New Courses Dates In London

After several months of running separate training courses from home, Sam and I have organised our first joint courses held just after the World Cup Final. We are now taking bookings and for more info please click HERE

Market Madness

Trading is a funny old game, as you don't really know what each day will bring and what new opportunities may arise. All it takes is 1 bookie or big punter to put a decent order through the market and it changes everything in that 10 minutes worth of trading. Even though the turnover in a race can easily push over the 1 million pound mark in high quality meetings. An order for example of £10-20k can dramatically affect the overall price even in these types of races. There are many factors for this, but the main reason is that most of that massive turnover in a race is accumulated from traders and not genuine bets. When someone is willing to smash a large genuine bet in the market, some traders will instantly be caught out and needing to close their positions out. This accelerates the desperation in people's minds and you can almost feel people starting to panic. This ultimately leads to people not only scrambling to get out for a loss but also other people scrambling to get on the possible move.

Another knock on affect of large orders flying into a market, is if someone is manipulating the price to their benefit and holding a price where they want it. Then this can completely destroy the manipulators objective and force a market to react in other crazy ways when they either chase their own position, or alternatively keep trying to push a market back to a price which puts them back in the green.

From Thursday-Saturday (I didn't trade Sunday but it might have been the same behaviour) someone was willing to smash through large orders on nearly every race of the day and eve's. This proved an exciting few days in trying to make the most of of situations like these, and in my eyes if you see a big gambler like this around you have to base your whole strategies and styles around him. If anyone was trading and had a hard time of things, I'll explain a few basis ways to approach markets with a big player in them.

1. Be very careful leaving too much lay money sat around. The big punt can come at any time and can easily wipe your orders out leaving you no time to exit for a small loss.
2. Try get on the first move, but only if you are confident the order is genuine and they want the bet matched. If they do a common occurrence is they drag the bet down until its matched.
3. If you miss the first move, there is often a chance to still get ride the price down. But it all depends on how much of the large bet has been taken and how far the price has gone down already. React to the situation accordingly and if you think the order is still going to be dragged down don't hesitate and get involved.
4. Looking for the reversal can work nicely as well by watching closely for when the big bet gets taken, riding a possible bounce back move where the price adjusts to the over reaction of the large bet.
   
5. If the price is being manipulated anyway before the big bet flys in, be careful what price you hit and pay attention to what the manipulation is trying to do after the large orders comes.

These are a few things to consider if you see this type of behaviour again, and I assure you will do at some point in the future. Who knows today at Ascot could entice some large bets :)

Friday and Saturday were my best days last week, although unfortunately on a few occasions I didn't make the most out of what was going on. I was getting a little bit too aggressive on some of the moves and I annoyed myself near the end of the day time card on Saturday. You'll see on the p/l screenshot I got a bit carried away with putting too much money on at times where I really didn't need to. Especially when I was already 600 notes up. There was a lot of money to be made and it's hard to really nail all of these markets. But all in all I was happy with the overall profits in the madness of the weekend.

Friday

Saturday

Good luck at Ascot and keep an eye out for large orders!

The Secret Of Consistency

Apologies for the lack of blogging recently, I've been busy finishing off my last courses in Madrid and planning out my move back to London.

I'd like to thank everyone who has attended 1 of my courses so far. It's been a very interesting experience for me which has changed up my lifestyle somewhat. After years of looking at the markets its a nice venture to go down by making my days different to just staring at numbers going up and down :) It's also been very rewarding and something that I will be happily doing with Sam for sometime to come. On that topic Sam and I will soon be announcing our first joint course dates very soon on my next post! We are going to be offering for the first few course packages of 1-2 days in mid July. I'll explain it all on my next post so keep an eye out over the next week or so.

When I first started running the courses I didn't expect that I would enjoy them as much as I have, even though I seem to have a habit of exhausting both the client and myself out by the time the course finishes. I hope you have gained a lot from them in offering you a chance to see what works for me, showing you an alternative perspective looking at the market and offered you a plan of action for the coming months.

The people who has sat beside me realise I have no golden ticket in controlling your financial future. I can show you the how to, but you have to be the one that clicks the button and react correctly to a mix of circumstances. This will come with time, but you have to be willing to give it just that - time. It's all about being able to adapt to each market condition and trying to maximise profit from the markets your reading correctly whilst minimising your losses from the markets that are difficult. There are so many more difficult markets on an average week that successfully cutting your losses is so important. It sounds simple I know, but you have to stick to strict rules in this game otherwise your fighting a losing battle. I think here lies a factor why people have many problems coming to term with consistent profits.

