Well, what a kick in the old knackers Week 20 was! After the international break I was full of hope for a bumper weekend, but it wasn’t to be. As I mentioned in my previous post, Week 20 got off to a bad start, and it ended badly too. Although not too badly. I did have a feeling a losing week was around the corner, as I’d been on such a good run of greens of late, and this weekend it materialised. Hey-ho! We deal with it and move on.

I would like to point out, that if I did stay in my trades instead of trading out, then I would only have been £35 down for the week, as opposed to the £111 I was actually down. But, you could argue that I’m talking with the benefit of hindsight. Had those bets not gone my way I would have been a lot more than £111 down, I can assure you. For example, for the Everton vs Spurs game I had 1-1 as a CS selection, so I would have broke even if I just stayed in my trades. But the game was at 0-1 with 10 minutes to go. If the game stayed at 0-1, I would have been looking at a £48 loss. If it went to 1-1, I would have broke even. If it went to 0-2 I was looking at a £75 green. With Spurs looking very lacklustre (especially against 10 men), and Everton looking good but not too threatening (because they were a man down), I decided to take the loss. Was this the sensible thing to do? I’m thinking so, but a lot of you would argue not. I guess from a traders view, being able to take losses is paramount if you want to stay in the game. But, looking at the risk-to-reward ratio, you could argue that I had the opportunity of winning £75 (or breaking even) vs the risk of losing £48.

The above scenario is a dilemma that can tear you apart as a trader not long into their sports trading journey. It’s something that can keep you second guessing. And just because you made money doesn’t mean that you made the right decision. I’ve made money staying in trades, and I’ve lost money staying in trades. I’ve lessened my loss by coming out of trades early, and I’ve limited my potential profit by coming out of trades early. So, because of this, what I’ve decided to do, is to download my last 3 months worth of Betfair Exchange data, and to see if I would have been better off staying in my trades, or whether coming out of my trades early would have been the better option financially. I’ll not include my set-and-forget trades in this research. I’ll get back to you with the results of this research at some point next week as I’m too busy to be doing this any time soon.

So, lets have a look at my actual trades for Week 20:

As you can see, this was my biggest loss to date. A large part of that is due to the £75 loss on my fire-and-forget trade, so I’m not too despondent about that. And the others I guess you could say I was unlucky with, but I probably did the right thing coming out of the trades early (research pending). I will say I’m using bigger stakes than previously, so bigger losses when I do have a bad week are to be expected.

Here’s the table of my weekly profit and loss amounts, with a cumulative picture of my journey so far:

I’m not going to get too demotivated with the loss, but it does affect you. It’ll be on my mind for a couple of days – what went wrong, what went right. But, it makes me more determined than ever to keep at this trading malarkey and to make it work.

Good luck if you’re trading at the weekend. I’m out and about on Friday till late so there probably won’t be any Friday Night mass. But I’ll may try and put a little Saturday morning mass on, I’ll see. If you are trading, good luck. And may the Lord be with you. Always.