Punt.com - A Blog About Gambling by a Professional Gambler.

Over-staking, the route to fear and over-trading.

I want to expand on something I posted in my chart patterns entry where I mentioned that I got too heavily involved on Roddick at short odds.  Firstly let me say that I don't have a problem getting on something that's short odds, if it represents a good bet / position, then I'm going to take it regardless (though I do drawn the line at backing at 03 or less usually - it's needless effort for little reward).  What I did in the Roddick match however, has made a dangerous mental trap much clearer to me, and this weeks trading has been much more fruitful because of this.

I had the realisation that had I not overstaked on Roddick at those odds I would not have felt the urge to mess around with the position later on - cutting my loss, then beginning to trading at a higher frequency without much thought to make back the loss.

This might seem pretty obvious, but the actual nature of the problem has really hit home for me this week.  Over-stake past your threshold and you open yourself to the possibility of a problematic market if things don't go perfectly right for you.. and lets face it, how often can you say things go immediately your way as soon as you get on?  Not often enough!

This also touches upon a few things in my expect the unexpected entry about acceptance of risk.  When you enter a trade you may feel you have accepted it, but if you get in too heavy, you'll quickly find out whether you really did accept it or not when you begin to panic about how quickly the odds are moving against you.  This is the true test.

Overtrading is arguably the worst problem a trader faces.  It's usually (but not always) caused by a fear of losing.  You might think you can grab ticks here and there quickly, or you have a bad position so you will trade lots in order to improve your p/l ratio... Either way, it's usually as a result of not accepting risk in the market place and being fearful of losing. 

For me personally I have found this to occur when I began with a position that was too big.  It's beyond my pain threshold to lose this amount, I would be very uncomfortable with that loss.  Under such circumstances I can freeze and stop thinking until finally I cut the position... normally this is at a market high or low, corresponding with my moment of most intense panic (there's a reason highs and lows are usually spikes or crazy prices that correspond with market panic). 

After this has occured, I'm usually rather annoyed to put it mildly and will begin to look for more and more positions to take, perhaps even guess which way things will go, when I get them wrong I cut quickly and look for another, and another.  I'm now, overtrading.  It doesn't take a genius to see that there's a very high probability I'm going to keep losing more and more money each time, and that it'll take a lucky break to get close to getting out alive.

That's a fairly extreme example, but contrast it to a position I take where I'm actually comfortable with the stake size.  An amount that I don't mind losing and that I think is appropriate for the position I'm taking.  I'm happy and prepared for this not to go my way because I don't mind losing the bet, I've accepted the risk in the market and the match I'm betting on and most important - the risk of this amount of money.

Mentally I'm secure and calm.  There's no panic, or possibility of panic entering my head at any time in this match now that I have staked it properly.  I'm free to follow my plan, I know why I entered the trade and I know what reasons would cause me to exit it and I'll act on them - no freezing here.

It's amazing how easily this can go unnoticed.  Yes I've known for a very long time that going in heavy at short odds is potential trouble, but the exact reason why has been elusive to me.  And it's not just short odds this applies to, it's all odds and bets.  If you overstake them beyond an amount you mind losing, then you are opening yourself to all kinds of trouble.

How do you know what the right amount is?  Tricky question.  It's easy to give answers such as, 2% of your bank, or a specific amount and or some amount specified by the many staking plans out there.  I don't disagree that you need to stake things ina technically correct manner, but to get the right size I think has to come from yourself.  You know instinctively when the urge rises to tamper with a position (because you are fearful of losing) that you have too big a position.  Cut down the size of the position and re-assess comfort levels.  When you find the right size, stick with that until your bank has grown enough to facilitate a raising of these comfort thresholds.

The last two weeks have been kind to me, because I've been placing positions where I've been in control and acceptance.  And on top of that, I've cut when I had reason to and run the rest of the positions, most of which have won thankfully.  I've placed bets with a specific size at various times of the matches and I've stuck to it, it's been a breath of fresh air really... not having to grip the mouse with white knuckles all the time!

