Cashflow

Ok, so my personal finances are in better shape than those controlled by these guys. But I hadn't really considered that an income gap would occur between the point where I cut back my betting activities and when I would be paid. Doh.

Something had to give, and my Betfair account has been raided. This means that I started today with a £383 bank. It's tough to get motivated to play with limited money and no target. It felt like I'd turned up for a five-a-side game to find that I was playing against a team of 9 year old girls.

I had a float around the betting blogs looking for inspiration and found a number of guys attempting challenges to build a target sum from a small starting bank, generally by daily or weekly percentage increases. I'm a little doubtful that most challenges won't end in disappointment.

Its pretty easy to make percentages on a small bank. In the last four hours I've made over 6%, despite also reading a batch of blog updates. But whilst I was happy to put £20 on the draw between Roma and Udinese at 1.21 with a few minutes left, and then leave it open beyond the point where I could have traded out, would I be happy to put £300 on a similar bet to achieve the same result? I doubt it.

But as a short term solution to keep me interested, and more importantly disciplined, I think a challenge may help. This seems contrary to my last post, where I noted that my daily targets were a problem to me. But with a three figure bank and a conservative percentage target, those pressures shouldn't be too great. And I can also experiment a little. It's tough to concentrate on the mechanics of trading techniques when you've still got another £90 to make in the day.

So I'm aiming to get to £2,000 by 2nd May, with a daily percentage target - 3% Monday to Wednesday, 2% Thursday/Friday, 4% Saturday/Sunday. Hopefully, at that point I can take things a little more seriously. I've knocked up a little spreadsheet similar to that used by BingBang (http://bingbangblogg.blogspot.com/ ), though not quite as colourful.

Oh, and the principles set out in my last post still apply.