Amongst Friends

Feeling fine tonight, in the knowledge that many of us are together in a club of Grand National losers. My own loss was a 'housewife's punt' of £16.00 - I know less about racing than the average housewife, and none of my three horses troubled the finish line. I've been out all day ( shopping in Birmingham ) and watched the race in Selfridges technology department. Oddly enough, no-one there won either.

Had a think about my '£2k challenge' and have decided to abandon it after one month. After a loss of £22 on Friday evening due to a defeat for the Irish champions, Bohemians, and with just a couple of footy bets placed today to offset my National punt, I was left with two scenarios coming into Sunday :

A. I am £141 behind target. I need to recover this sum over the next week or so, in addition to my daily target amount.

B. I have made £291 in a month, whilst enjoying a hobby.

I think the difference in emphasis illustrates the problem with targets in the environment we operate in. A couple of bad days suddenly put the target sums under pressure. The obvious way to pull back the shortfall is to increase stakes or risk. This is also the best way to lose money. You are psychologically at your weakest following a loss. In scenario A, the likelyhood is that you will chase to recover your position. In scenario B, you have a better opportunity to shrug your shoulders, switch off the laptop and start again the next day.

I'm still not sure how I'd operate in my old 'full-time' situation - if you need to pay bills and a mortgage from your income, how do you give yourself the best chance of meeting your required level of income? But as a hobby, the most enjoyable and sensible way of operating is to place bets as opportunities present themselves.

So my ambition remains the same - build back up to a £2k bank which I can then use cautiously to make a steady profit. But I now have no target date for achieving this milestone. And therefore no unnecessary pressure.

I'll link to a post which gives a thoughtful and sensible view on this same matter - Cassini's http://green-all-over.blogspot.com/2009/03/trouble-with-challenge.html.

Oh, and the piccy is of Selfridges, Birmingham, for anyone not aware of 'blob architecture'.

Guide rather than target

I am away for the weekend, with a Golden Wedding anniversary celebration dinner tonight in Yorkshire, so I'll leave Betfair alone until Monday evening.

I updated my '£2k challenge spreadsheet' to take out any target for the weekend. I'm currently £24 ahead of my projection, and have a new £2k date of 4th May.

These facts assume I've been looking at the right column, unlike John Dyson, the West Indies coach during yesterday's West Indies / England game (check out Cricinfo.com if you've missed the story).

Anyway, there have been numerous blog postings recently regarding the positives and negatives of setting targets, particularly since Alex's recent challenge demise at 'bettingblog.org'. I used a weekly target when betting full-time, and I often felt a pressure to over-bet, particularly following losses. There can develop a mindset that it is essential to recover losses quickly to maintain the target position. This obviously leads to increased risk.

I believe the answer is to treat any calculation only as a guide to monitor your successes and failures, and learn to accept that one bad day will take a number of days to recover, particularly if you tend to bet odds-on as I do. With my current challenge, I have so far managed to do this, despite a couple of bad days. If I can confirm to myself that a 23% per week 'guide' is feasible with part time betting, then a £2k bank should give me around a £1,000 per month income top-up, even allowing for a few cock-ups.

Whilst this may not be as exciting as an annual £100k challenge, and is a long way from Peter Webb/Adam Heathcote territory, I'm perfectly happy to enjoy my betting and also make a decent profit. And I'm sure a more relaxed mindset will help if I'm ever forced down the 'full-time' route again.

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.