Random thoughts

I wanted to write some stuff about life and family relationships but I’m not ready to turn this blog into an emo-whine-rant blog just yet. I may, however, write some of my thoughts on these topics later, when I want to update my blog but don’t have anything trading related to say.

The reason I’m telling you this is that I’ve been thinking alot lately (I think too much sometimes) about parents. About how they sometimes don’t accept their kids’ choices in life. and when the kids try to reason with their parents with sounds arguments they won’t listen or tell them they are wrong. it seems sometimes parents think they are allknowing and can decide everything in their kids’ life. I’m not only talking about career choices here, I’m mainly talking about something else which I won’t go into detail with yet. but the scenario can be fitted to alot of situations.

Today was satisfying for me and a personal victory. I got home from school in time to trade the last 4 races, and a profit of over dkk10 with a stake of dkk30 gave me a nice confidence boost. It was only after I finished trading that I found out there had been some problems with the api today. I did notice the markets where different but I kept trading because I want as much experience as I can get.

my p&l for monday

Weekend scalping – part 2

I traded most races today. I got really angry at myself after 1 hour because I had managed to get two big losses so I stopped trading for and hour until I was calm again. after my little break I didn’t get a single lossing race which is a nice result, and a nice boost to my confidence.

But I still have to take those damn losses before they get too big.

well, here’s my p&l for today.

Weekend scalping

this weekend I decided to scalp, which I haven’t been able to do much when I was studying swingtrading. I still have problems with cutting my losses and I’m desperately trying to work on that. Trading is not a battle against the other traders, it’s a battle against yourself. I couldn’t trade all the races saturday because I was going to see Avatar. It’s was a great movie but sadly I can’t see 3d because of my eyes, well, the sparks from the fire looked like they was in front of me but that was it.

I’m using dkk30 stakes again and I’ll keep it that way until I can cut my losses properly.

my p&l for saturday

Restless..

Right now I feel restless.. I want to trade and research my ideas all the time, but the problem is I get home from school just in time to catch the last 2 races on the card. That is getting me a little worried because I want be, and feel, ready for when I graduate to trade fulltime. I want to have my strategies all figured out and have a daily routine so I “hit the ground running”.

I took my own advice and simplified my already simplified strategy, or I tested if a simiplified version would work. the problem when I get new strategies is that the data I already have is no good because I focused on another strategy when I collected it. I found videos of a thursday and two saturdays on my harddrive today to test my new idea and it looks promising.

none of the days ended in a loss, only one of them ended in a small profit the rest ended with a nice profit and the average per day over the 3 days was over dkk100 with a stake of dkk100. that is good enough for me.

I don’t really worry about the size of the profit I may gain from my strategies, the only thinng I really want them to be is consistent and then I can adjust my stakes to fit a profit target.

I’ll keep working with my new strategy and hopefully start trading with it soon so I can calm myself down and not worry too much.

More swinging…

I didn’t scalp this weekend because I felt like I wasn’t focusing enough. instead I gathered more data to study for my swing trading. It is really hard finding the right patterns, when I do something to reduce losses I also have to see if it will reduce a possible profit too much.

What I’ve done when there were no more races was, I organized my data and looked for the patterns I found throughout the week, checked if my strategy checked out on these markets too and then I would look for new patterns and find ways to reduce losses. after all this I came up with a possible way of trading with my strategy, converting theory to practice.

I don’t know when I’m going to trade with my strategy, I may do some more paper trading next week because I don’t have sufficient data from all days of the week yet.

KISS – keep it simple, stupid

I was not happy with the result of the last 2 days swing strategy so I decided to scrap all the previous thoughts I had  about the markets and rethink the situation.

basically I used the scientific method on determining what signals to look for, change one variable at a time. otherwise you can’t conclude anything because you don’t know what changed what.

I also made it easier for me to find patterns as I gave every variable a different color in my notes, it’s easier on your brain that way looking for patterns. I don’t know if I’m going to test my new findings this weekend as I finally have some time to scalp which I haven’t done properly in week now. I’ll probably just scalp saturday and sunday and test my latest view on swing trading next week.

Back to the drawingboard

I swing traded on most races today, and scalped on about 3. I got a small profit but I might as well have broken even because my swing trading is far from perfect at this point. I’m taking a new approach on it now as I’m positive there is some way to crack this nut.

I found my scalping very consistent today averaged about dkk10 profit from scalping on the 3 races. note: there’s both swing trading and scalping in the races so the P&L doesn’t show how well the scalping went.

Tomorrow I’ll start taking my new approach on the swing trading, which is a new way of collecting data to study and a new way of studying it.

my P&L for today

Re-evaluating my swing strategy

Today’s swing trading wasn’t very sucessful. So what I did after the races was I took all the data I had and ran through it again to find ways to improve it. Trading is not about winning, it’s about not losing. so I looked at it again to find ways to cut losses and in doing so I found something very interesting on how the market moves, which is not only valuable in my swing trading but also in my scalping. you find new useful info when you least expect it.

I will try swing trading tomorrow with my re-evaluated swing strategy, I can’t scalp most week days because of school so it’s nice to have something else to work on and improve.

Good results and bad results

I want to keep my swing trading and scalping seperate, but I don’t want to open another betfair account just yet, so I just wrote down what my p&l was from swing trading and it looks good. I was only able to swing trade 4 races because of school. I got a big profit of dkk12.53 with a stake of dkk30 on one race and got a couple of losses on the others with one scratch trade.

Here’s the big swing I caught

all in all my profit from swing trading today is dkk4.32 with a stake of dkk30. I looked at some data and found that I could have turned the losses into small wins if I had entered the market later than I did. I will try again tomorrow and see how it goes.

My scalping has been way off today. When I traded I got really angry at myself because I didn’t scratch or take a small loss when the market went against me. I really have to work on that, if I had just taken the small losses I would have had a nice profit today. also I was dkk10 green on one race but then they pulled the horse I traded on leaving me with only dkk0.69 if I had got that profit I would have a very small profit now, but you can’t dwell on stuff like that.

Since I was dkk9 down today I’ll be using dkk70 stakes tomorrow, I really like my staking system, it allows me to take it slow and still improve. I don’t know if I was just off today but the markets seemed more unpredictable than Saturday and Sunday.

my P&L for today

ps. I’m really not proud of today’s results, it calms me down that I know what I did wrong, that allows me to improve on it. Now I just have to kick myself every time I don’t scratch a trade.

The results are in

I think I’ve found the right signals to be able to do some long term swing trading. I was too lazy to go over all the data I collected because my prerace scalping has been more succesful than I expected. I tried to find the right signals after I crunched the numbers from one meeting, and if I entered the trades where the right signals were present I would have made dkk44.58 with dkk30 stakes.

I’m going to try some real trading tomorrow, I’m really excited about it, I’m confident that it will work – it will be a nice boost to my profit if it does.