Adam Heathcote

[ShaunWhite]

That name's is a blast from the past. I used to have a copy of his first 18 monthly totals printed out and on my desk as inspiration.

[Kai]

This might still be useful to someone actually, I'll copy it below, Adam explaining his entry & exit points in depth etc, dug up from an old txt file. Since I'm not sure the comment section of the blog has endured the sands of time.

Entry Points

There are different types of entry points given the information you are basing the entry upon. These are:

Graph history
Weight of money
Book over-round
Price bands
Time before the off
Specific market tendencies; i.e. repeating patterns
Price movement; i.e. how far has the price already moved.
Price movement of another horse
Matched and unmatched bets
Commentators voicing opinions
No. of runners
Horses 'playing' up, etc.

All of these need to be taken into consideration when placing an entry - the better you can learn about every single one of these, and your ability to process them all very quickly will help you get a great entry point. I will keep the explanations brief as I could probably write a full blog post for each section!

Graph history
I think it's important to get to grips with using graphs religiously, as what has already happened is, in my opinion, a massive indicator of what is likely to happen. The less graph history there is, either using the Betfair graph or Bet Angel graphing, the harder it is to predict the future, but closer to the 5 minute mark before the off, the easier it is. But remember, never solely base your decision on one thing; you need to use a number of these indicators to make the right decision.

Weight of money
In my opinion, is important as ever; but never solely base a decision on just this. Watch money flowing in and out of the market and eventually you'll be able to judge at what points in time before the race where weight of money is a true reflection of potential price movements.

Book over-round
This is one of those facts that you don't need to be intuitive to understand; if the book over-round is close to 100%, you know that something has got to give way in the prices of the horses. A tip: most likely the one that has already been either drifting or steaming.

Price bands
If there are a few minutes prior to the off time, take a look on the far right column of the Bet Angel ladder interface. Here you will see the total amount matched for each price. If you see that 30K has been matched on every price between 3.2 and 3.5, then outside those prices the amount matched drops to 15K and less, you now know that the price has predominantly stayed between those prices for a while, and the graph is most likely to reflect that, so the price is much more likely to carry on staying between those two prices. Being aware of the time before the off is, in my opinion a very important factor for using this indicator.

Time before the off
Being aware of the amount of time before the race is due off I think is pretty important. For example if there is just 30 second to go before the off, there is much less chance of there being a massive swing in price, the same goes if there is only 10 minutes before the off. Making the connection between time and price movements will help you with your entry.

Market tendencies
You need to be aware of patterns in the market that are repeating. So for example, prices moving inside a price band - they usually see-saw between the upper and lower 'boundaries', but seldom in equivalent timings.

Price movement
If a price has moved from 2.0 to 3.0 for example, you should know that the price isn't just going to continue drifting forever out to 1000. Taking price movements that have already happened can help you make decisions about entry points. Taking the example of a move from 2.0 to 3.0, you should be much less inclined to then lay the horse at 3 given what's already happened.

Price movement of another horse
Say for example you have two favourites price equally at 3.0 If the price of one of the favourites started to drift, the price of the other favourite will more likely than not do the opposite. There are many more scenarios I've subconsciously learned I could explain, but that example gives the simplest explanation of what to be aware of.

Matched and unmatched bets
If someone jumped in the market and just backed a horse with L6,000 for example, the price is much more likely to go south; there are many explanations as to why, a couple being the weight of money has now changed, or L2,000 of that could have been traders, in which case they now need to get out. Unmatched bets simply add to the mixer of whether or not they are going to get matched, whether it's 'spoofing' - i.e. they don't want the money to get matched, and whether or not for example it's a punter's money and they are keen to get their money matched so they 'drag' their money down intentionally to get matched.

Commentators voicing opinion
If a commentator or a successful punter, e.g. Dave Nevison (when he's on a winning run!), starts explaining every reason under the sun why a certain horse can or cannot win, most likely people are going to react to them, therefore these opportunities can serve as an excellent entry point.

