Week 02 Result - Loss of £18.15

Well, Week 02 is over and a busy week it was too with all the shenanigans at Chester and full racing cards everyday. I worked 6 days and my results were as follows;

P/L - Was a loss of £18.15 (as against a loss of £86.22 in Week 01)
Number of races traded - 165
Percentage Won - 59% (same score in Week 01)
Percentage Lost - 30% (as against 32% in Week 01)
Percentage Scratched - 11% (as against 9% in Week 01)

My summary and thoughts of Week 02?
My win/lose ratio is 2:1 so why haven't I shown a profit? Obviously my losses were bigger than my wins, and this must become my next focus of attack as I seem to be taking my profits quickly and letting my losses run in the hope that they will come back before the off. In most cases, this doesn't happen, and so my red-ups are bigger than my greens. Totally the wrong way will say the experienced traders and so I need to reverse this and take my losses a lot quicker. This is a tough part of trading and I suffered with this first time round, but I need to work harder on it.

Highs and lows of the week, well there we a few roller-coaster moments, especially on Wednesday where in one spell I got 5 out of 6 trades wrong, and frustration boiled over a little, but on the whole my discipline was good. One mistake I did make and was a little costly was again associated with the bookmaking tool. When using this tool, I fire my prices into the market based on certain criteria being reached, so as usual on this one particular race I set everything up and waited for the trigger to be activated. It wasn't happening, the book wasn't right so with a couple of minutes to go before the off, I switched to scalping. What happened next was bit of a blow, as with half the field loaded, the automatic fire on the bookmaking tool fired as I had left it set to fire if my conditions were met. Sugar!! - or words to that effect! - Little or no time to cover / close my positions and a 5f sprint to boot! Off they went and a loss of £43.83 on the race. A simple mistake but a smack in the mouth for making it! Cest la vie - live and learn son, live and learn. Hopefully I wont make the same mistake again, and I'll ensure that if I decide to switch from bookmaking to scalping, I make sure I turn the automatic fire button off first!

Other learning's, well one is to beware the races where there is a long odds-on shot in the field and you are scalping or looking for swings because if say you have a £40 green or red on one horse and the horse is 4/1, then when you spread it across the field, the profit or gain is relatively small, but when the horse is 1/4, then it is a totally different picture, and large reds on these kind of odds hurt / smart a little when you have to red up before the off. I'll tread a little more carefully when trying to trade these in the future, especially in the early days, because getting these races wrong can seriously affect the old profit and loss for the day. I know, I got on the wrong side twice last week.

So in summary, I'm only two weeks in, and as yet I've worked 12 days for no profit at all, but the experience and the learning's have been good. I'm completely realistic about the learning curve I'm on and am fully aware that if this was easy, then everyone would be doing it.

I remember reading somewhere that 0.14% of traders make more than £12k a year - just 14 out of a 1000 make it. Not a good strike rate is it? The trick therefore is to be one of the 14. Tough goal, and one which I know many of us out there are striving for.