Jayne’s Trading Story… | Forum Member

Meet Jayne, one of our first female traders to become a forum regular. She’s got a lot to offer and isn’t afraid to speak her thoughts!

Often found in the daily chats and swing-trading topics if you want to say hi.

See Jayne’s trading story below…

Jayne’s Back-Story:

Where to start… Like most people I’m always looking to realign my work life balance.

What really prompted me on this journey was – making a bit of extra money at home. I am a single parent (I love it) and I work full-time as a secondary school teacher. I genuinely enjoy my job, but I’ve had a typical life really; marriage, child, lots of job promotions. All just following the rat race.

My husband was really into horse racing and football, so I started to pick things up in the background. Before I knew it, I’d learnt about race courses, horses and some form. All of which I wasn’t into myself initially but soon became interesting. Around 2007 the hubby was part of a race horse syndicate. We used to go on the stable visits, training sessions and see them perform. Newton Abbot racecourse being furthest south, and Perth in the north. It was on a cold miserable Saturday at Carlisle watching ‘our’ horse when certain things clicked for me!

Being part of a syndicate allows you to see more of the ‘inside’ views. I learnt that horse racing is not exactly what I thought. At first I thought the horse trains and it runs to win the race, but in reality the horse is trained to win, lose or take a position that the trainer has previously decided. It’s a much bigger overall game they play. To me it seemed like a pointless pastime, although my (ex) husband disagreed. He believes in studying form and stats.

A few years later, I was unfortunately diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I had emergency surgery and radioactive iodine treatment, my Dr told me to think very carefully how I lived the rest of my life as most aren’t so lucky. They only found it accidentally so I am extremely fortunate. Anyway, I had a while off work and I really enjoyed the time I had with my daughter. Not having to think about work in the back of my mind was refreshing. Promoted roles were too difficult and had to drop back the responsibility, which was very hard at the time. I found I just couldn’t cope with it all after the treatment, so moved schools for a fresh start. I am now lucky enough to  work with some fantastically supportive colleagues and love my job. The work life balance is great, but I missed the money. I know money isn’t everything but it certainly helps!

So one weekend around around November twenty-seventeen, I was researching ways to make extra money at home. I came across Betfair trading and Caan Berry on YouTube. I remember watching the trades and thinking huh?! I couldn’t get my head around it at all. I knew all about Betfair as my husband spent more time with it than with me! So I read, watched videos and eventually came across matched betting. It seemed easy, follow points X + Y + Z = guaranteed money. I thought it must be a scam, but had a go, made some money and that was the start.

It didn’t take long to learn about backing, laying, trading terms, language etc. I made some money (particularly over the world cup), but got banned from the top online bookies pretty quickly. This is when I started to read more and follow Caan more seriously. I watched a few of his videos on the subjects of matched betting and being banned by bookies. The more I read his blog and watched the YouTube videos, I thought this is maybe the next step for me. I’d had enough of playing the arbitrage game, and I was never fast enough to catch a big one anyway. All the other get rich quick things like dutching never worked for me either.

Getting to Grips With Trading Betfair:

I decided to learn the basics of trading throughout the summer holidays last year.

I also love knitting so it was a win-win whilst cramming on YouTube videos. Learning about software, getting set up, swing trading etc. So I grabbed a free software trial and had a go, thinking it would be easy, flipping heck!! I think just getting used to using software is a thing in itself.

I was on training mode using little stakes but anyway found it really hard. I actually just threw out a whole note book with my first lot of results, reds.

I gave up for a bit and decided to start laying the field etc using the software. Oh dear… another huge ‘make money fast’ disaster. I also tried football trading thought I had cracked the lay the draw strategy only for an early goal and bank-buster. I got a bit obsessed with it all I was dreaming about ladders, odds, strategy, over trading etc. I decided to buy Caan’s book to end this

drifting about in a muddle. It helped but I decided I needed the video pack, this was probably about October/November. Since then I have watched all the videos over and over, usually before going to bed, which was most likely why I was dreaming about it. However, it’s all started to fit into place now.

I read the book Trading in the Zone, which is a fantastic psychology book, very interesting read. I’ve also read a quarter of Thinking Fast and Slow which is good but I had already heard of a lot of the research before…

So anyway; I’d been following the forum and thought sod it – I’m going to write something. I had a massive moan about everything one afternoon, the community responded positively not to mention; Nev, Paul and CJ. It really helped at the time.

I am a bit of a thinker and as a teacher I always see things in different ways, I realised that trading related a lot to my everyday life. A lot of sayings in life actually come from trading etc. For example ‘cutting your losses’ became a bit of a thing in my mind as I cut my losses in life (I won’t bore you with that). Focus is a big deal, because I realised this I’m more finely tuned in my trading.

Having spent plenty of time on this I now understand the markets, where to place stakes, how to offer and speculate rather than just jumping on. However, I am still bad at taking my profit, it’s my achilles heel! The forum has helped me out quite a bit with things like the MO Charting.

Earlier in the year with the equine flu I started trading the greyhounds. It was the best thing ever for me, it got me into much better habits. Part of it was down to not being able to go in-play, learning to take the loss every time. I’m now totally over that foolish mistake. The key, as Caan always says is not to lose your money, I would rather build up slowly with 30p profits than risk that £11 totally unnecessary red.

My Next Steps…

Future wise, I feel my mindset has finally developed.

I have realised to treat learning to trade as a hobby, rather than a quick fix providing a second income. That said, hopefully I’d love it to become a larger part of my income, or even a dream of trading full time. Escaping the rat appeals to me!

Right now I’m happily tuning my scalping, scratching, and taking a controlled loss. Any small losses I look at as learning costs, my losses are getting far less, profits may not have exploded but the gap between the two is shortening. Thinking back to when I couldn’t even understand a software ladder, I have made great progress. The path is clearer now thanks to Caan and the support on the forum.

As my mum always says those who’ve never made a mistake haven’t made anything either!

Best wishes in your trading adventure, thanks for reading I know I waffle, but this is my story condensed believe it or not!

Jayne

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