Hello peeps! I hope you’re all alright and enjoying this time off from the football trading. I know I am. My stresses are no longer there, and I’ve got a lot more time to spend with my nearest and dearest which is always great to do.

I did say I would make a few posts regarding the three biggest trading lessons learnt from last season, so I thought that I’d start with my biggest lesson learnt, and the one mistake that kind of caused the other two lessons to be learnt, and that was going in at the deep end with new strategies.

I had a really good first season (2022-23) in terms of profit, but towards the end of the season I went on a really bad run that caused me to question my strategy and whether or not I still “had it”. Because of this, and the fact that I didn’t want to go through something similar in the new season, I decided to look into adding a few more strategies to the armoury in the close season. This, I hoped, would smooth out any bumps in the road that I might come across in the future, and any losses in my original strategy would then be compensated by profits in the new strategies.

The only problem with the new strategies was that they weren’t tested as exhaustedly as they could have been. And because of this, I dived straight into trading the new systems on similar stakes as to my original strategy, without having a bedding in period at all.

This meant massive losses were incurred within the first 2 months of the season. If you can recall, my losses for weeks 2, 3, 4 & 7 were £106, £224, £257, and £200 respectively. I think it was shortly after this time that I decided to cease trading my new strategies and concentrate on my manual trading and my original strategy. I’ve since looked to see how I would have preformed if I kept the faith and traded my new strategies until the end of the season, and I would have been over 93 points down. Which at the stakes I was trading at, would have meant a total loss of £2,325 (-93 points x £25)!

Looking back, I should have probably done a lot more testing of my strategies before utilising them. I also should have started trading my new strategies on reduced stakes too, to see if they were any good before going with the larger stakes. Who knows, they may still be good strategies, last season might have just been a blip. I know last season was one of the highest scoring Premier league seasons (if not the highest), so it might have had something to do with it!

And that’s the thing, how do you know when to keep the faith in a strategy, and when to let go? You hear of many people abandoning a strategy after a bad run, only for them to have missed out on potentially massive profits had they carried on trading it. And I guess this is were having 100% faith in your strategies matters. If you’ve done your testing properly, then the chances are that your new strategy will be a success. I might have just got unlucky with this season. What I’m going to do is probably retest my new strategies and keep an eye on them for next season. I’m not going to totally write them off, but I also won’t be trading them until the statistics say otherwise.

Hopefully next season I will bring in some new strategies, but learning my lessons from last season, I’m going to ensure that these new strategies are properly tested and I won’t be going in with the big stakes straight away. It’ll be small stakes until the strategies are proven to be profitable.

Well, that’s my first of three of my “biggest lesson learnt from last season”. I hope you’ve learnt from this. And I also hope to bring you the next two lessons learnt within the coming days. And as ever always, may the Lord be with you. Always.

Take care peeps.