Hi folks,
Not done any trading since Sunday, so I'm only just catching up on the forum. Firstly thanks for all the positive comments, it is appreciated.
I never put this up to gloat, it really was just to show all the newbies out there (and us not so newbies) that this can be done. I deliberately never put any figures in there to avoid any of that 'showing off' kind of mentality.
As I said in my original post, I have an extremely conservative approach to this whole thing and I think that has helped me to progress over the year. Based on this and to answer DodgyKnee78's question, I only ever stake with 1% of my bank (conservative or what!) and I increase/decrease my stakes at the end of every day depending on my daily result. e.g. if I had a £500 bank, I would be trading with £5.00 stakes (no matter what the price of the horse). If I win £10 on that day, my bank grows to £510 and the stakes the next day will be £5.10.
Originally my aim was to make 1 - 2% per day (or 100% - 200% of my stake), which is relatively easy when your stakes are low, but I have found that as my stakes have increased so my returns have diminished, mainly due to only getting partly matched, not getting as many orders through the market, having to scratch more often, etc.
As everyone knows who has spent any time reading anything about this game (blogs, forums, etc.), my big draw downs were with letting lays going in play and the horse winning (or coming close and my panicking and exiting with a big loss). I found that the best trick to stop going in play was to get out at the official off time regardless of greening/redding up and also not watching the races as I pushed myself too far to often to get that one last trade in before the ... oh bollocks, they're off! This was just my way of dealing with it, watching the pictures does have lots of other benefits. You can see from the graph that some of these losses took me a couple of weeks to claw back, which is very difficult to deal with, but I kept plodding away at it and did get it back (stubborn git that I am).
Compounding has been the biggest thing for me, using 1% was a slow climb in stakes and you don't feel the big jump like you do when you jump from £5 to £10. Easing you stakes up slowly makes the losses a lot easier to deal with as they gradually get bigger (as do your wins!).
If you compound £100 by 1% every day for a year, it will become £3740.93, at the end of year two, the £100 would have become £141,345.34. I'm not saying this is doable as the betfair markets can only take so much money, it's more just to show how compounding can grow. I think that means that my 1500% represents less than 0.5% bank growth per day which sounds 'hardly worth the effort', but after a year of compounding it is and don't forget the banks are only giving you approx 0.5% per year at the moment on your savings, not per day.
Anyway, thanks again for the positive comments and I wish you all the best of luck in your trading. We all need it from time to time.
Cheers
Spikey