Busy Busy Busy

Please accept my apologies for the lack of updates. My trading has been severely reduced of late due to extenuating circumstances: holiday's and The Ashes! I'm away for the next week also so it will be a a little while until we get back in to the flow of things. I have managed to trade a little since I last posted, but it was an incredibly frustrating day. P&L:

Horse Racing: GBP3.13 Total P&L: GBP3.13

Horse Racing Showing 1 - 9 of 9 markets

Market Start time Settled date Profit/loss (£) Horse Racing / York 11th Jul : 1m2f Hcap 11-Jul-09 15:10 11-Jul-09 15:19 0.53 Horse Racing / Ascot 11th Jul : 1m Grp2 11-Jul-09 14:50 11-Jul-09 14:55 2.21 Horse Racing / Nott 11th Jul : 6f Hcap 11-Jul-09 14:45 11-Jul-09 14:53 0.46 Horse Racing / York 11th Jul : 1m Hcap 11-Jul-09 14:35 11-Jul-09 14:43 0.82 Horse Racing / Chest 11th Jul : 7f Listed 11-Jul-09 14:25 11-Jul-09 14:30 2.18 Horse Racing / Nott 11th Jul : 6f Mdn Stks 11-Jul-09 14:15 11-Jul-09 14:23 -3.21 Horse Racing / Ascot 11th Jul : 1m2f Hcap 11-Jul-09 14:20 11-Jul-09 14:23 0.87 Horse Racing / York 11th Jul : 5f Nursery 11-Jul-09 14:05 11-Jul-09 14:11 -2.69 Horse Racing / Ascot 11th Jul : 7f Hcap 11-Jul-09 13:50 11-Jul-09 13:56 1.96

Profit and Loss is shown net of commission.

No good profits there, couple of reasonable losses. If I'm honest with myself I'm sure it could have been a lot worse.

I've found myself developing a scary new habit - one which I need to alter. Using the ladder interface of Bet Angel you are able to see money above and below the current price, giving you some idea of what the market could do. However, on a typical scalping market I have been quite agressive, but perhaps not the right way.

Let's say a price is coming in. I, for example, may place a back bet just above the current price and a lay be just below it. This is fine - however - the Lay bet gets taken and the Back bet does not. The price continues to drop.

Now a key point in scalping is that it better to keep betting - the more you bets you get matched, the more your out of the money bets are counter-acted and nulified. However, going back to my example, with the price continuing to drop I put another back bet in, and another lay. The price continues to drop and now I'm out of the money on two bets.

The other day I let this situation happen 5 times in a row, so I effectively had 5 open bets and while the price stabilised at a lower level, it never recovered to the position it was at before. I made a loss on that race.

So I was thinking - in low quality, highly volatile scalping markets is it better to take a price for your opening bet rather than ask for one? Or is it better to ask for a price, but only put one side of the bet on and wait for that to get matched before placing the opposing bet to close your position?

I hope I have explained this well enough - I don't have a video of it - but I would be very keen to hear people's views on this.

Before I sign off for the rest of the week, I want to link to a couple of great posts Adam Heathcote made regarding entry and exit points, both are well worth reading:

Entry Points

Exit Points