2018 Annual Review
Each year I like to look over the past 12 months. The years seem to be flying by at the moment. This review will look at all the major parts of my life. Family, health, travel, business, betting, investing and everything else.
I’m now onto my 5th yearly review. You can see the past reviews here. 2013, 2015, 2016 and 2017.
The major goal
When I started this blog in 2010, my goal was to try to make a profit from betting which would allow me to retire early. At the time there was no word/description for someone retiring in their 30’s. Over the past 9 years, the FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement has started and just last year I noticed a massive number of articles about it. I’ll copy what I wrote last year about our major goal.
Our families dream life requires $80,000.00 a year. This includes travelling for at least 3-6 months every year. There are a heap of great retire early blogs and calculators, but in short, I am using the 25x rule (or the 4% withdrawal rate). All you need to do is take what you will spend each year and times it by 25, this will give you the number you need in investments to be financially secure for the rest of your life.
$80,000.00 x 25 = $2,000,000.00
So I need $2 million in investments (stocks, bonds, property, betting, startups, so on) to be able to stop working (if I choose). These investments should return 7% on average and I can withdraw 4% ($80,000.00) each year and the other 3% covers inflation. There’s a heap of complexities to it, but that is the general idea.
My goal date to hit this number is in 2027 when I turn 47. I already live what is my dream life, I travel whenever I want, I work on projects I find interesting and I get to spend time with my family. So even when I can “officially” retire, I doubt I will be doing anything different.
To achieve this goal, I try and make money via numerous means. These are (in no particular order)
- Betting
- This blog (affiliate income)
- Dailyprofit (membership site)
- Investments (stocks, property, angel investing, cryptocurrencies)
- My own projects
Let’s get started with the least important one. How did I do financially this year?
2018 Betting profits
In 2018 I turned over $1,556,850.00 and made a profit of $95,920.00 at a 6.16% ROI. This is by far my lowest turnover year since I started betting 8 years ago. This was also because during my trip to the World Cup and around Europe I did not bet at all. I spent the first 6 years testing hundreds of different tipsters before I saw that only one of them actually made me a long term profit (I learn very slowly). Over the past 2 years, I have only followed the Sportpunter models and that has resulted in much lower turnover and a much higher profit and ROI.
I placed 1063 bets and won 564 of them, lost 486 and 13 were refunded.
The total time I spent betting (the most important metric to me) was 88 hours combined. During the NRL and AFL season, I would spend about an hour a day 3 days a week. During the NBA/NFL season, it takes me about a minute per day to place my bets. That works out to an hourly rate of $1,090.00.
The year didn’t start great and it wasn’t until mid-March when the AFL and NRL seasons started that I saw any profit. After an amazing start, the AFL model did not perform at all and in mid-May, I was back to breakeven for the year. But as with all betting, a massive winning or losing day is just around the corner and the final week in May saw nearly all my bets win and resulted in me hitting an ATH of just over $40,000.00 for the year, the next week was the exact opposite and I lost a heap to end with just over $20,000.00 in profit as I took off for Russia (World Cup).
I was fortunate to not bet during this period, as the AFL continued it’s poor run and had I bet, I would have been back to breakeven for the year. It took me a while to get back into the swing but with the return of the NFL and NBA season and the minimum time investment, I was back in the game. Both sports did amazing in the second half of 2018, resulting in a graph that goes straight up. I reached a high of $101,470.00 in mid-December, before ending the year at $95,920.00.
I blogged a lot less in 2018 but did keep up with my results (for the most part). Here is a list of the monthly reviews
- January -$3,710.00
- February -$150.00
- March +$13,620.00
- April +$4,020.00
- May +$18,950.00
- June to October +$41,170.00
- November +$14,510.00
- December +$7,510.00
We can now have a look at each individual model and how it performed.