No. of runners
If there are only 2 runners for example, their prices will move nearly perfectly to each other; keeping a low book percentage. That's one of the easiest examples, but if you build up a picture of all the races you trade and remember the number of runners, you will start to see price movement patterns appear. Knowing and learning this can help with entry points.

Horses 'playing' up
This is well documented and known by everyone; if a horse plays up the price is going to drift and serves as a good entry point to lay the horse in question, or even back one of the other favourites if the horse is a strong contender.

While writing this, I felt I could have explained everything into a lot more detail - I never realised I actually analysed things subconsciously into so much detail so quickly whilst I trade. I will go into the technicalities with screenshots of specific examples another time. There may be a few more indicators I have forgotten to mention, I've listed all the ones I could think of whilst writing this.

I'll make my next post on exit points; it should be much simpler.

Regarding my challenge, it's going great. I didn't trade bank holiday Monday - I took the time to play golf and beat two of my friends! I did pretty appalling with 31 points, but it was only the 2nd time I played in over a year! Yesterday I managed to just scrape over L2,000 profit; all in all it was a pretty uneventful day (sounds silly I know) - I was auto-pilot the whole day.

Exit Points

Exiting your trade is as vitally important as entering a trade. If you have made a poor entry position, you'll be falling back on to your exit trade to determine whether you make a non-profit trade or a terrible trade.

If you missed the entry points post you can find it here.

Instead of repeating myself, all of the entry points are important to be aware of when making an exit trade. There aren't really any new points so I'll just cover each point where I can add new information with a perspective of exiting a trade.

Weight of money
After watching so many races, I've developed a good sense of deciding when the price will stop moving in one direction and head in the other. The way the money gets matched is different to the way a false move does; it's subtle and unexplainable, but if you watch carefully you can eventually get a better judgment.

Book over-round
Similar to entry points, if you're in position on a horse drifting, the over round will most likely be edging between 102-4, so you'll want to keep your eye on this as when the book starts tightening you'll want to think about getting out. But remember, you can't just rely on this, over hundreds of races you will start to get a feel of when the best time to exit is around.

Time before the off
Be careful with about a minute to go before the race is due off. A fair number of people will be exiting their positions and in my experience it's harder to predict. I also find that trends will usually come to an end with about a minute to go as the markets find an equilibrium; so if you backed a horse going down, then would be a good exit point if it's been a constant steamer, the same goes for drifters.

Matched and unmatched bets
Try and keep a tally of matched bets in your head so you know what's been matched going what way, this will help you decide on when to exit your trade; based on every factor I mentioned in the entry points also.

Commentators voicing opinion
I find that once a commentator voicing an opinion, it takes about 5 seconds on average for people to react, depending on how strong the opinion is and who is saying it. So getting in position by then is good. Getting out I find that the stronger the opinion, the closer to 30 seconds is a good point to get out, where as if it's weaker, closer to 10 seconds. Remember these are all guides and nothing definite, it's just roughly what goes on in my head during these events.

Horses 'playing' up
The same rule I explained in commentators voicing their opinion should be used here also. The more extreme a horse plays up the longer you should wait before getting out; this time the extreme end could be minutes. A horse being stubborn as an example of a tiny play-up, then exiting the trade could be no more than 10-20 seconds after it happened.

Regarding stop losses, I personally seldom use them. I prefer manually controlling my position and being aware of my net position in my head. Stop losses are very good when predicting long term trends. One attitude I take is to get out if I have any doubt greater than a strength of 2-3/10 that the price will move against me. Sometimes very slightly higher if I'm doing long term trends because you need to ignore the subtle swings in prices. These 'mini' swings in prices can be quite predictable - they occur because everyone is always constantly unsure at which point the price will stop and/or head in the other direction.

