Blowing your bank

Turned out that it only took 2 sticks of dynamite to open the safe at my local Nat West, then like a muppet I laid Johannes in the Ripon 4:35 like there was no tomorrow. Of course it trotted up by 2 1/4 lengths so now I'm back to square one.

Only joshing, but there was someone laying Johannes so much that I was tempted to jump on myself in-running, but a swift self-inflicted crack over the knuckles stopped that. I was a bit frustrated because it cost me a chunk of the biggest trading profit I had built-up today when I was riding the steamer. Hey ho, it was still my best result today.

I was really pleased to see all the votes for the poll on the right-hand side of my blog about how many times you have blown your bank. Thanks everyone! Early-on the result was split between "Never" and "Three or more times" but now the result is much more what I expected, sadly. At the time of writing the latter has over 60% of the vote, mine included (althought not recently, wayhay!), and this is a big reason why long-term profitable trading is so difficult. When someone says, "oh, you only need to make £3 a race to do over £100 a day", it sounds so easy but anyone who has traded knows there is a lot more to it than that.

I've been experimenting with closing my trades within 10 seconds of post time, regardless of how close to the off the race is. It felt very strange at first, but it has advantages. For instance, much less stress! I am doing this experiment to see if I actually do profit in the long-term from trading past the post time. I have always enjoyed this volatile period of trading, but maybe it's not profitable even if there are only occasional large losses? What do you think? Should I put up a poll?