I'm watching and learning but....

[number2allover]

Morning All ,

Hope the trading day goes well for you !

I come from the off in that I understand there is no magic formula. It is how I use the information I see to spot opportunities and develop my understanding of what I see
to spot other possibilities.

From watching Peters videos and guidance in here ,thank you all, I frame my trade , execute my designed entry and exits. Manage this and efficiently manage trades when they don't work, I should be enjoying what I see you mention as +EV. I'm not a gambler. Just got fascinated by this horse trading world when one of peters videos popped into my feed some time ago.

My head is down , hours of ladder watching, screen recording all race cards daily for 2 months.

I'm noticing , analyzing, scrutinizing again, confirming what I see. I have not traded yet. I will be starting with very small trades. I have 2 weeks free now with no disruptions so I have roughly 150 hours to fast track some of my understanding and confirmations. I'm excited, I want this and I need this.

Questions please.

Am I missing out not using excel ??

Can excel help in real time with pre off information to help frame my trades ?

Thanks for Reading,

Number2allover

[ShaunWhite]

Hi. Excel probably won't be much use for your manual trading, but it is useful for looking at your bets afterwards. But being so very new to it, it might be a distraction at this stage.

I wouldn't put off using real money a minute longer. If you're staking £1 or £2 then at worst you'll only be losing pennies a race. Even staking small the psychological difference between real and play money is significant.

Don't be too disillusioned if your 150hrs doesn't make you profitable, learning this way isn't something humans do well. You can do the 'right' thing and the market will do the opposite, or the wrong thing and ditto, and you make some. Doing the right thing (in your opinion) will initially work in your favour maybe as little as 60% of the time and that's so hard to gauge over 00s of markets.

Recentism means you can lose a dozen times in a row and think you're doing it wrong, not remembering that a week ago you were averaging 70% being right and so are doing it correctly. So you change something and it gets worse. It's why a high level of competence takes 1000s of hours, the small difference between right and wrong, over 1000s of markets isn't something you absorb easily. Our chimp brains are more used to doing something wrong, falling, it hurts, so you don't do it again. Trading can be doing it wrong for a while, 'accidentally' making money, and not feeling the pain until next week when you give it all back.

... And the same with recording and watching markets, there's 10,000 races a year and watching even 100 might not give you much of an idea about the avg behaviour over all of them. The best way is just to knuckle down and grind your way through markets for months on end, making sure you don't run out of money before you run out of things to learn.

[number2allover]

Hi Shaun ,

Thanks for your reply and time for that.

Yes , I just seen a lot of people use it for analyzing and there's a section here regarding excel.

Yes , I understand the dry testing and using your own money in a trade is a different ballgame. A lot of the time served members here I've stumbled across ,
including yourself have provided very good guidance towards the psychological side of trading. Some very good threads with peoples journeys.

Regarding the disillusion of making no progress , I'm hungry for this because I need it. I hope to use the next 2 weeks to analyze , record more, watch , watch again , take notes etc. I understand its seasonal , thanks to peters videos.

I know there is a bigger picture behind the ladders, that there are many pictures in many rooms and then there's a stairs I never noticed that leads to another floor with more rooms and pictures.

If I'm lost after two weeks , well, I will know that I need to change my approach and look at it from a different angle. I'm having fun anyway unravelling.

I'm not a scientist, but I do know that recording and writing down that you were wrong is good. You try another method.

Thanks again ,

Number2allover

[ShaunWhite]

Don't overcomplicated it, it's just buying and selling and the orders and action you see on the ladder is the supply and demand. The price of a horse works like the price of potatoes, rarely keeps falling and rarely keeps rising, so rather than jumping on a trend that might have run out of steam, be patient and look for the turning point. Often those are around the good old fashioned odds points because Joe Public thinks that way. Nobody says ill back it if its better than 5.234*?% they say 'no less than 4/1'. It's not just numbers it's people.

Won't give anymore ladder 'advice' because manual trading isn't something I've done for years. There's plenty of people around who'll give you pointers.

Just don't let 'need it' stress you out about 1 race or 1 day of bad results, or try to recover losses fast to make them go away. Profit isn't a straight line for any of us. Anyone can handle good days, the difference is how you handle the bad ones. If you can have a 'bad day' and genuinely not give a damn then you're 3/4 of the way there.

[number2allover]

Thank you Shaun ,

Your time to reply has given me comfort and energy to knuckle down. I understand what you have said, not just read what you said.

As mentioned, I will be using small stakes so bad days will be good days for me as i will learn.

Thank you again ,


Number2allover