I thought I’d try some sports trading the other day using Betfair. In the past, I have managed to triple my starting pot using Betfair but then lost it all when I played with their Betfair Poker application.. keep away from that, it’ll eat all your money!
Anyway, I thought I would give it a try in the Horse Racing market. The strategy was quite simple, watch the trends in the price and when it looks like it would win, the put on a bet for that horse to win. To minimise risk, where possible, I would lay the same horse when the price was favourite to generate a situation where you can either eliminate any loss to your account (you don’t lose money if the horse wins or loses) or at least, minimise it.
I must admit, I’m not very experienced with this but I understand the concepts. Anyway, I started off with just £2 bets and as I got a little better, I put on £4 bets. 14 bets later I ended with 11 cash wins, 2 losses and 1 scratch trade, I ended up with £23.62 profit!! Excellent!
See my cash statement below (click for larger link):
The UK horse racing market stops at 4pm GMT and then then there is the US market. However, the US market doesn’t seem to offer the cash volumes as the UK market so I didn’t bother trading it.
I started at 2pm GMT but the market for horse racing in the UK starts around 12pm. If I have time tomorrow, I’ll go in a bit larger and start at 12pm if I can. At some point, I’ll do a video so you can see how I am doing this for those interested.
I was browsing through the internet and found out that Rich at the Forex Project was having a Forex competition.. this looked like some fun so I thought I would join and give it a go.
Though I don’t usually trade the Forex markets as much as I should, trading is trading and I’m hoping to build some long term links with people with some similar interests. I’ve not made it in my trading career (yet!) so it’s important to find like minded people to share and express ideas.. if you grow together and successful together then everyone is happy.
Anyway, I went to the website http://www.forexproject.com/Forex_Contests/ and read through what to do. I set up a game account as suggested and then scoured the charts to see if I could make some trades.
I’m also reading the Ed Ponsi book, Forex Patterns & Probabilities and there’s a bit in his book which says something along the lines of not looking for the small profits but the big ones… ie a few hundred pips rather than 20 - 30 pips or so.
You get a dummy $100,000 account to play with and a web based trading platform with charts and analysis.
Anyway, I got short USD/JPY last night at 113.846 and long NZD/USD 0.7722. I took my trade entries purely on the daily charts and using the smaller time frames to find a good entry point.
I closed the USD/JPY trade this morning at 112.8850 for $8,445.39 and the NZD/USD is still running with a cumulative profit of $940. I am targetting 0.78500 as an exit.. the stoploss is currently 0.76000. We’ll see how it goes, if the charts start to look funny I’ll get out but so far, there’s every reason to continue.
I was thinking great, this is a good start to the contest but I’ve probably gone in with quite large trades risking upto 10% of my capital… in the real world, this would be suicidal.. you may make some good lucky trades but long term, luck will get you.
Oh, the other thing which I found was that I had not actually joined the contest prior to making the trades and also the contest starts off in January for a month so my results so far don’t count!! Nevermind.. it’s all good fun! 
