Tuesday

Hi folks,

Yesterday's bet on the favs strategy lost having traded short again in-running. I could do with a couple of winners to boost up the cash balance although I'm not too worried about the stats just yet and the run of form is nothing out of the ordinary. At the moment, stats on the fav strategy is as follows:

Bets: 69
Wins: 34
Strike rate: 49%
Profit to Betfair SP assuming commission is 5%: +15.07pts

One thing I have noticed however, is that it has performed a bit worse than normal lately and I wonder if that's because all the decent racing has been cancelled, leaving only the all-weather meetings to survive. As such, I've started to record a bit more about each bet and it will be interesting to see if the lower class of race proves to be a hindrance. I won't change anything for now but I'll certainly make more notes.

Anyhow, one for that today, here's Timeform's comment:

3.20 Lingfield: Dr. Livingstone
Held back by temperament when last seen over jumps in first half of 2011, but has returned to form in jumpers' bumpers of late, winning at Kempton last time. Much respected in current mood.

As regards the financial trading, I've been a bit quiet on that but there's a good gap opportunity today. As you can see from the chart below where I've drawn some lines, last night's closing price around 9.30pm on the S&P500 daily rolling index was 1496.1. Around noon today, it was trading at 1492.1 which is a drop of 4pts. The idea here is to buy at 1492.1 and wait on the 'gap' to close. The S&P doesn't like gaps, especially on the downside, and more often than not, the Americans will close it when they hit their desks around now. So if/when the price rises back to 1496.1, I get out and take my profit. The stop loss is one and a half times the gap so in this case, 1486.1.