Saturday Trading Journal – From Start To Finish
After we returned from our holiday, at around 7 pm last Friday, it was all about the unpacking of the car, keeping my daughter entertained, sorting through the mail, organising the tons of washing out and grabbing an early night.
All mundane stuff!
However, it was like “music to my ears” when my wife said,
“I have a play date with a friend on Saturday afternoon and will be out until early evening!”
It was made even better, when she said,
“You can trade for the day and make up lost time and money from our holiday!”
Winner!
Talking of which, was the day going to be a winning one?
We'll see, but I'm actually writing this “live” as I go through the cards on Saturday 3rd August with Goodwood taking most of the money (You'll have to excuse the difference between 1st and 3rd person, narrative!).
So, let's take a look at my set-up, this is what I've done before parting with my money and how I execute all the timings and lay-offs.
My wife and daughter departed the house at 12.30pm and were going to be gone for around 6 hours. I made sure that I was fully fed, showered (sounds weird, I know, but being fresh makes you feel sharper!) and had turned all notifications off. That includes my phone, computer, watch and shutting the external doorbell off. Any emergency calls could penetrate my forcefield, but other than that, I was totally alone with my software and analysis.
Happy days!
Office fully set up, I then went about analysing the first three qualifying races of the day.
Here's an image of my scribbles, of which I will go through in more detail, underneath.
By 1 pm, I'd analysed the first three qualifying races and found three horses that were worth trading.
I placed £56 on my first selection, Boy In The Bar at around 1.20 pm (the initial £6 was a mistake, as this was my back stake and not the £50 trade I intended on using).
I'd then calculated a 15% lay off, based on my knowledge of the markets and hedged my initial back bet for a guaranteed profit of around £7.40. This hedge would enable me to then back the horse for £6, profit massively if the horse would win or make a smaller profit should the horse lose.
Here's how the trade looked, a few minutes later –
So, no matter what happened, Boy In The Bar wins, I make £145.56 profit but if he loses, I still make £1.64, no matter what.
However, the market had a shift and I went onto “better” my position. The £6 back bet I'd placed at 24 was now available to lay at 16.50, so I traded out to enhance my profit to over 10 quid no matter what happened.
From that position, I was able to re-enter the trade and increase my “hedged” position even further. Still managing to place my £6 back bet (this stake is taken from my bank management articles and has been applied for festival days, here), I had a very good start to the day!
Here's the final trade –
As it happens, Boy In The Bar came nowhere, but I still managed to make just over 4 quid after commisions.
A decent start!
Moving onto the next race, the 2.20pm at Donny –
I took this price, earlier at around 1.20 pm –
Now, this looked like a good trade an hour before the off, but with a few minutes before the horse were due to run, Skerryvore was on the drift.
Bollocks!
I'd got it wrong…
So, I had to get out, quick!
I made a loss of £3.94. Not major, but it obviously erroded into my profit from the first race.
I was now only £0.20p in profit for a couple of hours work!
Onto the next trade and it was the 2.40 Newmarket. I'd noticed some money and various credentials for Rose Of Kildare. It was worth a 50 quid trade, assuming that some late money would come for the horse on the first show.
I placed a 50 quid back bet and very quickly laid it off, for a guaranteed profit –
I could have left it there, but decided that Rose Of Kildare had a great chance and went in with my current £6 stake for the win only.
The result was a photo finish between Rose Of Kildare and Graceful Magic. The end result was a tie-break or deadheat and my analysis was correct.
As it happened, I did get the “emergency” call and had to go and pick up my girls from their play date. We ended up having loads of fun and my trading was finished for the day.
Having said that, I still managed to make around 20 quid for a few hours and was happy with that.
There will be more come as the weeks progress and making 20 quid on a Saturday is actually quite lame!!
I'll be back on Friday with a look at how I got on throughout this week 🙂
