Monday 21 May 2007

Another Score Draw

Since Last Post P/L: £12.85
Monthly P/L: £144.36

I apologise if it's a little slow around here at the moment but I suppose this isn't the entertainment business! The simple fact is I'm here to try and make money and if things are not happening I can't afford to push it otherwise I'm sure to get myself in a mess. I just need to let things roll, wait for the right opportunities and then when they come along have the conviction to make the most of them.

Clermont v Bath
For once a rugby match didn't go my way. Prior to kick off Clermont were trading at 1.72 and even though I was convinced they'd win the match they ended up making hard work of it. The first half was scrappy and as my strategy is based on predicting big market swings, when nothing happened I ended up getting caught a few times. At half time I thought about trading up to 60 minutes but in the end my trading rules prevailed and I decided to bail with a loss of £21.42.

Federer v Nadal
My first tennis action of 2007 started with a small loss of £8.76. I was tempted by the match up of two great athletes and wanted to see if I could spot some value. The consensus before the match was that Nadal would walk it and at a price of 1.36 the market agreed. He won the first set and looked assured of his 81st consecutive clay court victory but Roger dug in and played some wonderful stuff to win 2-1 in sets. I played with low stakes to test some strategies but none really worked so unfortunately it's back to the drawing board.

Leicester v Wasps
This was the highlight of my weekend. Having been very impressed by Leicester this year, I'd marked them before kick off as being between a 1.50 and 1.66 shot. When I saw their price was 1.40 I was very tempted to get involved but in the end decided to hang on to see how things developed. It was immediately obvious that the Wasps defence were in good form and you could see they were up for the game. The market started to take note and the price started to drift. The main point for me was managing to lay Leicester @ 1.74 just before the Ibanez try which helped secure me a profit of £43.03 on the match.

It'll be another quiet week for me as I plan my assault on the final weekend of the month - how will May turn out?
.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Mark,

Enjoying reading the blog, never bother yourself with slow action.. it takes as long as it takes for the next perfect bet to come along. Anyone with the strength to wait for the right moment has my admiration that's for sure. It's very rarely a steady flow of cash in this game, most likely period of stagnation (hopefully) followed by quick runs of good fortune. Managing the situation whilst it's not quite happening is a real artform you have to keep perfecting. Well done so far.

Do you have an email address I can reach you at ?

Matt

Mark Iverson said...

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the comment - I hope you prefer reading about my winning days :-)

If you want to reach me you can catch me at mark@markiverson.com (catchy eh?!?)

Due to all the spam email I get please put BLOG as the subject.

All the best!

Mark

DeadYellowMonkey said...

Hi Mark,

I've enjoyed reading your blog for a while, and now you've inspired me to start my own. I've been looking into the possibility of making a living out of betting for the past year using numerous systems, now with my latest one I've decided to let the world watch. OK, so it might crash and burn very quickly, but I'm hoping I know enough about football to keep it going.
Hope you don't mind but I've put a link to your blog on mine.
If you fancy giving mine a look (or a link!) it's at http://deadyellowmonkey.blogspot.com

Cheers
Shaun

Mark Iverson said...

Hi Shaun!

Nice blog :-) It won't be easy but if you stick to your system/strategy I'm sure you'll do okay.

I've added a link to your site under the name 'Dead Yellow Monkey'. If you'd like me to change it to something else then let me know.

Keep in touch and good luck!

All the best.

Mark

DeadYellowMonkey said...

Hi again Mark,

Thanks for the link - much appreciated.

I know it's going to be a long hard slog, but I'm confident I have the dedication and discipline to make it work.

I'm certainly not after a fast buck. My long term aim is to make enough money from trading to not have to work full-time by the time I'm 40 (I was 36 last month).

I'll set myself monthly profit targets from September 2007 (by which time all the European football leagues should be up and running again) which will start at around £100 (dependant on my balance at the time), and increasing by 20-25% per month after that.

At the moment I've allowed for losing once every 7-8 games, but I'll review that on an ongoing basis.

Anyway, good luck with the darts!

Shaun

www.stanjames.com