Sport/Tipster | Wagered | 2018 Profit/Loss | ROI |
---|---|---|---|
AFL H2H | $137,850.00 | $3,760.00 | 2.7% |
AFL Line | $276,340.00 | -$3,030.00 | -1.1% |
NRL H2H | $233,320.00 | $5,410.00 | 2.3% |
NRL Totals | $38,940.00 | $3,230.00 | 8.3% |
NBA H2H | $15,470.00 | -$1,770.00 | -11.4% |
NBA Totals | $595,280.00 | $55,500.00 | 9.3% |
NFL Line | $78,250.00 | $6,070.00 | 7.8% |
NFL Totals | $171,490.00 | $22,460.00 | 13.1% |
Mistakes | $9,910.00 | $4,290.00 | 43.3% |
Total | $1,556,850.00 | $95,920.00 | 6.16% |
It’s clear that the American sports (NBA and NFL) were the profitable ones in 2018. The NBA Totals made $55,500.00 at an incredible 9.3% over 602 bets. The NFL Totals made $22,460 at an even more incredible 13.1% over 137 bets. The NFL Line also did amazing with much less turnover. The NBA H2H bets were from the start of the year and I did not follow them for the current NBA season.
The NRL did ok, with $5,410.00 profit on the H2H bets and $3,230.00 profit on the Totals. The AFL H2H also made a profit of $3,760.00 and the Line bets lost $3,030.00. But as mentioned early, this would have been a lot worse had I bet during the June to September period.
The current Australian gambling market is seeing a lot of change now with new state-based taxes and because of this, we are seeing a lot of books merging. Add in the fact that the Australian model is to ban or limit winning punters and it is near on impossible to get a decent bet on the AFL or NRL. In 2019 I will be betting a lot less on these sports simply because I can’t get on.
My goal each year is to make between $50-$100k and this year performed perfectly. In 2019 I’d like to once again turnover about $2mil and make between 3-5% ROI.
Other betting income
In prior years I would do promo bets, look for loopholes and enter competitions. This year I did none of that.
Investment portfolio (stocks)
The good times had to end eventually for the stock market. The two previous years I had made a 30% return and a 15.32% return. My stock portfolio is 100% passive. I bought stocks in 2012 and have just left them alone (apart from a few small purchases here and there). I reinvest dividends if I can.
In 2018, Australian shares lost about 7%. My own portfolio did a little worse, losing 9.4%. If there is to be a further crash in 2019, I’ll be looking to invest in the market again.
Cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin)
I have a signed copy of the book “What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars” by Jim Paul. Thanks to the Bitcoin correction of 2018, I can now write an updated version of that but tack on “in a month” to the end of his title. Just like my stocks, my crypto portfolio is passive. My coins are locked up and even if I wanted to I can’t touch them for a few more years, and I’ll likely lock them up again for the same period when they open up again.
Let’s have a look at what I wrote in my 2016 and 2017 reviews about Bitcoin.
In 2016 I wrote
I’m a big fan of Bitcoin and plan to write about it more in 2017. I’m surprised more sportsbooks have yet to add it as a deposit method. Near the end of 2015 I decided to cash out some winnings from my 5dimes account, at the time, 1 BTC was worth about $300 USD. Over the course of 2016 the price rose all the way to $1,150USD before retreating and now sits at $900 USD per coin. I plan to keep my Bitcoins as an investment and see them heading back into the 4 figure range and onwards over the next 10 years. This is probably my highest risk investment. There is a chance they could go all the way to 0, or on the upside, each coin could be worth $10,000 (I’ve even seen estimates of $40,000).
In 2017 I wrote
Bitcoin ended 2017 valued at $14,000 USD. The $10,000 figure I mentioned last year was what I felt it could be worth many many years in the future. At the start of 2017, I had $2,000 as my dream return for Bitcoin. I assumed it could (if I was extremely lucky), double in value each year over the next 5 years and be worth $30-$40k in 2021. I did not anticipate what happened in 2017.
My warning to you is that we are all experts in a bull market. The valuations for 99% of alt coins are 10-100x what they would be if they were traditional startups. Eventually, they will be valued correctly.
We all know what happened to the crypto market in 2018. Bitcoin ended the year at $3,800 USD. A 73% drop in value over the year. Most of the altcoins lost at least 90% of their value. It is now very close to what I feel it’s value should be ($4,000) and I’m looking for it to double again this year to end at $8,000. I had multiple buy orders ready at $3,000 and will happily buy a few more coins if we hit that number again.
