THE START

The first thing I need to say about this blog is "Their will be no bullshit" what is the point, i am not out to impress anyone, con anyone or blind anyone with things that just are not true.
I won't ramble on about my background about hating this job or that job and trading has always been my dream etc etc. The fact is I wanna be a trader, I love sports and has a friend and fellow trader once said to me, "what could be better than sitting at home all day watching sport and getting paid for it."
I have been trading in-between jobs, (There is that horrible 4 letter word again) about 2 years, yes I know not long but how do you put a time scale on these things. I am not University educated, have no degrees and no diplomas but how many of these highly educated people have left education and are now working at McDonalds with 50 grand debts around their neck. Yes I do get a bit political sometimes.
I started sports trading after following the usual path of matched betting, signed on with every betting site under the sun and eventually made about 300 quid until the offers ran out and the bookies got the hump and closed my accounts down left and right, just a tip here, they don't like you to win.
So I discovered Betfair, I don't want to go into the benefits of Betfair or what it does, anybody reading this blog should know that already. The bottom line is they are an exchange, where fellow traders can back and lay and take money off each other and Betfair can grab there 5% commission on winning transactions. Just another footnote here, a while back Betfair introduced the premium charge for highly successful traders, I honestly don't know to what level but can I just say that I am definitely not one of them.
When I first joined Betfair, I started to trade on every sport going, Football, Tennis, Cricket, Darts, F1, Golf and of course Horse racing, any team sport. individual sport. You see I thought I knew it all, I have been watching sport all my life. you can't tell me anything about sport, I didn't need a plan, or a strategy. I didn't need to protect my bank if I fancied a team I would put 50 quid on them. I didn't need stats or graphs or team news. I didn't need an entry or an exit point. So low and behold I started to lose, blowing up banks, one after the other. The easiest thing in the world is to put on a trade and win, the hardest thing is to shrug your shoulders when it loses. I started to take things personal when i lost, i would blame everyone else but me, the faceless trader who had just took my money, the favourite who got boxed in and finished third, the odds on favourite at Roland Garros who actually cannot play on clay. The golfer playing with a new putter, the darts player who has just started playing with and not quite used to his new darts yet. The injured striker who has just been carried off on a stretcher. I think you get the idea. There are a million ways to lose and each one at some point will get you, it is a fact it is apart of the game, dealing with it is the hard part.
So I took a step back and tried to assess where I was going wrong. Firstly I realised i was not a jack of all trades, the most successful traders concentrate on one sport. I thought i would concentrate on Horse racing even though i am not really a fan but hey there are dozens of opportunities every day. Now my take on Horse racing is that you trade the back and lay or visa versa on another piece of software that works in tandem with Betfair. Again I will not go into the ins and outs of the benefits etc, anyone who is serious about trading should already have this software. I use Betrader, but there is others of course, Betangel, Geeks Toy, Gruss etc. The only reason I use Betrader is because it is compatible with my iMac. So i would start by trading the price up and down the ladder, laying and backing until matched. Then I would go in play and try and lay the winner. Great in theory until that horse you layed to lose actually romps home by 10 lengths and those 6 successful lays you have taken all day to win, gets wiped out and more in one 6 furlong race. Oh yes happened to me many times, I have layed the winner of the Grand National, the Derby, King George, a seller at Carlisle, a handicap race at Lingfield, every course, distance, flat or over the jumps you can mention. So again I thought I have to remedy this, I had read and heard all the stories about not going in play, the cardinal sin, but I don't like to lose and so when I had just backed and layed and not been matched and was 33p down, i took it personal, all clear thinking and reasonable behaviour goes out the window, so if I just let it ride in the race and i promise lord i will back it out with a profit however small, I mean the horse is in a field of 20 and it is 9.4, no chance of winning. So the race starts and the horse never gets above the 9.4 and romps home from no where and that is another bank down the drain. Why oh why didn't I just take the 33p loss, because i am a gambler, i am arrogant because I don't like to lose. So I eventually realised I needed some help here, after reading hundreds of online blogs, watching hundreds of online videos. I decided to go on a one day seminar run by Betrader and presented by Tony Hargreaves also known as the badger. Now I must stress I am not here to champion anyone or recommend any product or institution or for that matter blow smoke up Tony's backside. I will just say that the course was enlightening and an eye opener and gave me a new perspective on things, not so much on the aspect of trading but the money management and the psychology involved in being a trader as well has the importance of keeping records after every trade and most importantly taking away the element of greed and learning to lose. After all every trader loses, nobody wins all the time. After the course I bought one of Tony's ebooks on trading horse racing in play. I gave it another shot with my new found knowledge and that brings me to another old saying, "You can give a man the right tools for the job but that does not mean he can build a wall!" Yes you guessed it I failed again, another bank gone, I struggled spotting the lay and back opportunities and however hard i tried to read the actions of a tired beaten horse, i invariably got it wrong. Maybe i was trying to run before i could walk, I watched a hundred races maybe I needed to watch a thousand, but the conclusion I came to was, horse racing is just not my thing.
When I was 6 my dad took me to my first football game Leicester city v Birmingham city, I remember it well, I remember watching Arsenal beat Liverpool 2-1 in the 1971 F.A Cup final and knew that this was my team, I collected football cards as a kid and laying them all over the floor and being mesmerised by all the players and the different kits they wore. I cried when England lost in tournaments and cheered when English teams won European trophies on a regular basis. I would sit for hours watching game after game and talk incessantly with friends about every aspect of every match. I am still like that today and so it seemed the bleeding obvious thing to do stick to what you like and know about, so I started to trade football.