Remember this, if the only reason you are cutting your position is because you don't want to lose that amount, you got in too big in the first place.  Make sure you stake correctly so that you cut only when there's a real reason to do so.

Foolish zen.

A long time ago I subscribed to Fool.co.uk's daily news letter.  I don't normally read them much these days, they arrive in my inbox and I just delete, but one came by the other day that I thought had some good words in it.  Those that have read here for a while will know my liking for all things zen, especially relating to trading.  This article by them - Zen and the art of portfolio maintenance, has some points relevant for investors and traders / gamblers alike.  Namely, seeing doing nothing as doing something - in other words don't over-trade. 

It's not a long article, but is worth a quick glance..  Quote:  "It's a busy, fast-moving world. Sometimes, you feel the need to be dynamic, to keep pace with life; in short, to do something.  As far as investments are concerned, this is a fundamental mistake many of us make regularly...."

Expect the unexpected.

There comes a time, inevitably, when you get on a bad run.  Mistakes are made and occasionally you are plain unlucky, or so it would seem.  Either way, it's in the face of a bad run of results (and the losses that come with it) that you need to remain positive in the way you view markets.

It's easy to get down, particularly when there's a serious amount of money involved.  You can dwell on it too much.  Dwelling leads to a need to make back that lost money, but it also leads to confusion and fear of losing more money.  It's the later we're looking at in this entry.

Fear can do funny things to a trader.  It masks sensible thought patterns.  It clutters your head with conflicting messages about market activity, distorting your views.  You second guess everything and suddenly your trading plan is being questioned or even worse, forgotten about.

It's quite incredible the difference between a confident trader and one who is racked with fear.  Traders that are in the zone simply act without thought and money arrives at their doorstep with apparent ease!  Those that are operating in fear of the marketplace are buried under a quagmire of conflicting thoughts and emotions..

How do we prevent this from happening in the first place?  I believe it's by accepting the randomness of the markets and events we are betting on and the risks involved - then doing this consistently from day to day.  The markets can't and won't be consistent, the way you view them can be.

There's hundreds or thousands of participants in the markets.  They all want a slice of your bankroll and they all have their own opinions, plans and varying weight of wallets.  There's big fish and small fish, and, being human, they have emotions and aren't always logical, reasonable or sensible!

With this in mind then, the key is to set out with a view of the markets that accepts the risks involved.  The market won't always act the way you think it might, prepare yourself for this and make sure you have an exit strategy for any positions that don't go the way you expect them to.

Don't try to micro-manage your positions, it's very rare you will execute the perfect bet at the best odds the market hits.  At the same time, don't try to own the big picture - never expect it to go your own way.  Just execute your strategy when it applies - without too much thought, with an idea of where you get out, in good scenarios and bad.

Any time you begin to hope or guess in a marketplace, exposes you to the possibility of fear in the future when the unexpected happens.  You will also find you are less likely to deal with the situation quickly / properly - more likely to freeze, hold the position, maybe add to it more and hope you can somehow get out of it.  This is not the pattern of a winning trader.

Cold, calm and collected is the winning trader.  He (or she) has a healthy respect for the market and the unexpected.  If something unforeseen happens, the reaction is quick and decisive and dealt with mentally - it's part of every market, when it doesn't work it's closed out and when it goes in favour, it's run till it's time to close.  It's the same reaction to a win as there is to a loss and this is probably the subject of my next entry..  good luck !

Get disgusted for fast results.

I've been doing some thinking about my performance this week and relating it back through my 5+ years of trading.  Specifically about the way I relate to risk, how I deal with taking the risks and the way this has changed during this period.  This may well turn into a very random ramble, but a few things have occured to me and I just wanted to get them onto the blog, hopefully it will be of some interest, if only to myself.

