The first loss

Daily Result: £212.70

Finally got round to putting in some proper time today and traded a few matches. Would have been better off staying in bed!

Two games of note really. Guess I should cover my first loss to start. Dropped £361.42 on the Roddick / Bagdhatis match. Ouch. :-( Of course you can't win all the time. And the first loss was always round the corner. But I'd kind of hoped it was a bit further into the future and not quite so heavy!

Have looked through my trades. Was all going great with a moderate green on each until the second set. Trouble came when Bagdhatis took a rest in the second, forgot how to serve and started conserving that extra body weight by standing still for a few games. (Ok, the guy has an awesome return of serve but doesn't he always look just a little bit, well, jowly?!)

Ended up placing 4 trades that went against me from then till the match end. Still, it's all about discipline. Could easily have maxed out on one with a smallish green on the other and hope for the "right" result. But that's not what this is about. Especially when working with a fixed bank and a clear goal. So took a deep breath, levelled to more or less equal red and back to the basics of reducing it. A bit of a disaster none the less and my biggest tennis loss for a long time. The annoying thing is I'd upped my stakes to £500 for this one hence the size of the loss compared to previous wins on this blog. Guess many would have taken the risk and stuck it out for a win. I'm glad I didn't as my green was on Bagdhatis and he lost. So, something to smile about anyway!!

The other match I'll mention involved the newly crowned British no. 1. Our Greg. Sky did their usual and screened on the non-interactive channel so I traded it. Should have stuck with my head and gone with the Nalbandian match. There was much better liquidity.

But that's the issue here. Always torn between trading the higher liquidity games or the lower ones. My thinking is this. On the Rusedski game today there were a few bigger players in the market. But there was a lot of dead money too. It was easy to pick off bad prices and get some true value trades in. All was going great. The flip side is if you get on the wrong side of a trade you can't always get out. And that's what happened. I was offering what I considered screaming value to try and ditch a back but it didn't get taken before the next point. Tried again on the next with the same outcome. The break happens, prices move and a 3 figure green all round drops to miserable 2 figure green. Ironically liquidity did pick up later in the game but too late for me.

Absolutely convinced in a more liquid market I'd have closed the initial trade at a small loss. Though that said I wouldn't have built the green so quickly either.

Swings and roundabouts I guess.