Good old form study

Currently working on something that looks promising...

Last year, I ran a (free) tipping site, waynebaileyracing.com and I’m thinking of re-establishing it sometime in the near future. 

I got a fairly big following at the time as the profits were OK and made a nice few quid from affiliate links but I stopped tipping as I simply hadn’t got the time.  I do miss doing it though and the extra income from both the bets and the affiliates was welcome.

So I decided to start doing some serious form study again, usually early in the morning and so far, the results are positive. If it continues to go well, I may re-establish the tipping site. This time though, I’m only concentrating on a couple of races per day – and if there’s no bets, that’s fine. One of the problems with running a tipping site is that people expect selections every single day (even though it was free). You can also run into problems when you hit a losing run as you get slated on forums etc, but I guess that comes with the territory.

I wouldn’t call it a system as I’m doing from study but I have found that a systematic approach (concentrating on certain races and horses) has helped cut out most of the poor bets and so far, this work has paid off. I’m not sure if or when I’ll get the tipping site going again, I may just stick the selections on the blog, but it feels good to be able to take a few quid from the markets, especially since I'm using my own ratings and tissue prices for the bets. I’ll post about it again in the future but here’s the early results, recorded to €10 stakes at Betfair SP, assuming one was on the maximum 5pc commission:

Bets: 20
Wins: 10
Strike Rate: 50pc
Average price: 2.94
Profit to €10 stakes: 67.20

Here's the qualifiers so far - I'm having a particularly good run the past few days:

Mad markets

Had a small few quid in one of my trading accounts and tried to do a bit this week but it's very choppy with this whole France/Germany row and I've decided to get out and go to cash for a bit until it settles.

http://www.independent.ie/business/european/debt-crisis-european-shares-soar-on-hopes-leaders-will-hammer-out-deal-to-ease-chaos-2913795.html

Will there be a deal? who knows but I'm afraid of getting caught in one of the many swings so I'll watch from the sidelines.

As I type, the Euro/USD is 1.3844 which is up from a few days ago but still quite low compared to April or may.

Investor & Trader summit

Took a day off today to go into town for the Investor & Trader summit, run by Marketspreads.

http://www.marketspreads.ie/come-to-2011-investor-trader-summit.html

David McWilliams is the chair and it looks quite interesting. Peter Brown, who runs the IIFT trading course I'm doing, is also a speaker as is Charlie Fell from the Irish Times.

I've been to these sort of things before and I usually find that you learn a few bits and bob.

The IIFT course, by the way, is really enjoyable and I've learned quite a bit in the first two weeks. Can't wait to put some of it to practice but I've decided to open up a demo account again just to try out some of the new strategies before going live with bigger money.

I've no open positions with my live account at the moment - things are still quite funny and it's hard to make a decision about which way the markets going. 

Otherwise, I've not much to report.

On a non related note, a mate of mine is giving me a car this weekend :-)    I drove a motorbike for years but it's high time I learned to drive a car so I'm looking forward to something new although I am a tiny bit nervous. I have a bet of €150 with the wife - I told her I'd drive down in the car and pick her up from work at Christmas. She says I wont. So I've a couple of months to learn to drive as I sure as hell ain't giving her a ton and half!

Learning to trade (financials)

I've been doing pretty well trading the financial markets (albeit with a small bank) in the past year and while it's good to pat oneself on the back for a job well done, I won't pretend I didn't catch some good lucky upswings which greatly added to the total. Still, I feel I'm learning all the time and still find it absolutely fascinating, which is great as I don't get bored reading or learning about the topics.

But there's tonnes of room for learning/improvement. Despite keeping in the black, I've really only dipped my toe into the water of financial trading and want to take it a bit further. So tomorrow, I'm starting that diploma with the Irish Institute of Financial Trading and I'm looking forward to it immensely.

The course was expensive, €950 in fact, and I'm not naive enough to think this will be some sort of silver bullet that will make me become a super trader or anything - but there's only so much you can learn at home from reading books/websites and I think the course can't hurt. I've hear very good things about it anyway so fingers crossed.

When I first started trading on Betfair, I lost a fortune and I wish there had been some sort of course out there back then. I eventually done Peter Webb's course (founder of Betangel) and it set me on the right track. That course was expensive too but it paid for itself numerous times over at this stage. Hopefully, this diploma course will eventually earn/save me €950 cost the cost over time.

Elsewhere, I see that Greece hasn't met its targets and we have (yet another) 'crisis' with the Euro. You kinda wonder how many crises' (is crisis' the plural of crisis?) we can go through before the arse just falls out of it.

Whatever happens with the Euro and Greece, hopefully some of us can make a couple of bob out of it somehow. I've no positions at the moment though as I have to get some funds back into my trading accounts (I withdrew quite a lot when I went off on hols).

I've a busy week ahead and my missus is away for the week at Cambridge to study so I doubt I'll get near the Betfair markets as I'll be minding my daughter when I'm not working. If I can nip and hour or two here or there, I'll report on my progress.