confidence and I’m not about to start now.

My worst result of the last 2 days was Twist Magic. On the form book, this was about the greatest certainty that you can get in racing in my opinion as it was 2/1 against horses rated far inferior to it and all it had to do was run to the form it has shown many times on good ground and was in the process of showing last time until it fell in the Master Minded race.

Today, I was using £100 trading stakes on it to back and lay and at the off, I had about £180 riskfree on it to win as it was heavily punted pre-race and it was the easiest horse to trade this year! Just before the off, it started to play up at the start and people started laying it. I then got involved again with a few to take some money in running but I ended up taking £100 IR on it and the horse just never travelled. I knew my fate very early on and it was basically a £100 punt that went wrong and the layers were right to lay it at the start when it played up.

This is the sort of result that has me tearing my hair out in racing. All Twist Magic had to do was run to some sort of form to win the race as the eventual winner and runner-up ran to their best form which was about 20lbs worse than Twist’s form from last time. It really is hard to figure out and I’m left with a sizable bet on a horse that ran poorly. I also gave that out as a confident tip today, so that didn’t do the subscribers much good.

The same comment applies to a horse called Pop at Wetherby which gave a horse an
easy lead and the money I took IR was pretty much lost very early on in the race.
My other bad race today was Newmill in the Irish Chase and I again took some money IR to get out as it usually front runs and travels well. The writing was on the wall very early with this one and another hefty loss here after getting caught out by a drift.

My best bet of the day was Harry Tricker in the last race at Kempton today and it was one of the best backed horses of the day. It was going in a 15 horse race and the horse needed a decent pace. I was throwing things at my TV as they went a crawl and was shouting at the jockey to let it go on and take the lead as it was pulling for its head the whole way at the back and had no chance. It was a never nearer 6th I think at the end but it had no chance as it effectively turned into a 5f sprint which is not what it wanted.

Yesterday, I wanted to be against Kauto Star and as the money came, the more I laid and I was happy to gamble a little IR. Obviously, this wasn’t the best decision I’d made and this went belly up. To make matter worse, I had £600 riskfree return on Alberta’s Run which finished 2nd in the race and I didn’t make a penny from this IR at all.

I could go on and discuss another 20 races where I’ve had small losses or small wins but the wins were few and far between and I struggled all day with horses running poorly. I can barely recall a day where I read so many races badly and this will be on my mind for a while yet.

One of the things that I don’t understand about the last 2 days is that I’ve put more work into my analysis and set aside some decent time to enable me to trade properly. I expected to win a fair amount trading and at the least, expected to have a few winnings tips to enable us to finish off the month very well. No idea what happened today and looking at the results tonight, I’m scratching my head a little as I was nowhere near to finding some of the winners today and it worries me a bit.

So much of this game is about confidence and until today, I’d been very confident that things were going well and I was riding the crest of a wave this month with winning tips. Tonight, I feel down and I can’t believe I’m only around 10 points in profit this month. I was looking at a 30 point profit at one stage and that has evaporated very quickly under my nose and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.

There have been various times when I’ve felt under pressure with the tips and obviously, when I had a new subscriber who had 34 losing tips at the start, I felt a huge strain then but I’m probably feeling a bit worse now. I’ve had a few new subscribers recently who joined on the back of decent results and they must be asking themselves why the hell they have bothered no doubt. One guy is about 18 points down after a week and I can’t imagine he’ll be too chuffed with his investment.

I’m so desperate to separate myself from other tipsters out there and I feel like I’ve taken a massive step backwards over the last few days. I’m shell shocked with what has happened and reading JP’s blog tonight makes me cringe when I see all the tips and no winners. Knowing people are losing small fortunes on my poor advice is hard to take and I’m gutted about the last two days.

I’ll no doubt ease back on the tips a little and try to claw my way back into the game but I’m now on a losing run of 19 tips which is another horrendous run. I think it’s one winning tip in about 33 or something and that’s a near disaster for a tipster. Thankfully, I’ve been playing each-way a little and have had a few placed, so it hasn’t been as bad as it sounds but not far off it.

The only thing that keeps me going is I know deep down I’m much better than I’ve shown everyone in the last couple of days. I think I’m much, much better but I now have a lot to prove again. I’ve been here before and I’ll be here again in the future no doubt, so it’s time to stand up and be counted again. Let’s hope I can rise to the challenge.

With regards to my trading, I know I messed up a bit today but I’m not going to be too hard on myself. I’ve done well this year and after last month, I can’t moan too much about a bad month. I’ll get it back next month……………

1 comment:

Craig said...

Hi.

I have lurked upon your blog since the very start and whilst having no interest in horse racing have been amazed at your progress at both trading and predicting.

I do hope that you continue with the blog as it is definitely one of the best out there and am pleased to see you appear to have had a few victories since your last post - Try not to be so concerned with losing runs, as you have clearly demonstrated a talent in this area and that talent will show itself in the long term, and your subscribers will be well aware of this.

I have also started writing a blog about trading on Betfair and have linked to your blog - Please let me know if you want me to take the link down!