In simple terms what I regard a good market is 1 that not only has decent liquidity in volume but also has a good fill rate in the market. This is essential in being able to get out of trouble quickly if it turns against you as your order gets matched at a loss that is easily recovered. Also it ensures you turn over your own bank a few times which ultimately leads to happier rewards. Thinner markets are trickier due the fact they don't attract as much genuine money to them. Which leads to them being pushed around by manipulation and not bouncing to and from resistance points very easily. I often know when and where and market 'should' be at throughout a race, but when there isn't enough genuine moves occurring, then situations don't always happen as they 'should' do. I always tell people expect the unexpected at all times, because inevitably markets will do unexpected things more times than you could imagine.

So the secret of consistency I believe is down to being able to minimise your losses very well in many different scenarios. From swing to scalp trading it doesn't make much difference. Apart from in a swing trade I am willing to give myself a larger loss margin where I'm looking for a potential swing back in my favour. A small loss can turn into a substantial loss very quickly if you are not ready to execute your exit position. If you can be prepared to take the small loss before the price hits you, closing out for a loss becomes so much easier. Simply put you were ready to take the loss before the market even got there. Like programming your mind into expecting the market to do what you weren't expecting, and just take the recoverable loss straight away. If you don't do this it is almost too easy to panic when the a situation turns into a small loss, freeze, stare at the screen and 2 seconds later that small loss you could of taken is now a loss that isn't easily recoverable. Having a big loss affects not only a nasty look on your p/l, but makes it so hard to stay clear minded in the following races in the day. Depending on how bad the loss is even to the point of affecting your head throughout the whole week/month.

Hope that made some kind of sense :)


Here's the difference between a steady day of little losses, and smaller wins with more consistency.




Compared to a day with bigger losses and bigger wins meaning less overall profit on the day. It just shows how the small profits build up when you are not throwing away too much of hard earn cash.

SportsTradingJourney

We have had many discussions on where to how to take the membership site forward. It won't be a million miles away from launch but we want to make sure we get it right from the off so please bear with us. It will be more likely be launched when I'm back in London. Also we'll get some more free vids out to the mailing list very soon so check your emails.

Few thoughts -

The reason I think this is worth pursuing and how the idea came about is because it became apparent how much people learnt from analysing my own videos whilst on my courses. If we can get a similar kind of experience over the web then I think it will really benefit people.

The problem is that when I can talk over the videos in person. Where I pause, rewind and re- explain things. I can give a full understanding of exactly whats happening and why. Where expressing this online in a vid will be a little harder to get the full story across. With this is mind we want the membership site only to be available to people who have attended the course. Not only will this make it a very exclusive area where people can interact with each other, but mainly that people we are trying to help have met us in person and seen it all happen live. The way we trade, how we go about our decisions and how to implement strategies successfully. So seeing new fresh video's on a regular basis will really push their learning and understanding of the markets in the right direction a lot more. So we have decided to have the site like an on-going mentoring idea where we can easily get across everything we want to offer over a perfect teaching platform over the web.

Saying that we might introduce an area where people who haven't attended 1 of our courses can join up in another section. The interest looks good but we just really want to have the main aim of the site dedicated to the people we have met in person and can show them a clear path through our video's. The small group training courses are our main focus so the membership site will be a great way of helping these people out after they are thrown in the deep end and tackling the markets for themselves.

Chat & Forum

I've created a new chat feature to my site on a page at the top. I'll be on it when I can so feel free to come and say ello. But I won't be chatting away to myself so don't be shy :)
Sam and I will also be doing a Q&A session on the chat very soon where you can fire away questions at us for 30 mins or so. The date will be announced on the next post.

The forum seemed to have lost its momentum a little so I'll make sure I get some new posts on there and discuss a few things with everyone there. Sam and I will make sure we post quite often so again please don't hesitate to get involved.



Yikes sorry bit of a long post there, just had a few things I wanted to cover. Many thanks and please check back for more information on the London courses coming up in July.

Theres loads of opportunities around now with evening racing and some big meetings coming up Happy trading!