Sports Trading Diary Entry 11 030412

Sports Trading Diary Entry 11 030412

It’s been a week since I updated my sports trading diary and I’ve been football trading every day since my last entry. To read today’s football trading diary entry see below, but first;

I started sports trading (mainly football matches) on Bet Fair at the beginning of February 2012.

Follow my progress in my daily (almost!) updated sports trading diary entries.

Firstly though, I missed out on a fabulous offer for new sports traders to get a free £25 bet – the first time they start sports trading on Bet Fair. So to make sure you don’t miss out on this wonderful offer;

Claim a risk free £25 free bet at Bet Fair, click Bet Fair £25 bet. Make sure when you join the site, that you use or see the code HU4XE6MTR in the relevant voucher area to get your risk free £25 bet.

If HU4XE6MTR doesn’t show in the relevant box when you are filling in the joining page, you might not get your £25 free bet and that would be a shame to miss eh?

Today’s sports trading diary entry comes with an admission of falling back into my old gambling ways, being too clever, tweaking / messing with a winning sports trading strategy and not sticking with a football trading strategy that worked.

On the 23rd of March I posted an entry titled Best Day Football Trading So Far 23/03/2012 and I am ashamed to say that this last week I have lost all my football trading profits and am back to square one – at the same position that I started the day off with on the 23rd of March and I can’t even pretend that I transferred the balance from BetFair back to my bank account.

If my wife was reading this football trading diary entry after knowing how well I was doing for about 10 days before tweaking the system that was providing positive results, she’d give me a right telling off.

A week or so ago I was full of optimism, football trading was going to provide me with a reasonable additional daily income – I couldn’t seem to fail, every day was a profitable day football trading wise and I was almost at an eureka point… Then I decided to fine tune my football trading strategy with disastrous results!

With the football trading strategy I employ, I could trade the same match several times in-play depending on what was happening in the match. You don’t need to be a genius to work out that this basically is reliant on goals (or lack of them) being scored – that is after all the aim of the football match.

The problem being is that I was winning my trades so often I decided to throw caution to the wind and leave (if I had any open at the time) my last trades of the match open and in-play. The problem being is that I was leaving myself open to what 22 blokes on the field did, rather than closing the trade pre-full time for a profit – no matter what the outcome.

In some cases I was actually being ‘greedy’ for a small percent extra of profit. This worked for a while, but as with all things it seems to have come crashing down in flames Thursday last week. I was in an open position on several of the Europa League matches and if you watched those matches, you will know that in three of them there was last minute goals – in injury time.

This saw me lose on three trades that I should have closed before the 90 minutes (strange things happen in injury time) for a profit. I then committed the cardinal sin of not learning my lesson. After all, I had been successful prior to these three ‘blips’ and therefore I decided to continue with the strategy of leaving the last trade (if I was involved near the end of normal time) open until the final whistle.

The weekend 31st March – 1st April (April Fool’s Day) saw my losing streak continue. The last match I traded was the Sporting Lisbon match late on Sunday evening. Again I was in a winning trade when Sporting Lisbon scored during the last moments of injury time. Once again I lost and lost big time.

I spent yesterday cursing the gods of chance, went through my daily sports trading logs for the period that I was trading profitably and then for the period that I was losing. It was glaringly obvious when going back through my logs what the difference was between profitable and losing days.

 As the thread in response to my post on there titled Football Trading – Starting Again… on the Geeks Toy forum stated by one of the regular contributors; ’That’s why I pull out towards the end. And as for football trading…’

Sound advice and I won’t be leaving my trades open at the end of the football match from now on.

I have once again started writing on the top of my printed off football trading logs ‘Trade NOT Gamble’ – not that I should need this advice, as I seem to keep slipping back to the old gambling ways, only to have my fingers burned and regret and vow not to do it again!

What is evident though, is how much I enjoy trading football on BetFair. It’s nice to have profitable trades, and now I have tasted that feeling of success, I plan to go back to it and repeat it as often as possible.

Tonight there are several Champions League matches – I have already traded on these pre-kick off and it would appear that I will be able to close my trades before the match actually starts for a few ticks of profit.

In fact if you read the above and concentrate on big matches, it is a ‘winning’ strategy that you can employ with little risk before the match actually goes in-play. The key with this is to if you are able, check the odds at around 9am on the day of the match, then check again at 10am. If the odds are moving in the same direction at 11am, I jump on and back looking to lay off pre kick off for a profit.

The above works for me around 90% of the time and I seem to be able to trade out for a scratch or small loss the other 10% of the time. In fact it’s so good that I should (if I was inclined that way) write a ebook or pdf on the football trading strategy and sell it on ebay or something!

I hope to be updating this football trading diary tomorrow with positive results, but for now my BetFair sports trading balance stands at £146.65

Sports Trading Diary Entry 11 030412