Weathering the storm

Sorry for the lack of updates lately, I've been mad busy with work. A quick review of the past week or two.

Place lays have been absolutely terrible. Took an absolute hammering and they went from over 100pts profit to about 79pts profit:

A drop of 20pts is tough to take although looking at the chart gives me some comfort as it shows the overall long term picture. Hopefully they will get back on track soon. 

Part of my challenge included some place laying so that's taken a hit - I'll update that with a proper P&L  when I get a bit of time.

On a positive note, the strategy I mentioned a few weeks ago (automated inplay trading) is working quite well. I'm only using €10 stakes at the moment as it's still on test but so far so good. Basically, I set up a spreadsheet with Gruss Software with a load of triggers to place bets under certain conditions in-running. It's more or less an automated version of what I was doing myself although you can never totally replicate how you would act in any given situation. 

At the moment, if the trade goes well I earn €4 and if it goes wrong I lose €2. The strike rate is just under 50% which is fantastic as it produces around 15 trades a day. Unfortunately, it's not as simple when you want to scale up. A lot of people add a zero and think that if they were using €100, they would be earning €40 per winning trade. But the more you scale up, the bigger the effect your stakes have on the market. This is especially true of thinly traded in-running markets such as Irish racing. While €100 might be OK, €1000 might be totally out of place.

But I'll keep plugging away and have decided to increase the stakes this weekend in preparation for Royal Ascot. Not sure how it will work there but at least it's been a good distraction to work on while the place lays were taking a hammering!