Never let trades go in-play, it's gambling if you do it on purpose because you felt bad about getting out at your current loss. If you don't know anything about in-play betting, then it's simple; stay away from it. If you are one these people who are addicted or just have a habit of letting it go in-play, try setting accountability on this. So whenever you purposefully let a race go in-play half way through a trade, make yourself do something you don't want to do, like cleaning the toilet - if you don't follow through on it, you're only letting yourself down and you will most likely never succeed at trading if you can't introduce good habits.

Never sit and hesitate too much on a trade, the more you hesitate, the more confidence you're draining from yourself - just get out of position and start again. This piece of advice is invaluable! The more you restart your trades, the more chance you give yourself from learning from mistakes. Also stop yourself from being in the 'what if' mentality. My flat mate used to do it all the time, saying things like 'If I got out a minute later, I would have got x more ticks and made Ly more!' - it's time wasting and you're not paying attention to the market, holding yourself back from valuable market experience! It's also just negative thinking. You want to be as confident as possible.

Always remember: before you succeed, you must fail; take each loss positively with the mindset 'Yes I lost money, it was a bad trade, on reflection I did x and y wrong, next time I will try and do this' If you say this after every bad trade, you will undoubtedly improve. This statement is basically what I think an intuitive person repeats in their head subconsciously every time a mistake is made. I have sidetracked a bit from exit points, but it's still important to know.

I have been fairly consistent this last week, apart from today where I was not focused at all. I started poorly and was L500 down after 7 or so races. I then managed to finish L100 up - I decided to stop because I couldn't get in the zone (it happens). So I went to go shopping, got half way to Westfield and turned around because what I really needed was a deep breather and some music to calm me down from the rush I was in in the morning. Anyway I managed to turn the day into a L1250 profit; very gutting because the liquidity was good today with the Newmarket meeting and if I was on form and focused, I felt like I would have make a killing. Oh well, there are plenty more races in the future. I've started Argentine Tango lessons, which have been great fun, I'll talk about that another day - but ladies - watch out!

I'm currently on about L207k so far, I'm going to edit the challenge for the final time, making it L350k instead of L250k; I think it's more of a challenge to me which should help me refocus throughout the remainder of this year.

[Trader Pat]

Its a shame his blog is no longer available online, probably the best trading blog I've read.

You can still view the blog, The Wayback Machine website had it stored : https://web.archive.org/web/20120419121 ... .co.uk:80/

It's one of the very few blogs that I've actually read at the very beginning, have it saved somewhere but from memory there weren't too many concrete trading tips.

That's not the whole blog just a few pages worth. Don't think his blog was ever intended to be a guide though, seemed to me he was just putting his thoughts down and maybe a few tips thrown in along the way.

People would learn more reading that blog from start to finish (if it were available) than they would from someone giving a few trading tips while trying to flog an e-book. I've learned a lot from reading between the lines of what proper traders have said. The 'not so proper' traders though make everything sound very easy so you have lots of people starting out expecting to make money straight away. For some when they can't they expect others to walk them through every trade, and when they don't then its a big conspiracy.

Getting tips from top traders isn't going to make you a profitable trader. Figuring your own mind out is much more important to becoming profitable, for me The Holy Grail of trading is reached when you get out of your own way.

[Kai]

Getting tips from top traders isn't going to make you a profitable trader.

But what about clips?? Or quips??

[paspuggie48]

This might still be useful to someone actually, I'll copy it below, Adam explaining his entry & exit points in depth etc, dug up from an old txt file. Since I'm not sure the comment section of the blog has endured the sands of time.

Good stuff Kai !!

[ShaunWhite]

Getting tips from top traders isn't going to make you a profitable trader.

Mmmm sort of depends. For me someone said do X, i did X and I've made a decent living from it now for coming up to 3yrs. But X was an entire methodology and mindset rather than 'exercise before work' or 'look for the fav being supported'.

