An Introductory Post

Hi All and welcome to my first blog.

Bear with me while I get used to this blog software / layout ‘n stuff, it won’t take too long I hope. Anyway, here’s a sort of introductory thingy about my trading history, current trading style and targets etc.

Although I’ve been trading on and off for about 3 years I am by no means an expert or seasoned trader. I consider myself to be an experienced beginner and that is probably being kind to myself.

I started by buying (off eBay I think) a guide to “in-running” horse race trading and toyed with this for the duration of a Bet Angel Pro 20 day trial offer. During this trial I found that I preferred to trade pre-race and I don’t think I’ve traded horses in-play since.

I did get interested in in-play “event” trading and probably the most popular and well known of these is laying the draw in a football match and then backing the draw when a goal is scored. I still do some in-play “event” trading.

In August 2008 I stumbled across the blog “£1k - £100k” by Pinsticker and, for me, it became compulsive reading as did Adam Heathcote’s blog “£0 - £150,000 Challenge” These journals rekindled my interest in trading and I set about learning as much as I could from the two blogs.

In mid December 2008 I started pre-race trading with the minimum £2 stake with a reasonable amount of success. I’ve since raised my trading level through £5, £10 and last week lifted that again to £25 per trade commencing Monday 26th January 2009.

My starting bank was £250 and I will trade at 10% of the available bank by trading where the odds are less than or equal to 5.0. The odds range may change in the future but this limits my maximum liability to the trade level x 4. My plan is to “reserve” 50% of any daily profit and draw this from my Betfair account when the figure reaches a set level, maybe £10 I don’t know yet. By applying the reserve I get some reward for “getting it right” and the bank (and therefore trade level) increases with time.

I set myself some initial targets, possibly too easy I’m not sure, to achieve and these were arrived at by reading the above challenge blogs. The targets consist of 2 elements, an average per race percentage and an average daily profit percentage. I prefer to work in percentages as these are easily applicable to any values, whether practical or not.

My average per race profit target is currently 1.5% of trading level and at £25 trades that equates to £0.38 net profit per race. My average daily profit target is currently 10% of trading level and at £25 trades that equates to £2.50 net profit per day. I intend to post the stats and my comments/thoughts as I progress and will revise the targets from time to time as I already know I can do better.

At the moment I have a “personal development” target to learn as much as I can in as short a space of time as possible. Whilst this is somewhat unquantifiable I expect it will be borne out by results.

One further target is to attend Peter Webbs “Betting Exchange Academy” course. I have registered my interest and hope to be able to attend one as soon as Peter is back to some normality following the death of his Father.

Now, if this blog is not what you are looking for then no worries, I won’t be offended, hell, I won’t even know, but for those of you that have stayed this far with the above drivel, I thank you as it turned out to be much longer than I expected and I hope it has been of some interest to you. I hope you enjoy reading my future posts and please feel free to contact me if you wish.

Regards to you all.

Andy