The Cheltenham Gold Cup!

The long-awaited gold cup finally arrived, and to be honest although I done fairly well from it I was a bit disappointed – a couple of very large scratches stopped me from nearly doubling the result. This year as I see it did not feel like last years gold cup or even the year before, the overall fill rate either side of the book both back and lay felt a lot slower. I’m not sure why that may have been, many others have said liquidity has been in decline although part of it could be the fact it wasnt so hyped up this year. I remember when Kauto Star ran in the gold cup and that alone seemed to have an impact on turnover with all the hype.

On the runner I traded it appeared there was also other very large traders (bigger than myself) obviously its always going to be the case but one seemed extremely larger than others I would anticipate operating with stakes of up to £40,000. The end result it has quite an impact on the market – a game not for the faint hearted. Several times I had to scratch a max stake position that had initially looked quite attractive, it’s all part of the game but had they been filled I expect the Gold Cup result would have been more than £500, the false starts at the end allowed ever so slightly longer to get a few small stakes through which was the positive I suppose.

It’s a real shame Cheltenham only comes around once each year as it’s extremely different trading conditions to cope with. By the time it comes around again you’ve forgotten what you have learnt a year previous.

This year i think other than the usual problems of being interrupted or wound up mid trading i learnt that its important to be completely comfortable with the stakes im using and making sure their not too big for the conditions, each race can be extremely different and at times had I used slightly smaller stakes than quite possibly I would have got more positive trades through, adversely in some of the others I could have used a little more. Its something im going to keep track of for next year so I know which races attract significantly more money.

On the whole it wasn’t all that bad, I decided not to worry myself with many races in between either which probably wasn’t a bad thing…..

 

As a final note to the week as i said on monday the new ‘Video Pack‘ available now’s price will increase this evening at 7 pm so grab it while you can! I’m sure it’ll be a worthwhile investment for all those Cheltenham profits. I’ll be adding races from this week to it over the next week or so along with many others over the next month or so, I’m going to include absolutely everything including the summer racing markets so it’ll be current for quite some time. I’m also open to suggestions for those who purchase.

Other than that it’s been a bit of a different week even if it wasn’t as profitable as I’d hoped! Enjoy the weekend and get out in the sun shine! the markets will be poor for a few days as all the punters have burnt their cash on Cheltenham…. I’ll be off to catch the end of the snowboarding season whoop!