Trouble is that being a good trader and being a good teach aren't even vaguely correlated, and neither is being enthusiastic and being a good student. Unfortunately most people who want to learn something don't understand how to learn, which is a skill in itself that you have to acquire before you even start with the difference between a back and a lay. Once you've learnt how to learn there's nothing you can't do.

[Trader Pat]

Getting tips from top traders isn't going to make you a profitable trader.

Mmmm sort of depends. For me someone said do X, i did X and I've made a decent living from it now for coming up to 3yrs. But X was an entire methodology and mindset rather than 'exercise before work' or 'look for the fav being supported'.

Well exactly, an entire methodology isn't a tip. But even a methodology isn't much use if you don't have the right mindset.

[ShaunWhite]

This might still be useful to someone actually, I'll copy it below, Adam explaining his entry & exit points in depth etc, dug up from an old txt file. Since I'm not sure the comment section of the blog has endured the sands of time.

Good stuff Kai !!

It's good stuff but every point still requires subjectivity so it's a long way from A+B=£. The other observation is that it's mostly just common sense and common sense is something people either have or don't have rather than a list you have to remember. If you need to be told that a price that's moving won't keep moving to 1.01 or 1000 then this isn't the job for you.

....too much time on my hands today obv. I need to get off the forum and get a life.

[ShaunWhite]

Well exactly, an entire methodology isn't a tip. But even a methodology isn't much use if you don't have the right mindset.

+1 Pat, I didn't mean it to sound like I was disagreeing even though I started with "it depends". Let's just say that some tips are bigger than others. If it fits on a Post-It note it's not going to change your life much.

[ShaunWhite]

What I'm most pleased about is people on here still calling them tips rather than "life hacks".

[Trader Pat]

Well exactly, an entire methodology isn't a tip. But even a methodology isn't much use if you don't have the right mindset.

+1 Pat, I didn't mean it to sound like I was disagreeing even though I started with "it depends". Let's just say that some tips are bigger than others. If it fits on a Post-It note it's not going to change your life much.

Its all good, I got where you were coming from.

I suppose I'm looking at it through my own experience, it took me a few years to get the mindset right.

[jamesg46]

Getting tips from top traders isn't going to make you a profitable trader.

Mmmm sort of depends. For me someone said do X, i did X and I've made a decent living from it now for coming up to 3yrs. But X was an entire methodology and mindset rather than 'exercise before work' or 'look for the fav being supported'.

Trouble is that being a good trader and being a good teach aren't even vaguely correlated, and neither is being enthusiastic and being a good student. Unfortunately most people who want to learn something don't understand how to learn, which is a skill in itself that you have to acquire before you even start with the difference between a back and a lay. Once you've learnt how to learn there's nothing you can't do.

This makes me curious. When someone told you to do x and you did x and became profitable, did that other person lose their edge?.

If someone shows their edge do the vast majority not know how to learn from what has been shown?.

[goat68]

If someone shows their edge do the vast majority not know how to learn from what has been shown?.

I think I am case in point !

[jamesg46]

If someone shows their edge do the vast majority not know how to learn from what has been shown?.

I think I am case in point !

I’m genuinely baffled by someone that says you can lose an edge by sharing it but has made a living off of someone Else’s edge!

[ShaunWhite]

This makes me curious. When someone told you to do x and you did x and became profitable, did that other person lose their edge?.

If someone shows their edge do the vast majority not know how to learn from what has been shown?.

They (obviously) didn't tell me what their edge was, they taught me how to find them. Besides I didn't want to be given an edge because ...
"give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime"

Edges come and go, having 1 doesn't even guarantee next week's wages so ideally you need a portfolio of them and always have more in the pipeline. Btw talking auto here, orderflow trading is a skill you learn then it evolves as the markets evolve so I'm lead to believe.

I don't want to f-up this thread so this is probably a convo for the 'trade what I see' which seems to have become a bit of a catch all