Handling the ups and downs

I love the videos that Adam Todd, from Racing Traders, puts together! That said, I only just watched the October vid called, "Betfair Trading Using Advanced Coin Flipping and Guesswork Techniques". Essentially, Adam goes through a number of races and randomly guesses which way the price is going. He then either scratches out or takes a small loss if the price is heading in the wrong direction, but lets winning trades run, taking, for example, a 10 tick profit. The essential point of the video was that it is not so important how you determine the direction you think the market is going to move, but the important bit is limiting any losses and riding any profits. This is pretty much the same point given by financial trading gurus like George Soros. Its good to see this demonstrated and commentated on in Adam's usual amusing style.

In Summary

If reading through all the betting and trading blogs that are popping up is becoming a bind, there is a blog in town that does a lot of the grunt work for you. It is called Betting Blogs and it is basically a summary of what the latest posts are around the betting/trading blogosphere.

My eBook is ready for release, yay!

Well, I've finally finished the last set of changes to my eBook about building your own betting/trading software/bot. I plan to keep adding more examples and expanding it further, but for now, I'll release what I have. So far, I have added 9 new different examples, showing how to do the following.

1. Log on to your account using the Betfair free API
   
2. Getting a list of events
   
3. Getting a list of markets and runners
   
4. Displaying market prices in a "ladder" style.
   
5. Matched price and Bollinger band graphs
   
6. Volume graphs


7. Weight of money graphs
   
8. Placing a bet
   
9. Placing a below minimum stake bet, updating bets, cancelling bets.
   

At the top of this post, there is a screen shot.

Is this a blatant ad? Yeah, I suppose so, but I'm really excited that I've got this far. It's been hard to find time to work on this and seems to have taken me bloody ages.

Support?

Wife, girlfriend, partner-in-crime, other-half, spouse, husband, boyfriend, whatever you call them, they have a big impact on our lives. I was thinking about this the other day and wondered what your other halves thought about your trading activities? Are they supportive, encouraging, uninterested or downright anti-trading? For myself, my wife kind of treats it like it is my little hobby to be tolerated, like stamp collecting or something. It's okay, unless it looks like it will interfere with something "important"! A bit less than ideal from my point of view, but I just get on with it.

GetMarketPricesCompressed

I've had a few hits on the blog from people searching for information on the betfair API function "GetMarketPricesCompressed", so I have put a post about it in the forum at: http://thebreakthroughpartnership.com/simplemachinesforum/index.php?topic=3.0

Hope that helps.

Trading using the training or trusting mindset?

Whenever I have been in the zone and on a winning run, if I think back, it always felt very natural and was about acting and reacting without analysing and thinking. On the contary, when I've been doing badly, the opposite seems to hold, I am always over analysing, thinking and hesitating and then finally acting just as the price changed.

Performance consultant, author and speaker, John Eliot, talks about high performers using a "trusting mindset" whereas everyone else uses a "training mindset". The trusting mindset is what I would call the unconscious mind and the training mind set is the conscious mind.

When a skill is initially being learnt, it is done very deliberately and every action is scrutinised and practiced. This is all a very conscious activity. If you think to when you learnt to drive. Changing gear was a bitch! It was a long and complicated operation requiring full concentration (at least it was for me). A very conscious activity (training midset).

After you have been driving a while, changing gear is easy and you can do it whilst talking to your mate in the passenger seat without thinking about it. This is an unconscious operation (trusting midset).

Any skill is trained consciously and then becomes almost a habit as it is transferred to the unconscious. The thing is, if you start to think too much about something when you are doing it, it ends up working through the conscious (training mindset) route which is slower and more deliberate. The same holds with trading. When you are trading 10 minutes before the off, you need to be ready to act quickly and confidently otherwise you miss the boat. This is an environment where the unconscious shines. If you have ever had a winning run, where you have been in the zone, you will know what it is like. It is all about trusting your unconscious to know what to do and not trying to second guess yourself.

My birthday

It was my birthday yesterday, so not much to report tradingwise. I went out for a late lunch with my wife, the kids, the in-laws and family. It was nice, other than my boy Harry (who is 2.5) being a grumpy little monster.