April 22nd – April 28th -$35,800.11
I’ve had some large losing weeks, but never anything in the $30,000 range. By far my worst week betting ever. While a week like this would hurt at the best of times, added onto the back of the last few losing months and also nearing the end of my 5th year of betting and if there has ever been a time where I’ve just wanted to throw it all in, than that time is surely now. I won’t off course, I will wait till the end of the season and when in a calmer mood I will break down all the results and see what went wrong. We make sub-optimal decisions when we are in a stressed state and I hope to write about research to that affect soon. But put simply, people tend to stop following a tipster or sell stocks right at the worst possible time as they are not thinking properly. I see it with Dailyprofit members all the time. The fact is you need to set your bank and ride out the waves that come over the season. My combined highly leveraged bank each season is $100k now and there is every chance that one season that bank will go bust. There is no doubt now that this season will be my first losing one, it’s just a matter of how bad and how I can improve so it doesn’t repeat in year 6.
Yesterday I was going through my RSS reader. This is how I consume most of the websites I read. Whenever a new post is put up by a website, it is sent to my feedly app and I can see all the new articles and get through hundreds of websites really quickly. I also like to call it my punters wasteland. Every other week there will be a new blog where someone decides to embark on the same journey as me, I do enjoy reading other peoples journeys as well and over the years there have been at least 50 of these type of blogs. Yesterday I decided to clean up my feeds and deleted any blogs that had not updated in the last 6 months. That meant I deleted over 50 blogs. They all started out thinking how easy it would be, but after a few weeks and for the rare few a month or two, they lose a bit of money and give up. This highlights how difficult it really is to make a profit gambling. More so it highlights how naive people are about gambling and how ill prepared they are for it. I blogged weekly for 15 months and showed a grand total profit of $0, but I knew this was a long term experiment and I was learning as I went. I saw the mistakes I made as educational expenses. I thought I had finally cracked it and now it was time to reap the rewards, but this season has shown me that you can never stop learning and improving.
I think that last paragraph was more a pep talk for me than anyone else. I need to appreciate the fact that I have come a long way over the last 5 years and while this period has been the toughest, I know I will get through it and learn some valuable lessons which will make my future betting even more anti-fragile than before.
Ok, onto the results for the biggest loss ever in a week for me. The AFL continues to be my rock. $11,000 profit this week. But that ended the good times for SP models. NHL lost $6,700, MLB lost a massive $11,600, NRL lost $5,800 and the Rugby lost $1,100. In total the Sportpunter models contributed $14,200 to the $35,800 loss this week.
ClubGOWI made $1,000 but I missed a heap of his winners and also added in a lot of his long term losing bets. He did get a golf winner this week and many members would have made a nice profit from the service this week. With a few more long term losses to add to the total, I sit on 0.8% ROI for this service after more than a year of following. Others in the forum have mentioned they can usually get the odds just before game time, so potentially it is a case of me just being in the wrong time zone for this tipster. I do track every bet and if I had managed to get on every single bet at the prices advised, I would be sitting on a 3% return, which would make me very happy.
Moving onto what has really killed me the last few months and left me with a massive decision to make come seasons end. The Soccer bets have been in free fall since February and I remember back to when I was in the states for the Superbowl and missed a heap of bets that saved me close to $15,000 (I think). So really, the results should be much much worse. Football Elite lost $1,100 this week and sits on a minuscule profit. Football Value lost $1,000 and Winabobatoo made $800. The 2 big disappointments have been TFA and Football Investor. Things were looking so good mid season for these two services, but the last few months have wiped out any profit and faith I had in these. TFA lost $7,400 this week and Football Investor lost $10,600 to push it into negative for the season. I believe this season my TFA portfolio has been one of the best performing so I don’t want to think about how others are coping. If it wasn’t for the European bets, it would be another disaster like last season. Football Investor if I remember correctly was sitting on over $30,000 profit at one stage, so the swing has been huge. I would also like to hear from anyone who decided to follow only those bets where all tipsters agreed.
My own personal betting lost a further $1,300 and betting against tipsters lost $1,500
So that ends the worst betting week (SO FAR) of this journey. The last 3 weeks have now seen a $71,749.12 loss. Hopefully the rot stops here, but I highly doubt that with another week of Soccer ahead.
