A GRAND little system

Good morning folks, it's been a while since I put up a blog. I was away in Portugal last week so I haven't been doing much betting although I got back to it yesterday. Portugal was great craic - I went away with 12 lads from the local pub so it was plenty of fun and great weather too. It was a place called Albefeira (in the Algarve) and the weather was just perfect, around 25-30 degrees each day:

I'm not trading as much as I'd like due to time restrictions but I'll be back to it soon. I have automated some of my strategies and that's working out OK. Automation is a road I want to look into further - there's something great about heading out for the day, letting the computer do its thing according to your rules, and then (hopefully) coming home to a slightly bigger Betfair balance. But of course, automation comes with loads of extra risks and nothing comes easy. Plenty of stuff can't be automated and you can never account for those random events that happen when trading. But still, if you take the lead from the financial trading world (where there's a huge amount of automation), there are bound to be some opportunities with a bit of hard work. I'll keep working on it.

As regards the living dangerously strategy which I've posted about a few times before - it's going very well and I have the profit over the €1,000 mark at this stage. Basically, it involves rating horses, then laying the worst rated horses in the place market. It's risky though, as most horses are high prices although I do have a cut off at 100.0. Until very recently, I had been using €2 stakes but I've upped it to €3 since the bank hit one large (€1,000). Of course, I don't always get my money fully matched. Sometimes I will get a quid or two matched so the average stake has been €1.98. I'm leaving orders under the price a few minutes before the off and if it's not matched, that's fine. At this end of the market, you can't just take any old price just because it's an outsider. You have to be sensitive to getting the best price just as you would were it an odds on shot.
While I haven't withdrawn the money, that's enough to cover my holiday which is what it's all about. It makes the long hours, late nights and early mornings worth it.

I'd love to get it to €2,000 soon at which point I'll increase the stakes to €4 but it's one step at a time and I'm acutely aware that a couple of bad bets in a row will wipe out hundreds from the bank. I'll keep the blog updated with progress. Here's a snapshot and a chart of how it's been going so far:

Number of bets: 2081

Losing bets: 44
Strike Rate: 97.89%
Average stake: €1.98
Current stake: €3.00

Average price of bet: 44.17
Average price of losing bets: 34.39

Total profit: €1,090.55

***

Wayne Bailey's book 'Sports Trading on Betfair' is available on Amazon.

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Click here to read the Racing Post's book review