Well….. what a crap day that was, on a good days racing.
I always make every effort to give a true interpretation of the full-time lifestyle, occasionally things go wrong… today was one of them. The main cause? ME.
So to recap todays trading –
I started the day with the first at Cheltenham and straight away I was off to a flier, the first race I was on for a 3 figure green. Untill the favourite was withdrawn at the start taking all my green with it and leaving me £20 in the red on another runner. As I posted on Facebook ‘sods-law’ one of the comments by a page follower was very true – “sometimes that can be even more painful than an actual loss because you can’t even blame yourself!” I know this all too well, but it didn’t really work wonders for my mood….
A few races later I’d managed to sum a moderate total bringing me to about £150 profit. The group 1 at Newmarket on Channel 4 was my main hope for the day although probably still being subconsciously frustrated from the start of the day I made things worse for myself…. a long with some ridiculous stakes hogging the entire market (shown below) I found myself scalping hard late on only to get caught in-play watching the Channel 4 coverage out the corner of my eye instead of the Betfair Live Video (Channel 4 is nearly always a few seconds behind). An absolute rookie error that cost me all my days profit in a matter of seconds!!
Severely pissed off I started a bit more aggressively in the 3.40 eeking out £60 only to then go on to the following 3 races ‘trading emotionally’ blowing the lot and managing to put myself in a big red hole of -£232.
After a lot of faffing about for the rest of the day I managed to pull myself back to a small profit, pretty pathetic given the quality of todays racing! But I guess you have to just accept these things and move on… Shit happens, it’s how you deal with it.
I thought it important to put this up as just over the weekend someone asked me on Facebook Page if I ever have loosing days, their extremely rare but every now and then I have one like this. Emotions, I guess we’re all only human!
6 thoughts on “Trading Bloodbath….”
I don’t know or understand what you do and how you do it but what you described today is classic and just shows how easily emotions can take over. Hopefully you will be back on track tomorrow.
Thanks Colin, if your not sure how it works check out the YouTube channel… Thanks, just typical, rarely do it these days but it’s mad how half hour loosing composure can cost a few hundred quid.
This is how you know you have reached a point were you are successful. You had a bad day and was in a big hole with emotions running high and yet still pulled out a small profit.
Good post as it highlights how difficult it can be to control emotions, even when you are as successful as you are.
Hi Caan,
Followed your blog for the last year or so and purchased the trading guide a while back. I also follow mugsblog and have benefited greatly from both you guys over that time. The question i have is:- You guys seem to like the heavier race days with big meetings like Ascot and cheltenham (today for example) and you state that there is good money to be made. Personally i have never found this to be the case. When there are hundreds of thousands going through the markets in the bigger races, the ladders tend to stay very static with very little movement. No matter how hard i try i cannot get my head around scalping the way you do it, lining up bets on the back and lay side will ALWAYS leads to a loss for me. My skill seems to be swing trading and this only seems to work and smaller meetings. I personally find an evening at kempton or wolves very profitable usually. are there any easy methods to improve my scalping or is this one of those experience only things?
Thanks Mate
Al
Hi Al, thanks. Steve is a good judge too. The bigger race days are preferred as more money is turned over, larger stakes can be used and there is more chance of getting out with them if it goes wrong. A slightly different approach too I’d say, its only through experience I truly mastered it and if you read back in the blog far enough I used to say exactly the same as you are in your post! Trouble is you only get one chance a week to practice in saturday markets.
I can see how using higher stakes can be a very different beast mate. Thanks for your reply
Al