Developing a Specific Trading Plan – Measure Success Accurately

Obvious? It certainly doesn’t seem to be for everybody.

The reality is, if you don’t specialise specifically, then your chances of succeeding as a Betfair trader are dramatically reduced.

In this post, I’m going to do my best to explain:

Core of Success…

Succeeding as a Betfair trader isn’t easy. If you really are serious about succeeding in the markets, the first thing you need to do is plan. Within that plan, you need to be extremely specific.

What are you going to do? There’s very good reason for this.

I’ve skimmed on it in the past, but every week somebody contacts me with the same problem; Erratic results. You may have experienced it yourself, where you have 10 races on the day maybe, and you go win, win, win, big loss, win, win, big loss, win. It’s not unusual, often it’s a result of doing the same thing under a different set of circumstances.

This itself leads to confusion.

In most cases new traders don’t even realise the importance of adapting to the situation in hand. You have to remember, the markets are always going to do their own thing. If you’re to succeed, it’s your job to fit in around them picking off the opportunities as they present themselves. In order to fit in and find those opportunities, you need to understand the different characteristics and limitations from each situation you trade.

Furthermore, you need to refine and understand those results. Hence, being specific. But of course, the next problem is:

What Characteristics Do You Seek?

Depending on your method of application, be it swing trading, scalping, or a mixture of both. You need to decide what kind of characteristics are going to be beneficial to profit. For example; you don’t want to be scalping a betting market when it’s extremely volatile, bouncing all over the place. Nor do you want to be attempting to scalp when there is no liquidity or activity within the market. This will just set you at a disadvantage.

A lack of liquidity is a severe limitation in this instance, as explained within the video pack course. Of course this may not be the only problem, as there will be other limitations to each individual situation. However, but being aware at all in the first place is beneficial.

There’s No Debate…

Thinking about characteristics and limitations, often leads new traders to focus on a sport that they love and enjoy.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s very important to pursue something that you enjoy. If you don’t, upon the hard times there’s a good chance you’ll just give up. Also, it helps specificity if you have a good level of knowledge. However, the other end of the spectrum is a concern; fanaticism.

You need to make sure that you’re not trading and betting on a topic that you feel so passionately about, it heightens your emotional state. For anyone that’s wondering why that is, you want to check this blog post about trading fears.

Aside from this, it makes total sense to focus on something you have the most knowledge about. When I say knowledge, I mean in terms of characteristics, limitations, understanding for the game and possible influencing factors such as psychological points of tension inside an event. For example; in tennis it’s no secret that some players continually crumble under pressure. Specifically at points where there’s heightened tension within a match.

What Window?

Lastly I want to highlight the importance of focusing on the correct trading window. As you may expect; the same situation behaves very differently over a different frame of time. If you’re not being specific in recording your results over the same time frames and the same trading windows, then how do you expect to get clear results? You just can’t know if you’re making any kind of progress or not. Not easily anyway.

It stands to reason, clear results come from clear sets of data. That’s exactly what this is. It should be treated as such because trading is not some kind of computer game, although I do see on a regular basis people tend to treat it in this way. As much as it may be a fun hobby, this is real money at stake. When done wrong, the financial implications can be quite painful. Neither you or I want that.

That’s it. A rather simple but important post. Just to round up;

• Do something you love, but don’t be a fanatic.
• Ensure that results are measured over the same criteria, in order to get total clarity on progress.
• Treat it seriously because it’s not some kind of computer game!

If you’re sitting there right now shaking your head in disagreement, I promise you; you may as well give up.

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