So the end of the first week of my challenge and I’m sure you’re all desperate to find out how I got on. Well pretty well it turns out. The starting bank was £200, with £100 in Betfair, £50 in Betdaq and £50 in Pinnacle Sports. In one week I’ve turned this into £230.71. That’s an increase of 15.3%. It took 32 bets and 10 tennis trades to do so and shows you what is realistically possible. Of course you could have just stuck your whole £200 n a 1.15 shot and hoped for the best but this is aiming to show you what is realistically achievable using a measured approach. This shows you just how well you can do when sticking to a plan. Much like the Red Bull team at the weekend, you may get away with not sticking to a plan and over staking on a dead cert on one occasion but is it worth the risk and the stress that it causes. The one time that it does is unlikely to be compensated by the other times you got away with it. Incidentally I do believe that racing drivers hsould be allowe dto just race but the most favourable overall outcome for the team was to stay in position. Whether or not this is deemd as fixing a result is another matter.
Starting Bank: £200
Bank now: £230.71
Here are the screen shots I promised:
The ROI of my bets was 10.53%, you can see the sheet with all my bets and trade results here
http://www.bettingtools.co.uk/bet-records.xlsx. The ROI is something like what I expected having sourced out some really good tipsters and making sure I got the best prices from Betfair and pinnacle. Note that Betdaq only saw my money twice and the markets are still a bit too quiet to get involved in especially for the trading side of things but it is looking better than it was.
Trading went superbly well, again as I expected as I’m a bit of a trading pro these days and had one small loss out of 10 markets that I traded on. Some of the time I even did this at work using only the scoreboard. You might think how can you trade when you can’t see what’s going on? Well the answer is pretty easily since you’re more likely to overreact when you’re watching and anyone who watched the Vinci v Suarez Navarro match would have been sure at various points that Suarez Navarro would win. She didn’t.
Trying to get the best odds when I find a tip form a good source was a bit more tiring than I thought. Checking the prices across 3 bookies, then updating in my spreadsheet all felt a lot like work and isn’t feel quite as easy as you’d expect. Luckily all 3 of the accounts I’m using have apps now and I was able to get my bets on the move.
I actually made a mistake with the trading in that I used 5% instead of the 10% I stated I would be using. This probably allowed for a fairer comparison with the bets which were only using 1% as it turned out but obviously had I used 10%, the overall profit would have been nearly double.
When it comes to the bets you may think that 32 bets to make a measly £6.75 is pathetic but when you look what this means when you scale the figures it actually looks pretty damn good. If we had but £200 on each bet instead of £2 then our return would have been £675. Not bad for a week’s work eh. With the trading had we used a liability of £1000 instead of £10, we would have made a sum of £2311 and just goes to show that this is where the money is if you have time to do it. A week is a relatively short period to analyse but I’m confident of continuing in the same vein.
The aim of this challenge however is to get a £200 into a large one and considering this I think 1% for bets and 5% for trades was a tad conservative. If I had been using the kind of figures I just showed the possibilities for then I wouldn’t want to use a % bigger than this but I think in order to grow the bank we should take a little more risk and I will now be using 2% for bets and 10% for trades. I did think about recalculating the %’s after each bet to further enhance growth but I still think this may end up a bit too volatile for my own liking, not to mention difficult to keep track of.
I’ll finish off with a 5 things I learnt from the past week and which should enable to do even better:1) I need to be a bit more selective with odds on bets. Looking at my excel sheet these bets were the least likely to affect my P/L in a positive way and too many of these is not worth the effort, so better to be selective and improve the strike rate.
2) Betting on horse is a now go. The only option is betfair who don’t offer best price and there’s no tmuch liquidity until right before the off. The horrendous losing streaks you can get and the fact that I know little about racing also puts me off and I’m not going to be following any racing tipsters from now on.
3) Betdaq is not viable for regular tennis trading yet. It’s still dominated by bots that are giving much worse prices around the betfair ones.
4) My entry and exit points whilst trading were excellent but I should always leave more money on the player I least expect to win. This is not just because match results are unpredictable but it also would have given me more chances for further trades without risking more money. Moving all the green to one player at short odds also doesn’t help long term form my experience!
5) I must remember to compare pices at all times. Only 2 winning bets that I paid commission with Betfair would have increased my ROI by 1% had I not paid any commsison and bet with Pinnacle Sports. A lot of the time Pinnacle also have better prices on football even discounting commsision and making more bets with them will increase my profits further.
