Black Tuesday… What a Disaster Day!

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Nope, you read that right… Black Friday come early for me, but in a different way.

Tuesdays aren’t the best proposition for Pre-Race Trading this time of year, although I couldn’t help myself today… I wish I hadn’t bothered.

A complete waste of time is all I can say. Quite frankly I should know better by now…

You don’t see too many people who do this full-time post up about their sh!te days, so it’s important to let readers know it does still happen from time-to-time.

Admittedly it wasn’t as much of a disaster as the black Tuesday of 1929, but still, I hate wasting my time. I say wasted, because it’s hardly a new lesson for me.

Rushing…

Starting in a hurry is never good. I’ve said it a million times before, but today I broke my own rules, first rookie error.

You might have seen this YouTube clip where I tell the story about a day where I proper screwed several years ago. Today was a similar set of circumstances, all brought on by yours truly. The one difference being I’m a little wiser now, which is probably why it didn’t turn out far worse!

So I woke up late (it happens sometimes), made my way to the gym for a quick swim, steam and bubble as usual. Before coming back to a bit of a problem; the overflow pipe had some how come loose behind the washing machine. It wasn’t the biggest drama in the world, although you can imagine the surprise coming home to a kitchen inch deep in water – not knowing what the hell had happened…

It didn’t take long to work out, although I was running a tight schedule as I’d woken up late.

Once I’d located the problem and cleared everything up it was coming close to the first race of the day. I burst into the office, fired up the machine and started to get everything set. It already stinks of a mistake doesn’t it…

Worse still, I had the bright idea to trade a greyhound race or two to ‘warm-up’ before the real stuff started on the nags. Second rookie error – over-staked on the dogs, got caught out trying to exit a bad position MARKET SUSPENDED. Unfortunately the open position was a back, and my dog didn’t win… it was only £28, but I should have stopped and had a little word with myself at that point to stop rushing about, usually I would.

Chasing…

I’m not sure why as it was such a small loss, but the mistake on the dogs had pissed me off. And so the first race (can’t see it on the P/L below as it’s the 21st market) turned into a stupid situation with me over-staking yet again. I guess I thought I should make the greyhounds money back and more in the first. It really makes me think back to the kind of thing I used to do 3 or 4 years ago… anyway, first race was another -£60… onto the second race and nearly already a £100 down, happy days! What a cock!

At this point I realised I needed to get a grip, the markets were fairly thin. Not too bad in places, although large stakes weren’t a good idea. It wasn’t until a couple of race later I physically made myself get up, out of the room and have a break… I was behaving a erratically and over-staking, purely to try to catch up with the poor start on the day. Hence the £125 loss a couple of races after.

I’d like to say it was the last time I made a stupid cock-up today, but it wasn’t. In the 1.40 I slashed a big profit to less than half.

There wasn’t any crazy reason I was in a bad mood or anything, it was just one of those days. One that’s better off forgetting…

Fortunately, come the end I managed to get out of the red.

For all those that get frustrated when they lose their cool in the markets…

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It’s important to remember, tomorrow’s a new day. Occasionally these things happen, after all; we’re only human!

Related: Simple Horse Racing Trading Strategies

10 thoughts on “Black Tuesday… What a Disaster Day!

  1. Having a bad day and still showing a profit is something I could definitely handle.

    But unfortunately I have had Black January, Black February, Black March…..repeat til October. 🙁

  2. Hi Caan hope you don’t mind my message. I have plenty of time in the evenings to nail this trading – however there aren’t many evening horse races, so what other things do you trade on in the evening? Thankyou

  3. Nice post Caan, thanks for being honest and making me feel better. As you say bad days happen to all and this just means I will push on with this knowing its not just me doing it wrong sometimes.

  4. Unlucky, I had a similar day and threw away around £400 on the night racing that put me -£11 down on the nags for the day. Dropped £200 on the last race by being greedy and not closing 🙁 In the old days I’d have chased that on the US races. Luckily my dog bot had picked up £150 for the day so at least I didn’t finish with a loss.

    I find it’s just complacency and boredom that causes me to throw away a few grand each week in stupid errors. But on the other side of the coin plenty of times these ‘errors’ win us money so it’s not a one way street. Sometimes you need to accept them for the wake up call they are to get back to some consistency rather than blowing them out of all proportion, especially when there’s probably around a 1000 races each month to get things back.

  5. i made a pre trade profit AND BETFAIR TOOK IT!! -they said due to late withdrawal of horse there is no cashout–this was AFTER i made a pretrade profit–betfair cheats!!!

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