No. of bets: 114
Amount Staked: £424.27
Return: -£21.75
ROI -5.13%
Week 1 results of the betting investment challenge are in. The first week produced a 5% loss on stakes after 114 bets and this was a loss of £21.75 in monetary terms. The first few days were as bad as I can remember in recent times for the chosen tipsters and with only 10 winners from the first 50 or so bets, I thought I was going to lose half the bank! But I kept to the plan and considering the results and the fact that most tipsters had a bad week, a 5% loss of funds is a pretty good result in my opinion.
The results would have improved by half had level stakes have been used (would have been less than 2.5% loss) but I’m still happy with my points system for now. I’m adamant that stakes on horse racing need to be much lower than on other bets with the losing streaks that I have seen happen. The largest stakes are usually on the rare odds on selection or betting resource’s tips.
BettingResource is having a bad patch and had they had one of their typical weeks then we’d easily be looking at a nice profit today. I must add that the service only really restarted on Friday after a break in the baseball. It was down to this bad spell that Pinnacle results were poor and were the only account to finish in the red with bet365 and Betfair results posting decent profits. I may have to transfer half of the bet365 funds to Pinnacle because I may need them at this rate and haven’t used Bet365 as much.
I must also give a special mention to Simplythebetsonline (aka STB Horses and STB Footy) for being one of the few tipsters to make a profit this week.
I also remembered what a pain updating the spreadsheet after each bet was and because I want this challenge and the recording to continue for a long time I’ve decided on a few rules/changes to make the process easier. The biggest is that I will focus on making the bets during each week and only update the spreadsheet once a week on a Sunday with the results published on a Monday. Getting on at the best prices quickly is hard enough without having to faff about with excel too.
Most of the bets will be placed with Betfair and they can be downloaded to excel anyway, so it’ll pretty much be a glorified copy and paste job and then add in the Pinnacle and bet365 records. It should only take about 30 minutes once a week which isn’t so bad. This also means that I will need to keep the stakes the same for the whole week and only recalculated after each set of results have been entered. I actually like this much better not least because it was again a pain to check for each bet and to be honest sometimes I forgot what the exact stake was and rounded up or down.
Although this is a professional approach it is still not an exact science. There are rules and we are making sure that risk is kept to a minimum but even with the most professionally ran business mistakes and inaccuracy happens. I missed a few bets during this week, I even bet on a couple of things twice which luckily went my way but overall these things will even themselves out. Stakes weren’t perfect as I mentioned earlier but you can’t always get the exact stake you want on at the price you want a (particularly on Betfair) anyway.
You can get a little crippled by trying to achieve perfectionism and crunch too many numbers. So I’m allowing myself to chill out a little and not be too hard on myself if the process isn’t quite a perfect one.
So it’s a loss in week one but for me monthly results are more important and I’m expecting to be in good profit most months. 114 bets is a decent amount but a week is a small timeframe and I feel a month is a better indicator of how things are going. Sheet is here in case you’re interested and I’ll provide account screen shots at the end of each month.