Let's start with this week.  I got off to a great start, my first match I racked up a fairly nice win by anyone's standards.  It was the perfect match and the perfect start to the French Open fortnight.  But since that moment until yesterday lunchtime things took a downward turn, I jumped into positions without thought, my mind was scrambled with the myriad of options available to me and I quite literally lumped on anything that vaguely resembled a tennis player with a good price and an easy to remember name.  Note here that I was aparently uncaring about the level of risk I was taking, these weren't small bets, yet I treated them as if they were nothing and unimportant.  It sends shivers down my spine writing about it, but at the time - there was not a care in the world.  As a professional, it's a pretty disgusting state of affairs.

Rewind back 5 1/2 years.  I had £75 to my name.  All that mattered to me was not losing.  Not losing ANYTHING, let alone the £75.  Every trade was placed with the sole intention of minimising risk and downside.  I would sweat over each £1 I made.  Looking back I admire the way I was, in some ways I was a superb trader without much knowledge, but all the determination and speed.  My bank grew quickly, but I would maintain my feelings towards risk for quite some time.

Clearly you can't really compare myself then to now in a perfect sense, I had little money then and these days I have a much larger amount to my name and this brings new challenges and methods for trading in such size.  But, there's some things that I need to get back that I've lost along the way.  The main one being a repulsion towards trading badly and losing.

This sounds a rather strong feeling to have - repulsion.. Fear of losing money was also present, but mainly it's a feeling of disgust towards not so much losing, but doing things wrongly - which usually results in losses.

Back to yesterday lunchtime.  I was pretty fed up, it's the French Open - a Grand Slam event and one of the best trading events of the year.  I was down, being particularly stupid (even by my standards) and then I realised how foolish I had been and quite frankly, it disgusted me.  I was angry.  I put down a mental marker at that moment (polite term for slamming my desk and shouting loud enough for the neighbours to hear) that I would do things rightly for the rest of the day at the very least - if I lost, I lost, but I would be right with everything I did.

And it has just struck me how powerful this feeling can be.  I often say to myself - get angry with it, stop being an idiot and lets do things properly.  But I do believe the feeling of revulsion or disgust at what you've become, might become or been doing, is a more powerful thing, and can stick with you longer.  Maybe better than this, is the almost instantaneous effect it can have on you and your bad habits.

Next time you realise you've been a tosser, get disgusted!  I'm now ahead for the tournament after a series of wins from that moment, it's no coincidence - I started doing many things differently almost straight away.  Things I should be doing all the time anyway.

The professional gambling journey.

Perhaps I should read my own blog a bit more often..  Maybe I should write on it a little more often too.  It seems I've lost some sight of where I am going and what I'm trying to achieve. 

It's been quiet at punt.com for a while, and that's because I've felt good about what I was doing.  Yet somewhere in the background there was a change happening to the way I trade and a loss of awareness of what I'm doing (or not doing).  It's not a coincidence that I've begun to lose.  So fine is the line between winning and losing, that even small changes can make the difference.  The change I've encountered in my game, is not small.  Yet it crept up on me, because I've been having good results - there's good results from good trading, and there's good results from being lucky, these tend to dirty the picture somewhat.

There's many many technical issues.  These are quite easy to rectify, I still know how to get them right and when to use them, I simply need to execute with conviction.  It's the conviction part that leads me towards where I think the real issue is here.  I touched upon it in the first paragraph..

I said that I have lost sight of where I was trying to go.  Today I realised that perhaps the problem is in the trying to actually go somewhere at all, rather than what I want to do along the way.  In fact, as gamblers, we don't really have anywhere to go, apart from a hole in the ground when our time's up.  Hopefully that is a little way away for most of us, but in the meantime - there's no deadline, no hurry to get somewhere and nowhere to get to.  A concept that few of us are familiar with in day-to-day life. 