Last year I had mentioned that Bitcoin had allowed me to reach my major goal early, thanks to having my coins locked up that is no longer the case. So it’s back to work for me :).
I think we will see a lot more products coming to market in 2019 and the user experience improving which will lead to more use. But I still think we are 5 years off from Bitcoin being used in the way I envision it will eventually be used.
Angel investments
In 2017, I thought that Bitcoin had been the investment with the biggest % gain. But in fact, it was one of the startups I had invested in a few years earlier. The problem with angel investing (investing in new startups) is that you never really know their value until they raise a new round. I’ve invested in close to 100 startups over the years, at an average of $1,000 per investment. 30% of these startups have already failed, another 5-10% have been acquired or bought out. The others are quietly building and growing their companies.
One of these lottery tickets managed a 60x gain in 2017 and what looks like another doubling in 2018. There are a few others that have done well in 2018 and raised more funding at very high valuation. These investments are very long term investments as I can not sell my tiny shares in these companies until they either raise new rounds or IPO. That means these investments are forced holdings for at least another 5 years and likely much longer.
Affiliates
A long term affiliate that I had made a decent income from closed my account as I had stopped advertising on this blog and did not send any new customers. Another affiliate that I had sent hundreds of players and helped them build the business simply didn’t pay me what was owed. The affiliate business is geared towards much larger sites or dodgy call-centres in the industry. Luckily for me, I’ll be creating a much larger site in 2019. Even with these hassles, I did manage to make a decent profit of about $30,000 from affiliates in 2018.
Dailyprofit
Dailyprofit.com.au is my stable source of income. It just about covers my yearly expenses and does not take too long to update each day. Customer service takes up much more of my time with this site. Apart from this blog and my twitter feed, I do not advertise the site. All new members are via word of mouth, as I created the service to be the best possible tipster service in the world. The results speak for themselves year after year. I could go big on marketing and double the number of subscribers, but it is in that sweet spot of earning me a nice income and making sure members can get set. Most of the members are long term ones and I feel their loyalty means I should be thinking about them first at all times.
2018 Investment conclusion
Last year I said
2017, on the other hand, was the most profitable year of my life. I can say with absolute certainty that I will never have a percentage gain like I did this year.
Because of the crypto market losing such a massive amount, I can say with some certainty that I will never have a percentage loss like I did this year. I lost more money this year then I imagined I would ever have in my entire life. But they are all paper losses (as they were paper gains the year before). I never actually had the money and more importantly never actually spent the money in my head.
As always, the year ahead will offer a lot of opportunities. I feel I am fairly diversified and whatever happens with the economy and the world at large, I’ll do ok. Thanks to this year’s betting profits, I have a small amount to add to whichever investments crash first.
Projects
I had no pressure to work on my major project in 2018. But near the end of the year, I found a few great programmers and have been working on Punt101. This is my big project which I hope to build into a world-class business over the next 10 years. Expect to see me release a very basic version in 2019 and continue to grow it over the next decade. I’ll be trying a lot of new things with this site and I hope it will help bring your punting to the next level. The first product is the bet history tool that I talked about over 4 years ago on this blog. A few other companies have tried to build products in this space, but I feel they have gone about it all wrong. Punt101 will make it a no brainer to track your bets as once set up it will take zero effort on the users part. Stay tuned for big things in 2019.
Travel
According to Google (who track every step I take), I visited 55 cities over 9 countries in 2018. I wrote about my trip to the World Cup and also my family trip to Japan. 8 of those countries were brand new places for me. I travelled for about 3 months of the year, which seems like the perfect amount of time. 2019 will be a quiet year as I plan to work on the new site, but I hope to travel to a few places around Australia, and have contemplated moving to Asia for a few months to get even more work done.
Health and Fitness
It took me until September to actually make a change. I wrote about how fat/unhealthy I had become and talked about what I was going to do about it. Since that time I have been intermittent fasting and following a keto diet. In 2018 I hit a high of 101 kilos in April and a low of 89.9 in December. The end of December sees so many birthdays and events, that I knew in advance I would put on a heap of weight. For the first time in years, I feel super confident about getting my weight and fitness under control. I’m actually looking forward to losing another 10 kilos over the course of 2019.
