Week 6: 9 selections (3 wins) for a profit of 189.25 points (£189.25 at £1 per point)
Overall: 70 selections (35 wins) for a profit of 714.00 points (£714.00 at £1 per point)
Some of you are looking at £714 in 6 weeks and are thinking “I am having some of that”! I would be remiss if I didn’t warn you that we are only halfway through the trial, so be careful. However, if you do want to press ahead, I am going to reiterate an updated answer to a question on the previous blog post:
The following is for illustrative purposes only and is not a recommendation on bank size or risk.
Bank size is a difficult question to answer as it depends on you and your attitude to risk. Spread betting isn’t like traditional betting, you don’t just slap a tenner on the counter knowing that, if the bet loses, you can only lose that tenner, but you also know the odds and therefore what your returns will be if the bet wins. Therefore the traditional advice of using a 100-point bank (or thereabouts) doesn’t really work.
Yesterday’s [Wednesday] 3 bets had stop-losses of 100, 150 and 200, so even at 10p per point (the stakes I am using) I had £45 at risk; or 45% of my account to put it another way. You have to ask yourself whether you would be comfortable with 45% of a £1,000 bank at risk to use £1 bets. What would be your reaction if you lost 50% of your bank in one day (possible but not probable)? Yesterday was the worst day since I started this trail and it lost 163 points, if £1,000 is OK for £1 bets, can you handle losing 16% of the account in one day? Does 8% of £2,000 sound better? That is using a £2,000 bank for £1 per point. 32% of a £500 bank for £1 per point doesn’t feel comfortable to me.
[Update: Thursday was just WOW! We had a sell of total goal minutes (all the goal times added together) for the European World Cop Qualifiers at 1320 minutes. This had a 500 point stop: 100% of £500 bank, 50% of £1000, and 25% of £2000 if using £1 per point; see what I mean about being comfortable with the level of risk? Anyway the market closed at 972 minutes for a profit of (drum roll) 348 points. Be warned, the stoploss was 500, so you could have lost big too!]
Now, I am finding 10p off £100 comfortable; I am not using the account as income but so I can monitor the results. Yesterday [Wednesday] was not nice but the service is still handsomely in profit (335 points) [683 after Thursday :)].
Personally, I wouldn’t want less than £1,000 bank for £1 per point; but I am finding that 10p per point of a £100 bank comfortable. I also ratchet, so, if I had started yesterday and experienced this loss I’d still be using £1 per point bets today. Perhaps the best advice I can offer if you go down this route is to use a £1,000 bank (but ONLY if you can afford that) and start with 25p per point. If you are comfortable with that slowly increase the stakes to either £1 per point or stop at the point where the risk has become uncomfortable.
As sports spread-betting is closer to ForEx the advice from that arena would seem relevant; risk 1% to 2% up to 5%. Each market has a stop-loss so you can work out the stakes for this. The average stop is 150 points (I have seen 1 bet [now 2] at 500 points). So, risking 5% of a £1000 (£50) your stake would be (£50 divided by 150) 33p. This suggests that a bank of £3,000 is needed for the average £ per point to be £1. At the end of last week a £3,000 bank stood at £3,450; a 15% return in 5 weeks! [Using this method this week lost £10] Note that 5% risk per bet (ratchet) is kind of a 20 point bank; you’d wipe out if you had 20 successive losing [150 point] bets. If, one the other hand, the service continues at 15% growth per month, compounding would see £1,000 stand at over £5,000 in 12 months. The service seeks to make a minimum of 200 points per month. 15% growth was from 550 point profit, so if I adjust this downwards to 6% growth representing and average of 200 points per month you’d double your bank in 12 months. A bit too early to tell whether I will add this service to my portfolio, but if I do I think that 5% bets will be the way I go and hope that we average way more than 200 points per month.
I can’t say this often enough: trial not ended, stakes, bank size and risk are for you to work out; but I hope the above provides some pointers.
You can get Sports Spread Betting HERE
