Reminder

Due to problems with ftping to blogger, the main Bet Angel blog is available at http://blog.betangel.com.

Day off

With the racing looking pretty dreadful, the weather fantastic and my wife celebrating her birthday, a day behind the screen was a remote possibility today. Till August 24th, each Monday and Tuesday have only two cards on in the afternoon, excluding bank holidays. Often these are poorer quality affairs.

My advise, don’t kill yourself doing all races unless you feel you need to, there are plenty around in the summer. Try to strike the right balance and take the opportunitity to get some time off if you wish. Do this by trying to pick and choose your targets. With the Irish Derby on Sunday I opted to go out for the day, but time my arrival back home for the Derby. This took the pressure off feeling I needed to do anything today, Monday. Sometimes it’s worth taking a break!

Catch up

Due to problems with ftping to blogger, the main Bet Angel blog is available via word press at http://blog.betangel.com. We have reverted this blog back to the standard blogger format and will re-populate this with posts from the main blog for continuety. It will take a little time to catch up but we should get there soon!

When it's scary to scalp!

When I started this blog my first ever post was about three club monte, you can see the original blog entry here. Since I started trading, nearly nine years ago, my view has always been that there is a strategy for every market. Recognise the right one and it's a breeze, well much easier anyhow. Use the wrong one and it will make your life very hard indeed.

If you looked at yesterdays races before they started you could see pretty quickly that it wasn't exactly a scalping paradise. As the day wore on anybody trying for a one tick upside risked some pretty hefty downside movement. Looking at my stats, it was third most volatile day this year. At the end of the day, of the 35 markets I traded yesterday, a large chunk of them were the antithesis of scalping; very volatile with big movements. If you just scalped you would have had a tough day, by contrast swing traders had a field day yesterday.

The first race of the day was a classic example. The price moved from 10's to 4's and if you didn't catch that, then one of the clearest cut swing trading patterns occurred when the horses were at the post. It sent the price right back out again. It would have been a clear signal for even a die hard scalper to change styles.

Today's forecast is some more of the same. More races today are ideal for scalping so it's a bit better balanced but quite a few will exhibit characteristics that are not at all suitable. Scalp those and you could get into trouble pretty quickly. Of course everybody sits in their own comfort zone but trying to scalp a volatile market is actually a common mistake that inexperienced traders make and is best avoided.

More reason to make sure you are equipped with tools that will allow you to take advantage of what promises to be another volatile day.

Chaos at Folkstone

Not sure I have seen a race like this for some time. Two jockeys chucked before the start on the way to post. Horses run to post. Another horse chucks a jockey at the start. All the horses load when one plays up and gets stuck under the gate. All horses come out and are reloaded, another horse fails to run!

5 out 10 horses played up of which two were withdrawn, not sure I have ever seen that before!

Champions league - Past performance

When you read a financial sales letter or advertisment, they always put that little caveat in that "past performance is not an indicator of future performance", how apt in the current environment!!! You may be interested to know this often afflicts the betting market also.

It seems to be a classic case of placing too much reliance on past activity. What you often tend to find is that if something unusual has happened recently people think it has a higher chance of happening again. It's like watching people playing roulette and upping their stake, just because red has come in six times in a row.

For a more recent example look at tonights champions league. Based upon the free scoring quarter finals you may find that tonights market gets mis-priced at the higher end of the market, i.e. it makes sense to lay and vice versa. I'm tempted to put this into use tonight on the correct score market. It may not work tonight but I am pretty sure that over the long term I will end ahead as that's always been the case.

You may want to try using the ducthing to a profit target option to take advantage of the many opportunities and potential strategies in play on the correct score market. I've embedded a video of this function. This is where I will be lurking tonight.

Long term trading using trailing stops

Further to my last post on the blog if you are looking to catch longer, bigger market moves, then this is a useful set up to do exactly that. The great thing about this type of trade is you don't need to actively manage it much. This means you can do this on multiple markets all at the same time and Bet Angel Guardian will look after this for you while you get on with your normal trading. Give it a try on small stakes to try it out.