What a year
I say it every year, but looking back shows me what an incredible life I get to lead. I honestly feel like I am pretty lazy, but when I look back over the year I seem to do a fair bit. I hope you had a great 2018 and I hope your 2019 is filled with amazing experiences. Thanks again for reading the blog over the past year.
Let me know how your 2018 was in the comments below.
what do you do when Sportpunter closes for good?
I’ve taken a life insurance policy out on Jonno 🙂
But in all seriousness, I’d stop expecting to make a profit from my betting. I’d probably bet for fun, try and pass on what I have learnt and continue making products in this space.
1000 bets is a good distance to say that you are profitable tipster, good job. Amazing results in NBA. Why so bad result in AFL? As i know it it not hard to predict this league in opening lines on Pinnacle and Sbobet.
If it was easy to predict things, everyone would be very rich. Not sure why the AFL model had a poor year. It generally has one every 4 years, but over the recent years it seems to be doing much worse then it previously did.
Great review again Steve. Seems you need to crank out more ‘Mistakes’ in 2019 😛
Thanks Sean, I should start selling the “mistakes” service
Steve actually I have a question. If you are only following the Sportpunter models, I note the results spreadsheet for 2018 on Dailyprofit shows pretty much break even on the year. Yet above you have had a profitable year. Am I right in assuming your actual bets placed have been filtered down / stakes geared up, whereas those in the results sheet are all-inclusive of everything given by Sportpunter? Can the two be reconciled?
Hey Sean, It’s all about staking sizes and also the AFL and NRL bets I didn’t place when I was travelling for the World Cup (The AFL would have resulted in a big loss for me).
So Dailyprofit has the same weightings for all 4 sports. That’s purely for fairer recording. But we let our members know which models we think are better and what weightings to use.
So my NRL bank was a little bigger this year and my AFL was smaller than the year before. I also slightly increased my NBA bank.
It just shows that how you set your bank sizes is pretty important.
Hi Steve,
Regarding your 2018 Bitcoin paper losses?
Aren’t you still up near 35x. What was your average buy in if you care to share?
And when you say you put some profits into bitcoin around 2016 ; does that mean you put a few grand of your profits into Bitcoin in 16 or did you put around 5 or 6 figures?
Out of curiosity why didn’t you take any (maybe 25%) BTC off the table in 2017 into 2018 when it went above 2k and then 5k to 10K and beyond plus.
Seems like it hit your 2017 goal in Summer? Or is it really a 30K btc price or year end 2022 type goal? Do you suspect it can 10x again over the next 3 years? Thank you.
Hi Dav,
Yep, still comfortably up from my average buy-in price. I won’t be sharing how much I invested.
As always, every investor can be an expert in hindsight. I’ve always had a longterm mindset when it comes to investing. Did I think the prices were crazy as soon as it hit 10k? Yep, did I think it would keep going up and up? Yep
What most people won’t tell you is they have no idea. I’ll happily tell you I’m an idiot. Because I know I have no idea.
Others will tell you they believe in the tech, blah blah blah and you ask them to explain it to you and they have no idea.
I saw something that was pretty cool and bought some, lucky for me I bought before it became mainstream. Also lucky for me (and some might say unlucky… only time will tell) I decided to hold for many many years.
I have no idea if it will 10x, 100x or go to zero. No one does, but people have always loved to speculate. The only people I would listen to is those who have skin in the game, so if someone like Draper speaks I listen (but now he has a very vested interest). If someone actually shorted bitcoin and was vocal about it, I’d listen.
Hi Steve,
Maybe a sportsbetting year below the average, but still one which makes lot’s of us jealous! So still a great year and still on track for your early retirement!
I had a so so year, but things are improving. We have hooked up with some sports bettors on Discord. These members of this discord channel are pretty diverse from pro sports bettors to regular punters, just betting on their own team before a game. Due to this I did become more disciplined and learning day by day.
The idea about the discord channel is to educate sportsbettors. We are starting with the beginning of bankroll management and record keeping!
