Back - and ready to roll!

So, hope the new year is treating you well and you're off to a winning start. Had a great week away with Emma. Really fantastic. And am now feeling refreshed, recharged and ready to start trading again. It's good to have a break from it all from time to time and am hoping I'll benefit from it. :-)

In between the drinking, eating and serious relaxing while away (I'm pretty lazy at heart and it doesn't take long to revert to type!) I took the opportunity to review many aspects of my trading and money management and also had a think about improvements that can be made to the blog to make it more useful for anyone who reads it. So hopefully you should be seeing some changes over the coming months.

That said I've been true to type, have been a bit lazy, and still haven't filed my tax returns for 05/06 yet. My accountant appears to be pulling his hair out in frustration and I need to spend a day or two checking everything over before I hand everything to him. It's just so boring I always manage to find something else more important to do. But, mind-numbingly dull as it is, the deadline looms, so that'll be my main priority at some point in the coming week.

Finally got around to reading Market Wizards by Jack D Schwager while I was away. A fantastic read. OK, it doesn't mention Betfair, or sports betting exchanges even once (and was published before they were invented) but I defy anyone to read even the first chapter and not realise they're holding pure gold. Sure, the traders interviewed operate on financial markets and offer differing advice. But many of the general principles are the same as with sports trading, the pyschological stuff is totally relevant and much of the money management discussion makes sound advice. It's a book well worth reading. And then re-reading. Several times. There's honestly hundreds of pieces of advice in it that I could copy onto this blog and they'd be totally relevant. I've no doubt I'll be cribbing bits from it in the coming months. So a big thanks to whoever it was who recommended the book to me through a comment. And I'll pass that recommendation on to anyone who hasn't read it.

So what else? Well, I've updated the results page. Had an all green position on the 2nd test between South Africa and India before going away so have added that to December's results. After a relatively quiet trading month in December it all kicks off again in January. Even just looking at the cricket January is a busy month - and the schedule gets busier still over the coming months as we approach the world cup. Much of January's action is over night but as it'll be one dayers I'm planning on staying up for a lot of it. Though there are a few UK daytime tests that I'll no doubt have a dip into. On top of that the BDO darts has started (gutted I missed the PDC final between Taylor and Barney) and the tennis season gets going again. So there should be loads to keep me busy.

Finally, it is, of course, 2007. Which means I'm getting married this year. :-) Time seems to be flying by towards the big day and it's all getting a bit exciting. We had one of our favourite bottles of champagne on New Year's Eve to celebrate and now need to start planning all the small details soon. All the big stuff like venues, cars, photographer etc was sorted a while back. Which all gives me a great incentive to get on with the trading, keep everything disciplined and hopefully start collecting some more green again to help pay for the big day!