I've studied the trading video's from Peter and others i've found too, i've played in practice quite a bit and i did the tiny stakes thing for a while. Tiny stakes didnt really do it for me because i'm pretty wealthy due to other business interests so it kinda didnt matter enough to me and i'd just leave everything if it went against me not really giving a toss.
That changes from today. I've put a small bank of £500 into betfair and to begin with i'm just going for small tick £ size trades which i will increase over time if successful. Initially i'm setting the tick size to £1 - I know this is still tiny but i need to build a consistent win/loss ratio and slooowwwly increase the stakes. The reason for the £500 bank is just so i can grow the stakes size without worrying about the margin needed.
I also know how important this is from a psychological perspective. I used to be a forex trader and back in 2004 turned a 1000% + profit in 12 months starting at £10 per pip on a system I devised. It failed in 2009 when algorithmic trading took to the fore and the markets changed forever.
One of the hardest things was managing the risk in my head - i started at the £10 a pip (which is 1 lot) and by the end of year 1 i was at £155 a pip - to begin with the £10 was scary but as you compound and over time you get used to it so that's my plan with this. Each step in stakes needs to be absorbed by the brain to give a comfortable pain threshold.
Right now most of my trades are £5 at the higher odds and up to £50 at the lower odds auto calculated by betangel.
My strategy is one based on technical analysis using a simple moving average and 2 second candle charts based on the back price.
Here are my initial rules of play:
1) Always back first - no laying trades first due to the liability
2) Only consider the first three horses and where possible trade the favorite
3)Take trades at or above recent highs taking into account a reducing lay liquidity before hitting the button
4) don't be greedy - take 1 or 2 ticks on an initial trade with the possibility of more ambitious targets once you have a finger in the market (and a feeling for where it's going)
5) Dont add any more rules for at least two weeks
So it's day one - today i worked from the 13:55 until not far off 6:30 - here are my results
Things I learned today:
1) I'm prone to looking for too good a price - i see a move coming and place my order too high only to see price head down immediately - so I got the move right but didn't accept the current back price. One thing i did not do is chase it down, if i didn't get the price then i just waited for a new setup.
2) In an adverse way i'm also prone to taking them at a point which really signals that the uptrend will continue. so the order i place at say 3 ticks above price get's taken and then keeps going before a turn. this suggests that i'm not reading the lay liquidity properly on these occasions.
3) When a trade goes against me, like many traders i let it run - my reasoning for this is that "hey, it's the favorite - it will come back" - to be fair this is actually pretty accurate, i had several losers of up to £5 today which did indeed come back to a profit - but that isn't good for my loss control so i need to do something about that.
number three stems from my trading experience - when i was trading forex full time i lost money UNTIL i stopped using stop losses. to me stop losses are the devils spawn because once i stopped using them i just made tons of money. I need to work out if the same happens here. right now the way i'm controlling this from full losses is by always taking SP - so any losses are generally small anyway.
So that's day one of my journey blog.
If you have any CONSTRUCTIVE comments i'd love to hear them.
If not then i will update around the same time same channel when i next trade (should be tomorrow but not holding myself to any promises, if i want a day off i take it!)