We are also trying out a new blockchain sportsbetting exchange. In short it is where betfair meets crypto and blockchain. We do think that this has a lot of potential. I don’t want to spam this response on your blog with an affiliate link, but you can have a look at my website to discover it! I do think that you wont regret this. If you like it, feel free to use the affiliate link on there 🙂
Have a great 2019!
Cheers,
Peter
Hi
I haven’t commented for a while as I actually do not follow any of the sportspunter models any more it got too difficult to get bets on (timing and limits). I gave up on a lot of very good services including UK racing and soccer services aswell it was a little sad actually. I record my year July to July. I only bet on horses now due to minimum bet rules. My turnover is less than half what it was when I had a much smaller bank and my time commitment is vastly reduced. I now operate a 100 000 bank built up from 500, 6 and a half years ago. I was up 88k before spring carnival lost nearly 40k and am now sitting at just under 70k and 220k lifetime. Thank you for your help over the years. I will remain a member of daily profit and may even bet on the service again some day.
Ps in my 6.5 years betting I have never come across anyone willing to become a winning punter in the real world.
The rest of my life is now very interesting since discovering and reading the Stargate project and some of the possibilities that exist for humans.
Good luck all.
Hey Alex,
Sounds like you have done really well over the past 6 and a half years. That’s very impressive growth from a small investment.
Thanks for the support.
Elon Musk is actually working on something in that area. Trying to get us to communicate straight from brain to brain, and make it easier for us to work with future AI. Interesting field.
Great work mate. Really great results over 2018. Which of the main betting sites do you recommend? Just found it increasingly difficult to get a decent stake with the Aussie bookies.
Thanks
Jim
Hey Jim, The only Australian bookmaker who will take a bet is Topsport. All the others have forced me to bet offshore. I have a couple of articles on the site that show you where you can bet (Sportmarket, Asianconnect)
Hi Steve
Seems like you are lacking some good old fashioned financial insurance in your investments. A small percentage of your assets in physical gold and silver (in your own possession) will make you whole when the whole debt based fiat Ponzi scheme implodes in coming years and paper/digital assets are decimated.
Hi Jane,
I’ve never understood this position. If the world does go to shit, do you think these assets will matter all that much? I envision a mad max type scenario.
But would love to be enlightened on how you think it would work.
Based on past monetary resets, unpayable debts have been revalued against gold. Remember, all fiat (un-backed paper) money in history, has reverted to its intrinsic value – zero. I don’t think Mad Max scenario is a certainly, but having real money, will make it less terrible if it occurs. I understand, holding a pointless shiny “babarous relic” that pays no yield, in this day an age seems insane, but the elite (and non Western central banks) are buying as much physical (non paper gold) as they can get their hands on. I just do what the smartest guys are doing for themselves.
Thanks Jane, always good to hear other points of view.
ha ha, no worries. Female “gold bugs” are rare, especially one who has a PhD in economic history…and who bets on sport…I’m used to being laughed at.
I own Bitcoin, I know how you feel 🙂
We are wrong until we aren’t
Hi Dave,
When you say its very difficult to get an AFL or NRL bet on, why dont you just use Betfair?
Regards,
Ackland
Hey Ackland? My name is Steve, not Dave 🙂
Betfair is great but has no liquidity on the morning of the game when I bet. The max bet you can get on is a few hundred. The key is always getting the best odds, and by the time Betfair has enough liquidity, the market is pretty sharp.
Hi Steve, Curious about Topsport as you mentioned they are the only bookie that takes a bet… can i ask what the deal with that is? do they genuinely take bets from winning punters? Ive read a few say who have said that Topsport has decent limits even for accounts that get limited… is there a catch? just cant wrap my head around how a small bookie can do well by doing that
Hi Huy,
From my experience they do. They do not always take the full stake I request but do take big bets.
Bookmakers are meant to take bets from both sides and make a profit from the middle. If done correctly, bookmakers can take on very little risk and make a small profit from each market. It’s just over the past 10 years that bookmakers have worked out their profits will be larger if they ban winners and happily take on losing punters.