The introduction of a destination / goal, is asking for trouble.  These can take many forms, most of which involving some deeply rooted requirement to make a certain amount of money, either per match, per day or any other time frame.  Perhaps the most destructive influence of this manifests itself in need to make back what you've lost.  It buries your trading plan under a quickly increasing weight of emotional baggage.  Consistancy and control in employing a trading strategy becomes a seemingly invisible goal.

So it's the journey that we have to learn to love, and not the looking forward to reaching a destination.  This being a bit "cliché", makes it all the more troublesome to do.  It's easy to resist this approach, it requires the sort of passivity and steadfast consistancy of approach that's tough to achieve everyday... let alone month on month.

It involves doing the same, technically correct things over and over and letting the money take care of itself.  Worries and cares over wins and losses matter not, if you simply remain aware of the right things to do and DO THEM, without question.

Resistance comes in the form of questioning our own ability to do this over a very long period of time.  Questions about boredom and time wastage will arise in our minds, as will the inevitable noting of that last rather large loss we just experienced and how long we might be waiting to make that back, etc. etc.

When professional trading is viewed in this way, it becomes apparent that "patience" and "discipline" are small parts of a larger puzzle.  The complete picture being "the journey" itself.  Problems of discipline, patience and ego, occuring when one resists focusing solely on our journey.

Why is this difficult to do?  It's because it's not something you can 100% actively do.  You can't actively "non resist"!  Just like sportsmen can't try their hardest to get into the zone, it happens when you don't try.  The best we can do is be aware, have a great plan and be in a good condition to execute it.  Enjoy being attentive.  You can actively pay attention to how you feel and what's happening to the match and how it is affecting your plan, if you are doing this then there's no time for impatience, and you are engaging in the journey without knowing it.

Preparation of your trading plan will take care of most things.  Prepare one that has contingencies for everything you can imagine, make it air tight and have it focus on keeping you at the table (minimising losses).  A complete plan will remove all issues of ill discipline, because that match/market scenario is already catered for. 

If you can't execute it, then you are resisting and it's time to stop until you are in the right frame of mind, be sensible about the length of time this can take.  I took the month of February off, granted I had a trip booked, but it coincided with a bad run.. I came back and acted on my plan perfectly for a while.  As time has gone on though, I've become mentally fatigued by it again and it's probably time for a week off before the French Open. 

Having said all this, I'm not completely against goal setting.  I know the importance of having ambition and a dream.  I traded for a while after I achieved a long term goal without a new goal in mind and I didn't have a clue what I was doing.  There's a lot you can find on setting "S.M.A.R.T." goals, all I would say is make it long term and make sure you make very clear to yourself about HOW you will get there - by following your plan and dedicating yourself to trading properly.  If you must have short term goals, then I recommend making the conscious decision to trade each and every match correctly.  If you do this, then you should feel good about your losses as well as your wins.

It's been a long post, but I needed to get a few things out.  Frankly I'm disappointed in myself in the last week.  I believe I was lucky to get away with the previous week's profits and this week, the God's decided they would show me the real consequences of my actions.  It needed to happen and was a certainty to occur at some point.

You pay for alarm bells to ring in this game.  Tuition fee's have once again been hefty, but worthwhile I hope.  There's only one or two matches this week I feel I've traded well, most importantly, the last one today - Hewitt v Nadal.  I still lost, but am content to lose having traded well.  The payoff was almost enormous, but thats the way it goes.

I want to get back to technically correct trading, and I want to be relaxed whilst I'm doing it.  There's several methods of executing my bets that I've been too lazy to do the last couple of weeks.  My focus will be on doing these properly, and making sure I have plenty of energy to do it.  I also want to be more aware of trouble and back away from troublesome scenarios.  I'll be working on my plan a little to put these into effect and make them easy for me to do.

I also want to get back to a good routine away from the computer.  Make sure my trips to the gym are more regular and get more fresh air.  Fit body= fit mind is unfortunately true, for me anyway.  I strongly believe good balance away from trading spills over into your work.

Good luck in your trading and focus on the journey and not the money.

Quiet times at punt.com and a few words on staying patient.

The sun is shining outside, there's plenty of tennis to trade... and less time to spend writing new articles!  Who wants to be indoors longer than's neccessary when the weather's like this.

Work wise, it's been a great week.  The Montecarlo masters series has thrown up some brilliant bets, the first 3 1/2 days were pretty close to perfection for me, over 40% (or points if you like) added to the bank.  Of course the inevitable happened, and the last 2 days I've dropped about 14% of that, which is ok, but frustrating.  I got a little carried away - it's human nature, but as a professional, something I want to cut out.

The best thing to come out of all this is that my new approach is proving it's worth.  I just need to have the patience to wait and execute it quickly when I need to - not exactly straight forward, but at least the ideas of what I need to do have become very clear in my head now.  The clay court season and the rest of the year are looking fairly positive.

It's the "getting carried away" that I really need to do some work on.  It's a fault I've suffered with forever and it seems, reading a few of the other blogs, that I'm not alone.  The waiting is the problem.  A friend of mine who is a professional poker player once allowed me to watch him play.  After 25 minutes of play and not a single bet it became apparent the importance he placed on waiting for the right hand and the right position, amongst other factors.  Trading or betting on anything is no different to playing poker in this respect.

We have to wait for the right circumstances, the right match situation.  One where we know our edge almost defintiely exists.  To bet at any other time is foolhardy, wasteful and unprofessional.  It's a big weakness.  So with that in mind, some research on patience has been conducted by myself, links to follow at the bottom.  The main areas for improvement, from whatI've read, for me are:

• Finding something else to do to pass the time.  Not always wise when a tennis match is going on, it's good to watch it clearly.  Maybe I can play some music in the background, which leads me onto..
• Stay relaxed, it's easy to be impatient when tense or emotional.
• Don't think about what you could be doing.  This is important!  For us it's more along the lines of - I could be laying this 1.62 because I know it'll go to 1.82 in a minute - if it doesn't fit what you are looking for in you strategy though, you shouldn't be doing it, tempting though it is.
• Find some good in the waiting situation.  I think trying to see waiting as part of the work is a good idea.

Thanks to these links for a few ideas - Cyberend.com and this Wiki-how.  Perhaps I should be looking to get hold of patience.com as a domain name. 

Markets mirror life.

As a professional gambler / trader, I watch a lot of markets... for many hours.  After a while you begin to see a pattern emerging.  If not consciously, then subconsciously you are taking in action that has a strange sense of repitition to it. 

Being a tennis trader, I often comment to friends about the story of a match, and how often we see a similar "story".  The same goes for markets.  But what is this story really?  What are these patterns that give us a sense of deja vu?

When I began my trading career (a "career gambler" - I love it!), I read a book called "Reminiscenses of a Stock Operator" (link of left side of the site).  I'll make a post specifically about the book in more detail another time, suffice to say this is an incredible book and I highly recommend it to anyone trading anything.  But the point I want to make here is that it's set some 80+ years ago, yet all of the points it makes are still relevant to today's traders.  How can this be possible, given the World we live in today compared to those days, and the many tools we have to help us trade ?

Some things never change.  Specifically, Humans and their emotions.  For all the technological advances, the same emotions still have a hold over us, and quite probably - always will.

Market's have charts, you can see the price action going up and down and the volumes traded.  This is a display of market behaviour, a plot of human activity.  It's not only a graph of probability, supply and demand but importantly - a drawing of human emotion at play.  The interactions of all the different emotions and feelings of all market participants.

We've talked occaisionally about good and bad emotions (and I'll certainly continue to write about them), as traders, we know the effects emotions have on our own personal game.  Everyone else is playing out the same internal and external battle for themselves and it shows up in the market and the charts.

We attempt to make good judgements about market direction.. tops and bottoms.. momentum etc  And a certain amount of these will be due to fundamental factors, in the stock market it's economic figures or announcements, in tennis - the score, the players, the surface etc.  But, importantly, not all the market movement is down to these things, some of it is pure emotion at play. 

When a market is controlled by emotion and not the fundamentals then it's efficiency is compromised and we have an opportunity.

Emotion in trading suggests logical judgement has diminished to some degree.  The key is to seperate yourself from the pack by keeping the emotions in check and staying focused.  Focused enough to spot those times when the market has left sensible fundamental trading and entered the crazy world of emotional recklessness. 

Opinion prison.

Opinions (or "onions" as I like to call them) and gambling.  They go hand in hand don't they?  Most people (casual gamblers), bet only on opinions.  Without these, in their mind, there's no reason to have a bet.  Why bet on something that you don't have an opinion on?  Where's the fun in that?

Putting fun aside (personally work can be quite boring at times - unless I've just layed a 1.03 shot and they've lost the next 8 points in a row!), we're in this to make money.  Anyone serious about making money can't afford to dabble heavily in their opinions.  If you are a trader, you'll learn pretty early on that opinions can be a hinderance, but why?

It's pretty simple.  Opinions cloud your judgement.  But aren't opinions formed out of your judgements?  Sure, but the judgement never stops when you are trading.  There's always new information to digest.  If you form an opinion on early judgements then it's too easy to dismiss the rest of the info you are going to receive, if you even continue to pay attention.

An opinion can be like a pair of rose tinted spectacles.  Once you pick a pair up, you continually see only the good things and the good possibilities of one outcome, with potentially disasterous consequences.

You lose the ability to change your mind and to question yourself and the situation.  You're no longer at the cutting edge, you're miles behind it and way off the pace.

The best traders are aware of all that's going on around them.  Yes, they act quickly, boldly and on instincts, but it never stops there.  They can reverse their decision just as quickly, admit they were wrong, yet still continue to trsut their instincts.  Opinions don't allow any of this to happen.

When I'm trading, one of my goals is to try to stay impartial as much as possible.  I set out deliberately with the thought to relax and watch carefully.  I've learnt the danger of starting a match thinking, this person will win or they lost heavily last time I know it'll happen again.

The trader that is calm yet alert, without an opinion on things, is positioned best to act on instinct.  And this has to continue along the same lines once you have a trading position.  Have humility in your trading, know your "onions", and you won't go far wrong.

Doctor's orders.

Been a strange week.  Not much written on the blog, apologies for that..  Ill health and things to deal with away from the computer have taken over to some degree, leaving time only for work, perhaps this is how it should be at times.  On weeks like this is seems best to update the blog once or twice a week rather than every day..

Off topic I know, but you know you are getting old when the Doctor's you see are younger than you are.  Even more frustrating is when they give you advice against what you personally believe is correct, leaving you the dilema of whether or not to trust them.  I decided I would follow their advice, and thankfully they seem to be right, but I'm still not 100% yet.

Another example of getting old, is when the sports stars you admire all seem to suddenly be much younger than you are, Rafa Nadal, Andy Murray etc.  They're all almost a decade younger than me !  It's just not right !

Work this week has been a mixed bag, but thankfully I've come out on the right side of things in the end.  It's been a week of easing back into it, working on keeping the right sort of thoughts rotating in my head and trying to get into a good mode of trading.  I find it's fairly critical I start off well in this regard, I don't mind losing as long as I was thinking well.

My largest win of the week coming on the Murray v Davydenko match, I worked a great position and was able to give Andy time in the 2nd set to take it with a very large but safe position in tact.  Had he lost the 2nd set, I could have squared off for minimal damage.  In the past I might have squared up at the end of the 1st set, but the prices were so big on Murray that in the long run I would have been really paying for it.  Murray was value to back at that point and very poor value to lay, I didnt want to add to my position there though.  I knew if Davy threatened in the 2nd set the value on Murray would be huge as everyone would try to get out of their Murray positions - this would be the time to add to my position.  It worked well.

Largest loss of the week was Vaidisova v Kuznetsova.  I was a little under prepared for the inconsistancies of these two ladies.  Vaid began like a train, Kuz moving like a tank with the turning circle of a heavy truck, warning beeps came on when she was in reverse. 

There comes a point though in each Vaidisova match when a look comes across her face of pure youthful inexperienced anxiety.  Usually when she is pushing to keep momentum and take a lead further, eg. early 2nd set having taken the first.  It's a flash point for her.  In the next 2/3 points she either makes the important forehand (and therefore hurdles the anxiety flashpoint), or a crippling run of unforced error forehands will commence.  Once that begins, it's tough to get out of her system and it was pretty much game over.  It's tough to trade though, because she tries hard to play well again and sometimes shows glimpses of getting rid of the problems.  Add in that she was clearly the better player without these problems and it becomes a tricky thing to deal with. 

And I didn't deal particularly well.  Too much action being taken on and not enough steering clear.  I need to be big enough to take my first loss and then wait for the next very obvious opportunity.  An opportunity where the entry point, loss cut point and profit taking time is clear from the start.  Efforts to make back my red screen are futile if I leave the confines of my trading plan behind.

Overall, it's been a week of learning that quality over quantity is the way forward (again).  To adhere to a very clear plan and be disciplined to place my bets in the same way every single time.  Consistancy in this approach will be a big weapon against the opposition over the long run.  In a game where it's all too easy to lose sight of your plan, it makes sense to use this against the opposition.  If it's easy for me to do it, then others must have the same problem...

Deleted temporary brain files.

Took my first tentative steps back into the job yesterday after over 5 weeks off.  It's good to take a break now and then, but this was by far the longest I've ever taken, usually it's a case of 2/3 weeks.  It felt good.  I didn't miss it while I was away which is pleasing, and I felt very fresh with a renewed perspective on things yesterday evening.  That said, I'm suffering from a fairly bad cold / infection at the moment so I'm not 100%.

With 9 1/2 months of the year remaining, realistically 8 1/2 of tennis to trade it's important I set my stall out now to trade them all well.  I've always felt that this was a game about performance and not results.  Performance takes care of the rest, at the end of the year you can see how well you performed.

One of the great things about taking a break is you are giving your internal computer time to mull over things and come up with suggestions and ideas, unconsciously.  It's a bit like defraging your hard-drive, set it off and leave it running in the background, after a while - stuff seems to be easier to comprehend and the way forward a bit clearer.

The other effect is a sort of emptying of the cache.  What was remaining in the cache before the break from the heat of battle, has all been processed through and with a bit of luck - learnt from.  When you re-enter the arena, suddenly a lot of space is available for faster learning, processing and memory.  And this is what happened last night. 

I always bet a little smaller when I return from a break.  There's no reason to rush back in..  I'm clearly going to be a bit rusty and the previous months form is missing from my experience.  Besides I've always believed that you can learn almost all of the same things from smaller stakes as you can from playing at full steam.

I traded 2 matches last night for a small loss.  But the result of the evening is me coming away feeling good about my trading plan, with one critical element firmly in focus for me.

Do nothing, until the time is right for action.

Inaction is perhaps the gamblers most powerful weapon.  In January I wasn't employing it enough towards the end.  In fact, I probably wasn't employing it at all!  When you consider I should be doing nothing for a high % of the time, it displays a serious weakness.  Only when everything lines up should I take some action. 

For me, it's about cultivating the right circumstances to make this easily and consistently achievable.  Make it a habit, and make it something I don't even think about.  Inner "peace" as my mate "samurai" from the betfair forum might say.  It's easy to see this is not merely a change in strategy, it's a mental state that exists whilst I'm trading.  More than that, this is made easier if it exists in the other areas of my life as well - switching it on and off is very difficult I find.