So the tennis season comes to a close, with just the Davis Cup Final remaining. It's been an incredible season for me. January was my only losing month. I have averaged approximately 50% of my bank each month. I've achieved my biggest ever monthly profit from tennis trading. But perhaps most importantly, I have a strategy that is 100% set in stone; no nagging question marks, no underlying worries and no problems executing it.
At the start of the year, I was 4 or 5 months into fine-tuning a whole new strategy and a trading ethos which was the complete opposite of what I'd been doing for years. I was finding it hard to adapt and to trust the new ideas. I was still ill-disciplined, impatient and uncertain about many things but the one thing I was sure of, was that I was on the right path finally and it was just a matter of time before it all clicked. That moment came in February, where I made my first 4 figure profit. From then onwards, I was no longer the boom and bust trader of a year earlier and I was no longer frustratingly breaking-even as I had been over the previous 6 months. It was just a few small tweaks to the strategy, plus this excellent book, that made the difference and enabled me to become consistently profitable.
But that's not to say I haven't had my share of frustrations. The main one being that I have been unable to compound my profits or grow my bank. When I think about where I could be if I'd been able to do that, it makes me a little sick. Hopefully, things will change in 2013. My new set of goals for my 4th season of tennis trading, will mostly be aimed at growing the bank. The scope for scaling up to bigger stakes is still huge - I'm still just a tiny minnow in the ocean when it comes to liabilities. So I think that my overall goal for 2013 will be to grow the bank up to a 5 figure sum. Once I've achieved that, I can seriously start to think about trading professionally again, only this time, I'll actually know what I'm doing!
As for my trading itself, there will of course, always be things that I aim to improve. The key one still remains, even after all these years, my terrible impatience. The second one is keeping any over-confidence in check. And the third key issue I'll be working on, is my focus, which I can see becoming a bigger problem in 2013 because my trading is pretty repetitious now. I'm not trying to figure things out or test areas of strategy or work on my mindset, so there is less variety in what I do. Trading has become easier but with it, a tad monotonous. So keeping focus is going to be a real challenge. I'm hoping that an increase in stakes will bring with it a new set of challenges and perhaps new trading ideas, which will keep me interested. There is also still room for me to develop a more aggressive approach and I may look to do this. I've been playing it relatively safe and have not gone for the really big greens. If I hit a few of them, it will take my trading onto a whole other level.
I was going to trade some football over the next few weeks but to be honest, the win I got from Reading v Arsenal (have I mentioned I layed 1.03 at 4-0 yet?!), is as much as I could have hoped for in the whole off-season. As football managers like to say "I would've taken that before the start". Besides, my fall out of love with football continues. I'm sick to death of all the stuff that goes on around football - the racism, the pathetic behaviour of some fans, the vile chants, the farcical governing bodies, the diving, cheating and gamesmanship, the moaning, whinging, biased-beyond-all-reason supporters, the primadonna players and the endless debates over the same, nonsensical issues such as goal-line technology. When I trade a sport, I need to be enjoying it and I actually find myself getting angry with a lot of what I see and read. That's no way to prepare for a session on the ladders. I won't be back as a regular viewer or trader until some serious changes are made - ones I don't expect to see any time soon.
So it'll be quiet on the posting front from me. I've added a couple of new sections to the side-bars of the blog; a list of my most popular posts (automatically chosen by Blogger based on no. of hits) and 10 of my favourite other posts. Might be something of interest to tide you by till I return. I'm not even going to think about trading at all until the New Year, so that's it for 2012..............happy Christmas, traders!
Ana Ivanovic:
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At the start of the year, I was 4 or 5 months into fine-tuning a whole new strategy and a trading ethos which was the complete opposite of what I'd been doing for years. I was finding it hard to adapt and to trust the new ideas. I was still ill-disciplined, impatient and uncertain about many things but the one thing I was sure of, was that I was on the right path finally and it was just a matter of time before it all clicked. That moment came in February, where I made my first 4 figure profit. From then onwards, I was no longer the boom and bust trader of a year earlier and I was no longer frustratingly breaking-even as I had been over the previous 6 months. It was just a few small tweaks to the strategy, plus this excellent book, that made the difference and enabled me to become consistently profitable.
But that's not to say I haven't had my share of frustrations. The main one being that I have been unable to compound my profits or grow my bank. When I think about where I could be if I'd been able to do that, it makes me a little sick. Hopefully, things will change in 2013. My new set of goals for my 4th season of tennis trading, will mostly be aimed at growing the bank. The scope for scaling up to bigger stakes is still huge - I'm still just a tiny minnow in the ocean when it comes to liabilities. So I think that my overall goal for 2013 will be to grow the bank up to a 5 figure sum. Once I've achieved that, I can seriously start to think about trading professionally again, only this time, I'll actually know what I'm doing!
As for my trading itself, there will of course, always be things that I aim to improve. The key one still remains, even after all these years, my terrible impatience. The second one is keeping any over-confidence in check. And the third key issue I'll be working on, is my focus, which I can see becoming a bigger problem in 2013 because my trading is pretty repetitious now. I'm not trying to figure things out or test areas of strategy or work on my mindset, so there is less variety in what I do. Trading has become easier but with it, a tad monotonous. So keeping focus is going to be a real challenge. I'm hoping that an increase in stakes will bring with it a new set of challenges and perhaps new trading ideas, which will keep me interested. There is also still room for me to develop a more aggressive approach and I may look to do this. I've been playing it relatively safe and have not gone for the really big greens. If I hit a few of them, it will take my trading onto a whole other level.
I was going to trade some football over the next few weeks but to be honest, the win I got from Reading v Arsenal (have I mentioned I layed 1.03 at 4-0 yet?!), is as much as I could have hoped for in the whole off-season. As football managers like to say "I would've taken that before the start". Besides, my fall out of love with football continues. I'm sick to death of all the stuff that goes on around football - the racism, the pathetic behaviour of some fans, the vile chants, the farcical governing bodies, the diving, cheating and gamesmanship, the moaning, whinging, biased-beyond-all-reason supporters, the primadonna players and the endless debates over the same, nonsensical issues such as goal-line technology. When I trade a sport, I need to be enjoying it and I actually find myself getting angry with a lot of what I see and read. That's no way to prepare for a session on the ladders. I won't be back as a regular viewer or trader until some serious changes are made - ones I don't expect to see any time soon.
So it'll be quiet on the posting front from me. I've added a couple of new sections to the side-bars of the blog; a list of my most popular posts (automatically chosen by Blogger based on no. of hits) and 10 of my favourite other posts. Might be something of interest to tide you by till I return. I'm not even going to think about trading at all until the New Year, so that's it for 2012..............happy Christmas, traders!
Ana Ivanovic:
