So, this is weird! I'm sat at my keyboard about to start regular, hopefully daily blogging for the first time in over 2 years. When I started the blog, it was intended to be a daily log of what I'd done on the ladders and I managed that for the first 2 months. That was easy because I was so bad at trading, I had a lot to write about! So I'm not sure how this is going to go but I will try to get as many posts as I can done each week.
It's week 2 of Roland Garros and as with the second week of any Grand Slam, it's one of the quietest weeks of the year for us regular tennis traders. There simply aren't that many matches to trade and for someone like me, who relies on a good quantity of matches to make my money, it's often a frustrating week. Actually, it's not so much the number of games that is the issue but more that many of them are complete mis-matches. You will almost always have at least 3 of the big 4 men's players still in the competition going into week 2, so that means a fair few matches will have odds sub 1.2. This doesn't often leave you with many options for trading the match, other than the obvious lay. The same thing seems to be occurring on the ladies side in recent tournaments, with Serena, Sharapova and Azarenka. It's why when I watch any major tournament now, I am always routing for the top players to get knocked out so we can have more even match-ups.
I think people who don't trade tennis would assume these big tournament quarter and semi final matches are the ones where I'm going to be involved more than any other but in reality it's probably the complete opposite.Yesterday's men's quarter final matches I barely watched at all and didn't enter the market once, as Nadal and Djokovic breezed past Haas and Wawrinka. And today, I only traded Sharapova v Azarenka as Williams hammered Errani in the second women's semi. What this does mean, is that we'll get a great semi final tie between Djokovic and Nadal and potential for a decent women's final. But I will always be much busier during a standard week, where on a Friday (usually quarter final day) I'll have 2-5 tournaments to choose from and 4 matches in each one to trade. That's a massive difference to tomorrow, where the second Friday of Roland Garros will only have 2 matches for me to trade. Of course, quality is more important than quantity but having 8-20 quarter finals to select from means I'll always find at least a couple worth trading; no guarantee of that when there's just two.
This does make it seem like I spend a lot of time in the market, trading game after game and I've had comments about my P&Ls expressing just that. The truth will probably surprise a lot of people. I actually spend very little time placing any trades. The Sharapova v Azarenka game lasted over 2 and a half hours today. I watched most of it but only entered the market on 3 occasions. That is pretty standard for me. If there had been another game I could have switched to during the final set, I would've done. So although my monthly P&L (see previous post) might look as though I've got about 3 games on the go at once, I'm actually rarely involved in more than one at a time and if I am, it's normally because I'm just letting a trade run to conclusion of the match and don't need to be keeping a close eye on it. The vast majority of my time is spent waiting and doing nothing. For the 2 and a half hours of Shazza-Aza, I spent approximately 20 minutes where I was seriously involved in the market and highly focused on what was happening. That's over two hours where I was either just watching and waiting or keeping an eye on things from a distance aka, eating a cream cake with a cuppa whilst lying with the sun on my back!
I'm not sure whether this technically comes under the Pareto Principle which has been discussed on other blogs recently but 20 minutes of focused, intense trading out of 150 is just 13% of my time which produced 100% of my profit for the day. So not far from Pareto's 80-20 rule. Roll-on the men's semi finals, which promise to be absolute crackers and both should produce some trading opportunities for me.
Sorana Cirstea:
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It's week 2 of Roland Garros and as with the second week of any Grand Slam, it's one of the quietest weeks of the year for us regular tennis traders. There simply aren't that many matches to trade and for someone like me, who relies on a good quantity of matches to make my money, it's often a frustrating week. Actually, it's not so much the number of games that is the issue but more that many of them are complete mis-matches. You will almost always have at least 3 of the big 4 men's players still in the competition going into week 2, so that means a fair few matches will have odds sub 1.2. This doesn't often leave you with many options for trading the match, other than the obvious lay. The same thing seems to be occurring on the ladies side in recent tournaments, with Serena, Sharapova and Azarenka. It's why when I watch any major tournament now, I am always routing for the top players to get knocked out so we can have more even match-ups.
I think people who don't trade tennis would assume these big tournament quarter and semi final matches are the ones where I'm going to be involved more than any other but in reality it's probably the complete opposite.Yesterday's men's quarter final matches I barely watched at all and didn't enter the market once, as Nadal and Djokovic breezed past Haas and Wawrinka. And today, I only traded Sharapova v Azarenka as Williams hammered Errani in the second women's semi. What this does mean, is that we'll get a great semi final tie between Djokovic and Nadal and potential for a decent women's final. But I will always be much busier during a standard week, where on a Friday (usually quarter final day) I'll have 2-5 tournaments to choose from and 4 matches in each one to trade. That's a massive difference to tomorrow, where the second Friday of Roland Garros will only have 2 matches for me to trade. Of course, quality is more important than quantity but having 8-20 quarter finals to select from means I'll always find at least a couple worth trading; no guarantee of that when there's just two.
This does make it seem like I spend a lot of time in the market, trading game after game and I've had comments about my P&Ls expressing just that. The truth will probably surprise a lot of people. I actually spend very little time placing any trades. The Sharapova v Azarenka game lasted over 2 and a half hours today. I watched most of it but only entered the market on 3 occasions. That is pretty standard for me. If there had been another game I could have switched to during the final set, I would've done. So although my monthly P&L (see previous post) might look as though I've got about 3 games on the go at once, I'm actually rarely involved in more than one at a time and if I am, it's normally because I'm just letting a trade run to conclusion of the match and don't need to be keeping a close eye on it. The vast majority of my time is spent waiting and doing nothing. For the 2 and a half hours of Shazza-Aza, I spent approximately 20 minutes where I was seriously involved in the market and highly focused on what was happening. That's over two hours where I was either just watching and waiting or keeping an eye on things from a distance aka, eating a cream cake with a cuppa whilst lying with the sun on my back!
I'm not sure whether this technically comes under the Pareto Principle which has been discussed on other blogs recently but 20 minutes of focused, intense trading out of 150 is just 13% of my time which produced 100% of my profit for the day. So not far from Pareto's 80-20 rule. Roll-on the men's semi finals, which promise to be absolute crackers and both should produce some trading opportunities for me.
Sorana Cirstea:
