Ice Ice baby

Today's tick size was £1.

As expected the bastards at Ikea stopped me from doing much trading today. Add to that the fact that ice cubes the size of testicles were falling from the sky in a hail storm - not much trading got done. I was worried that the lightning might affect my internet connection and decide to hold off any further races.

All in all the races I did trade went well. Here's the P&L:

Horse Racing: GBP5.18 Total P&L: GBP5.18

Horse Racing Showing 1 - 4 of 4 markets

Market Start time Settled date Profit/loss (£) Horse Racing / Ling 27th Jun : 5f Mdn Stks 27-Jun-09 19:20 27-Jun-09 19:24 0.60 Horse Racing / Donc 27th Jun : 1m Hcap 27-Jun-09 19:05 27-Jun-09 19:15 0.83 Horse Racing / Ling 27th Jun : 1m2f Mdn Stks 27-Jun-09 18:50 27-Jun-09 18:56 3.17 Horse Racing / Ling 27th Jun : 1m4f Hcap 27-Jun-09 18:15 27-Jun-09 18:20 0.58

Profit and Loss is shown net of commission.

I'll give a bit of a rundown:

Race 1 (1815 @ Ling) I tried to scalp very agressively. The favourite was at odds of 8.00 when I arrived and seemed quite range-bound. Using the ladder interface in Bet Angel I was constantly placing trades around both sides of the current price. The main task here is to watch your 'net stake' - if I started getting too heavy on one side I would try to fill orders on the other before continuing.

In the end I was slightly out of the money - but the price was so very close to me being in profit I decided to let it run in play. With 14 runners and 1m4f to run I was very confident I would be filled - and I was quickly, greening out for 61p.

Race 2 had a 20 minute gap from the previous - I decided to give this a wide berth after the crap yesterday, though with an odds on favourite in the field it was a shame. Perhaps as I get more confident in my ability I will be able to trade these races.

Race 3 (1850 @ Ling)was very nice. I managed to catch 4 nice swings, but the inevitable mistakes that come with swing trading ate in to my profit somewhat. Still - a very positive showing.

A very tough scalping market developed in 1905 @ Donc - initially the favourite had odds of around 3.45, with the second horse @ 5. I find these races hard. I find that set-ups like this dont tend to swing enough to be classified as a proper swing opportunity, but move a little too much for non-heart palpation scalping.

I was out of the money right until the end on this one. At the off the odds came very near to where I had 3 bets I needed to close - so close in fact I decided to let the bets run in play again. Sure enough in the first 5 seconds they were filled and I greened out. I'm still undecided on this strategy ... am I going to get really burned letting things go in play? How close is close enough to justify it? I will keep testing this.

Just before it started thundering outside the 1920 @ Ling took place. Bloody hell.

"Nepostism" starting the day at 5-1, was 3-1 at the off - but it happened so quickly. I was trading the fav, "Where's the Soap" when out of the corner of my eye I saw Nepostism start to come in. The weight of money on "Where's the Soap" implied he was about to drift - sure enough he did and I made a nice 10 tick profit. At this point I turned my attention to Nepo - should you change horses mid trading? I don't know. I made a small loss on Nepo in the end, he was just too volatile. Someone knew something and he certainly warranted the crash in price by winning the race.

Small green total for an all green night. Nepo's price graph below.