As anyone who has been following this blog and read my latest posts, you’ll notice that I’ve been on a massive losing streak of late.  In recent weeks I’ve lost £277 in Week 23, £222 in Week 24, and £465 in Week 27.  Yes, I’ve had a good win in Week 25 to offset one of those bad weeks, but it’s still been a downward trend in my fortunes since.

Whilst experiencing these losses, I decided to have a look at my fire-and-forget trades to see what kind of losing run I was experiencing and how this compared to what I should have expected statistically.  When looking back on my recent results, I experienced 3 wins in 14 trades for the 3 week period Week 26 to Week 28.  This differed significantly from my expected strike rate of 2 wins in every 5 trades.  So, looking at my recent trades I believe I have been extremely unlucky.  Out of those 14 fire-and-forget trades I should expect 5.6 wins.  So, as you can see, only getting 3 wins does point to me being a tad unlucky.

So, what can I say about this recent bad run?  I can say that psychologically it’s affected me.  Financially it’s also affected me in terms of growing my bank.  But I also know that this is all part and parcel of sports trading.  I probably wouldn’t have minded psychologically if the 3 wins I did get broke up some of the losing streaks, instead they appeared at either end of the losing run, so I got this sequence:

W-L-W-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-W

Statistically you are going to get these bad losing runs.  It happens.  This was perfectly highlighted in an episode of Derren Brown’s TV show (not sure what it was called) where he flips a coin and gets 10 heads on the bounce.  They show him doing this in an uninterrupted video clip, but gave the impression that he’s only just started flipping the coin and manages to flip this incredible run.  What they later came clean with, is the fact that they recorded Derren flipping the coin for a number of hours, until he finally managed to flip this incredible run of 10 heads.  Statistically it was always going to happen, it was just a question of when it was going to happen and making sure that they caught it on film.  And that’s the thing that I need to get into my head, the fact that these runs will happen.  And the good thing is, this could easily have happened the other way – I could have had a brilliant run where I made lots of money.  I only need to look back to Week 21 when I did extremely well.  I managed to get 3 winning trades out of 4 which gave me a profit of approximately £500.  So I just need to take the rough with the smooth and stay mentally strong.

What did make me laugh is that I experienced this unfortunate run at such an early stage of my trading journey. You’re only meant to experience this type of run when you’ve done a good number of trades. Still, it won’t put me off, and it should really give me a boost as I should experience a turnaround in my fortunes.

So if you are experiencing a bad run, and you’ve got faith in your system, just remember that you will come across these bad runs and you’ve just got to ride it out. These type of runs put people off doing trading, but you’ve got to go through the hardship if you want to make it in this game. Nobody said it was going to be easy, it isn’t. But the rewards at the end of it should be worth it.

Take it easy peeps, and I’ll try and post some more helpful hints to fill the gaps between now and the start of next season.