Bird in the hand is worth two in the bush

Right now I am sitting at my desk writing out by hand laboriously Bird in the hand is worth two in the bush 100 times – because it is a lesson I need to learn really badly, soon. Sometimes I get up in the night or early morning unable to sleep and I have a cup of tea and a biscuit and then go back to bed again. Often I type some things in the blog during the tea period or just read some things that I am interested in, like photography on my favourite web sites like Strobist.com for example. Last night though I thought I would have a look at some NBA basketball games, maybe I could add a little to the bank while I suffer insomnia.

There were 2 games in play on Betfair and in one of them I had a small profit then managed to try one more trade and lost it. So I was looking at a loss of 1.33 for most of the game. Right at the end though there was an opportunity to change that, I took it and had a profit of 68 cents to take home. That was the Utah vs Sacramento game. Utah were winning most of the game but took it in the last quarter.

The other game is where I had my mental challenge, my brain wasn’t up to speed I think and I didn’t read the signs well enough. Although to be fair the signs were a little confusing. For the first half of the game LA Clippers were leading convincingly 49 – 36 and in BinarySoft BDI the price went up to BP85 I had traded up to a profit of somewhere around 3 Euro. During the second half though the Clippers could not score and lost the game. I didn’t trade out of position because on my live score page it showed that they were leading by some points still. That was false though as the page wasn’t live refreshing as it should have been. They lost the 3rd quarter 15 – 18 and late in the game when I did get a more true idea of what was happening the scores were level I traded out to a loss of €22.53. I waited a little in case they could still get back the lead but it was not to be and the final score was 78 – 87 The Milwaukee Bucks won the game.

So why didn’t I trade out sooner?? First of all was the mixed messages I was getting due to the non update of the scores page. The other thing was that when I was trading up the Weight of Money indicator was showing that it should have been going down while I was trading it up. This was I believe due to there being a big lump of money on the layside sitting at the top end of the market which made the indicator look wrong.

Ah well I will live to fight another day even though I will have a losing day again today because I am not going to try chasing the loss. I will be about 20 days behind target for today and I will have to set my sights at 3% for some days to get back on target. When I get 1% profit on a game I will leave it alone and look for another game to work with.

What I wanted to do with the game that went against me was to use a stop loss to trade me out when the tide turned. But I found that with Basketball the swings of the market are big enough that you could have a swing that knocks out the stop loss and takes off the profit while the overall movement is up. Lessons to be learned……