One of my common mistakes is to enter in the market too early, even when there are only ten thousand pounds matched.
As a consequence when money comes in I end up being in the wrong position 60-70% of times.
I guess this error is due to my anxiety of making profit that pushes me to enter in the market with relatively (for that particular moment) high stakes hoping to be on the right side when big money comes in which means many ticks and a big profit.
With evening races and many meetings is not uncommon to experience this situation even when there are only 2 or 3 minutes left before the start of a race.
The thought of having only a couple of minutes to find a good chance to profit probably is also another reason for my anxiety.
Basically I'm not a scalper though I tend to mix my strategy even in the same race.
Of course entering in the market very early makes me very 'visible' to the others. I'm sure everyone would spot what I'm trying to do most of the times and seems like the do in fact cause as soon as I get in the market moves in the opposite direction.
This unless I choose to be even more visible putting up to 800 or 1k pounds, in that case I obtain a market movement in my favour, the negative consequence is that I cannot always take advantage of it since there's often a big rebound in the opposite direction.
Talking about being very visible or not leds me to talk about the one-click interface and the ladder.
In fact I don't know why I'm using the one-click screen I'm much mure prudent, I use to set a 8 or 10 pounds autostake tick size and I can say the that I'm quite invisible in the market. My explanation would be that I'm not subconsciously influenced by money outside the 'boxes' which are on the contrary visible in the ladder mode.
Today I gave it a try using just the one-click mode and stakes suggested and it was good, gaining an average of 4 £ per race. There are however two things that I'm worred about: it's extremely annoying and knowing myself this can be very dangerous.
Second thing is that I've just learned (after months
) to use the stop loss function in the ladder by right clicking the odds, this feature has given me so much more confidence that I'd like to use it with the same ease in the one-click mode as in the ladder which is not quite possible. I don't use the 'Offeset by' option so I can't put a stop loss where I'd like (I'm very concerned about spikes and similar movements when I'm in the one-click mode). Antoher one of my usual mistakes is to trade high odds like <15 or 20. I got my backs matched, when it comes to lay there's no money at all. Peter talked about it in the mp3 I found here in the forum.
However I think these errors should be easy to manage with some discipline avoiding the big odds.
Charts; I don't find the chart in the 'enhance ladder' mode particularly usefeul for my decisions which is probably a big lack. I do have a brief look at candlesticks charts but even here, I don't base my decisions solely on them. I find more useful the normal odds-volume chart, it helps me to read a trend end eventually go against it (according to the volume) as I often do with not bad results.
I've without a doubt a gambler personality, after 4-5 bad trades I start to gamble in-play and on other sports also because my bank starts to be probably too small after many wrong trades. At the end of the day the result is always the same; empty account.
I've lost about 7k £ in the last two months so I'm facing a very difficult period.
. If you're wrong, you're wrong... go back and review it. You can't be right all the time, but if day aafter day you're losing you have to reconsider things. One thing that completely changed my view was being with a pro trader (Jack Birkhead, who has been living in Madrid till now). Just seeing how naturally he admited his mistakes and losses completely took my stress out in accepting my own mistakes.