The £1 that cost me £130

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I can identify with the trader in that advert, that's how I used to react!  A major aspect of getting on the road to long-term consistent profit is being able to handle losses.  In my case I think it is by far the biggest challenge.  So that's why I'm very happy to have kept pretty much on the level after a stupid trade lost me 25% of my bank.  And this was on my first day of proper trading since restarting.  I had a trial day on Saturday with a tiny balance and doubled my bank purely through trading (i.e. I didn't let a few trades turn into bets and get lucky).  I'm pretty sure I've never made 100% in a day purely from trading before.  I guess I went into Sunday full of confidence......

Whilst I'm happy with how I continued afterwards, I'm really not happy about how I ended up in the stupid trade.  If I had been following my new rules to the letter I would have had a loss of around £1.  Here's how it happened.....

I'd been having a tough start to the day and had 3 losing races on the trot.  I then made my biggest profit of the day only for it to be voided as the favourite was withdrawn at post time.  That's pretty unusual and I think that really put me on tilt.  It's stupid, the amount wasn't that big, but after the three previous losses it was as if the market was conspiring against me, which of course is utter rubbish.  I had prepared myself before starting the day for losing on some races so I was able to cope with those, but I hadn't prepared myself for this and it really must have tweaked me!

The stupid trade occured a couple of  races later.  I had got into a medium-sized loss situation after three trades had all gone bad.  I then pulled it around and got back to only -£2 or -£3 which after redding-up would have been -£1.  I had 10 seconds until post time and had just exited a profitable 1-tick trade.  The same opportunity seemed to exist as the front of the queue on both sides were very small amounts backed-up by several thousand behind them.  My rule is to not initiate a trade inside 30 seconds to post-time (I close an existing position up to 10 seconds before).  But temptation got the better of me and I thought I could exit this race about £5 up after starting out like another losing race.

I put in a back order and shortly after the closing trade and - whoops - the race went in running.  The horse I traded on must have been napping in the stalls and the odds shot up. I did resolve to take the hit and closed the trade.  At that point the "reverse close" and "manual close" buttons were no longer available, so I had 0 liability on the favourite and £130 on all the other runners.  At the closing trade odds of around 6 this liability was really only £22 if I could have "redded-up" fast enough.  At this point I was just panicking and the odds were switching between 12 & 22.  By the time I'd worked out what I should be laying the favourite for to even-out my liability it was too late as it was trading at 100+.  I wondered about smashing my keyboard like the guy in the advert, but I'm glad to say I kept composed, took a break for the next race, grabbed a beer and traded through the rest of the day for a profit.

Hopefully today I'll do the the right thing and follow ALL of my rules and nothing unusual will happen to put me on tilt.  That being the case I should be starting my first week with a winning day.  However, I have to say I normally lose on Mondays................anyone else have that experience?

Good luck to all.
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