Free Racing Diary

Just a quick post to say that you can register for a free Racing Diary with Racing UK. As a subscriber I have had one for the last few years. I always find it useful as it has all the racing fixtures so you can plan out your trading and look out for the big meetings. I don't think you need to be a subscriber because they didn't as for any subscription details. So treat yourself to a diary or get a cheap Christmas present for someone!

Greyhound Grief

I meant to post this earlier but forgot. I ventured into the Greyhounds on Tuesday. I meant just to have a look. So I decided to use a bank of about £50. I think perhaps someone was giving me a message not to bother. In the first race the 1558 at Sunderland I was happily trading on the fav when at 1556 the market was suspended and I was left with £42 liability. Now my bet was a lay so the fav duly obliged and won. Now I am not one of those people that believe these things always go against you because they don't. At times these sort of things have gone in my favour. If you read some people they must be the unluckiest traders in the world because every time Betfair mess up a suspension the long shot they had layed wins!

Anyway this has put me off the Greyhounds for a while. I don't think it was Betfairs fault because I presume that the race just went off early. I have checked my clock and it is right. Therefore I won't trade them if this sort of thing happens.

Evening Winter Racing

Now that it is pitch black when I get back from work most of my trading has to focus around the all-weather racing at Kempton and Wolverhampton. These markets can be very different from the markets in the day. Big Steamers and Drifters are very common mainly due to two factors
1) The racing is usually very poor in quality
2) This means that it takes very little money to move the price of a horse

Moves like the picture above are fairly common place. This horse halved in price in about 5 mins. If you are really brave you can even try the markets at Dundalk. Although these can be very thin. Anyway it is possible to make a decent amount and tonight I was able to clear £40 with small stakes.

Some improvement.

Today saw me return to some profitable trading. The highlight being the race above. I was very pleased with this as I thought carefully about when to enter this trade and things went perfectly. Sometimes I think I enter the market with very little thought and this is when I get caught. The rest of the trading was steady if unspectacular, that one race accounted for two thirds of my profit for the day. I think this was a good example of letting profits run however sometimes I think I look for big trades too often. I traded some of the breeders cup races and am looking forward to trying a few tonight.

The Wall

If trading is supposed to be a marathon not a sprint then I think I have hit the wall. Now I know that this time of year is going to be difficult for me with the lack of opportunities but this hard! The last week my trading is like this I either get in a green position only to make it red or it is red as soon as I open my trade. I think part of the problem is the pressure to match the returns of the Summer even though the opportunities are much smaller especially for a part time trader. Anyway I am telling myself that I just need to keep things ticking along and improvement will come. The most pleasing thing about this spell is I have kept my discipline telling myself to hang in and the profits will start to flow again. In previous years I have lost my discipline in spells like this and then made some stupid in-play trades.