The Big Question: Are you trading better than yesterday?

Hi, I've been away to sunny Spain for 10 days so it's the first break from trading I've had this year. I'm feeling really refreshed!

I did have internet access but it wasn't that fast and also as I didn't have t.v. pictures of the racing I resisted the temptation to have a go at trading. I thought the additional risk wasn't worth ruining my holiday!

I did wonder if I'd have forgotten how to trade by the time I got back, but it seems it's a bit like riding a bicycle and I was soon back in the swing of things yesterday. In fact, I was on for a real cracker of a day (increased my bank by 60% by 6:20 p.m.) so I was even trading a few early evening races which I don't normally bother with. At that time I decided to finish on the 6:55 p.m. as there was an o.k. favourite there, but I got badly caught out beforehand in the 6:35 p.m. by the very weak market and kept calling it all wrong. I did close my trades but temptation got the better of me and I decided to red-up in running - bad idea! I lost a big chunk of my day's profit.

Over at the excellent Tim Ferriss blog, his latest post is entitled,"The Big Question: Are you better than yesterday?" (www.fourhourworkweek.com). Today I am still reeling from the stupidity of not redding-up yesterday and was wondering if it will effect my trading today. After reading his blog post, I feel that is applicable and all I need to do is make sure I trade better than yesterday. That seems pretty easy - just red-up!

In his post, he mentions that it is easy to become demotivated by large complex problems (I would say successful trading is one of those!). For me, successful trading is comprised of many small solutions. In his post, Tim states that because these can be difficult to measure it is hard to see results. He uses the example of trying to get in better physical shape - he can go to the gym every day for a week and at the end he might not appear to be in better shape.

However he realised that by focussing on making today better than yesterday that it was possible to "be enthusiastic about taking real, tangible steps toward a distant goal".

For a long time I simply judged my improvement on how much I'd made (or lost) in a day / week which I don't actually think is very useful (what if you lost a bundle on trading and then made a lot backing or laying a horse in-running, or you didn't red-up and got lucky). Nowadays I simply compare my average loss per race, average win per race and strike rate. It is then easy to see if I'm on the right track, regardless of the daily P&L. I mentioned this in more detail in my previous post "Part 2 of Ending your pre-race trading career by going in-play" (it's a very long post - scroll down to the bit with the graph).

Trading better than yesterday - that's my aim for today!