Early last year I went on Peter's course. It's good to see that kind of enthusiasm pouring out on a subject that truly intrigues me! I left the course with the intention of getting stuck in but with my business taking up a lot of my time at that point and the birth of my son it's been pretty hectic! I'm now in a position to sit down and have a go at this and am looking to dedicate a month to seeing if I can get away without losing money. With this I'm looking at a couple of hours in the evening on the racing through the week and around 3 hours on Saturday and if I can squeeze it past the missus a few more on Sunday.
So that I don't scare myself with the money that I'm putting in I'm starting small and building with each successive day. After just sitting and watching the markets for a few weeks I started on Friday evening with £2 stakes, traded 7 races making a loss on 1 to make a hansom return of 26p
watch your back Heathcote! On Saturday I doubled stakes to £4, traded 12 races making a loss on 4 of them to give me a deja vous figure of 26p again! I will be trying next with a stake of £8.The way I'm approaching this is:
1) Check the grade of a race to try to work out how it's going to behave.
2) Heavy graph use to try to highlight a repeating trend or a shift in the market.
3) Look where money has already been matched to see what people are considering value.
4) Look at the structure of the money that's waiting to be matched on the ladder to look for weak points that would speed the price in or out if the chunk at the front is taken.
5) Don't use a stop loss, just go in manually and cut out manually using the trading calculator.
This seems to be reasonably successfully on my small scale but I have a couple of questions that I hope some more knowledgeable traders can answer. Please feel free to flame me if I've missed these responses in previous posts but I did do a search before putting fingers to keyboard.
1) What should I be looking for on book percentage? I see that it regularly hovers around 102% on the back side. Is there a trigger I should be looking for here if combining with say a switch in the WOM?
2) I've been looking to get in on the end of a trend and catch it on the bounce, but have found that a few times prices have come in and in and not done a final flip. If I'd jumped on this trend I would have done very well, but refrained as that wasn't my strategy. From the limited races I've seen this seems to happen from 4 minutes from the off onwards. Does anyone have any details on price movements that are relative to time before the off?
3) Does anyone have any scenarios for different race types that highlight known trends?
I do think a lot of this will be trial and error but a nudge in the right direction would be most appreciated.
Best regards,
Simon