Total Loss for the week was $35,800.11
[mc4wp_form]
Stats Year 5
Total bet amount: $6,445,535.93
Profit/Loss: -$45,335.81
POT: -0.7%
Bets Placed: 9021
Won: 2894
Lost: 4219
Half Payout: 62
Refunded: 1846
Winning %: 40.7%
Total profit per day: $302,189.03 / 1763 = $171.40
Total Turnover: $20,788,279.30
Total ROI: 1.45%
AFL H2H – SP $86,015.00 $13,439.03 15.6%
week profit/loss: 2411
AFL Line – SP $378,439.00 $(12,577.37) -3.3%
week profit/loss: 8532
NHL Totals $588,092.00 $12,018.99 2.0%
week profit/loss: -6737.70
Rugby SP $60,624.00 $(1,715.10) -2.8%
week profit/loss: -1081
NRL SP $85,027.00 $(2,233.25) -2.6%
week profit/loss: -5846.23
SP MLB $394,478.00 $8,210.30 2.1%
week profit/loss: -11627.18
ClubGowi $666,133.00 $5,477.62 0.8%
week profit/loss: 961
GOWI $19,776.00 $3,322.28 16.8%
week profit/loss: 0
Jason Kelly Golf $13,441.93 $(7,208.53) -53.6%
week profit/loss: 0
Betswot $9,573.00 $(7,818.00) -81.7%
week profit/loss: 0
FB Elite $214,641.00 $736.38 0.3%
week profit/loss: -1130
Football Value $60,000.00 $(4,015.00) -6.7%
week profit/loss: -1000
TFA 21 $395,217.00 $(11,506.60) -2.9%
week profit/loss: -4709.50
TFA 41 $383,876.00 $(18,621.00) -4.9%
week profit/loss: -3410
6-21-31 $219,257.00 $7,551.22 3.4%
week profit/loss: -1911.50
D1-D6 $135,700.00 $7,570.00 5.6%
week profit/loss: 435
E1-E6 $134,040.00 $25,887.40 19.3%
week profit/loss: 2240
Mike Lindley $101,264.00 $(6,623.00) -6.5%
week profit/loss: -1500
WINABOBATOO $375,655.00 $(5,532.88) -1.5%
week profit/loss: 2274
FBI combo $152,500.00 $6,351.20 4.2%
week profit/loss: -1790
FBI Euro $216,492.00 $(8,235.30) -3.8%
week profit/loss: -8790
Odds pushed out $47,750.00 $4,965.00 10.4%
week profit/loss: -1500
Personal $72,573.00 $(14,007.60) -19.3%
week profit/loss: -1320
Mistakes $13,735.00 $(13,735.00) -100.0%
week profit/loss: 0
Wow, pretty hard core losses, but you seem to have a good attitude towards them. You make a valid point about being in the right time zone, some sports you just have to be on hand to trade them. What interests me about you is you seem to have really diversified your portfolio, would you say that it’s necessary in order to trade in the volumes you do?
I’m just wondering why in times of trouble you don’t just revert back to your “rock” and trade only in the AFL?
Also don’t knock the soccer! 🙂 I trade under 2.5 goals with a pretty high strike rate, though I’m a little minnow so don’t know if the markets I trade can support such high volumes.
Anyway I’m glad I’ve come across your blog, keep up the good work!
Steve knows I’ve been following his blog for a while and these losses are not going to discourage me to do so further. My opinion is that Steve diversifies too much. It simply isn’t possible to obtain so many winning tipsters, especially not in soccer. Right now, I am following very few besides my own bets. Joseph Buchdahl’s excel tool is excellent in determining if anyone’s record is a product of pure luck or of a real skill. In my experience, you need 200 bets max to get a sample of what a tipster is capable of doing and how he handles losing runs. Streamline your portfolio, Steve, and it’s all going to be good. 😉
Kizo, we have spoken before and you are also a member of pretty much all the soccer tipsters I also follow?
I do agree that it seems there are no good long term soccer tipsters. It has taken me a long time (I’m slow at the best of times) to get that through my pretty thick skull.
But diversification IS KEY. Just like when investing in anything. A simple comparison to the market. We can say Sportpunter is like stocks. Over the long term they will give the highest possible return, but fluctuations can be pretty crazy. A tipster like GOWI will produce from -2 to +2% each year, so he is more like CD’s or bank interest rates. The football ones are more like investing in startups, massive failure rate, but if you hit that one unicorn it will dwarf all the other investments.
In the investing world, you have a percentage in each depending on your age and risk attitude. The same should happen in your betting portfolio. I like a fair bit of risk (and can handle it) so had it heavily weighted towards the startups (soccer tipsters). Sadly I didn’t find that one great tipster that would cover the losses from the others.
Everyone is different and in hindsight we are all geniuses. I don’t remember anyone telling me this when the soccer was up $80,000 earlier in the year. It seems it is much easier to come to conclusions when you have the final result.
In saying that, I will be restructuring my portfolio to be a little less volatile (I hope) next season. I will be giving up a fair bit of potential upside but also saving myself from large potential downside.
As I keep saying, gambling is not an easy thing, first you have to find those rare tipster who can make a profit (1 in 100,000 or more), you have to be able to stick to a plan through the bad times, you have to deal with bookmakers closing accounts down and a heap of other issues. If it was easy than we would see more than just me blogging for longer than 6 months.
I took up only football investor and am now regretting it, sadly. I think I did try to warn you that it is not possible to find more than five decent, not great, soccer tipsters. It is an efficient market because everyone’s involved. Of course I would diversify if I could find so many good tipsters, but it’s not the case. For example, I think you vastly overrate sportpunter (i know he’s reading this, so no offence mate, really), especially compared to subscription he asks for. I would take only few of his models, if any since he is a stats tipster. I can only repeat myself – good tipster is an informed tipster.
I can only go off my own results and from those, no one comes close to Sportpunter returns over such a long time frame. Also, Jonno rarely reads this blog, he is too busy golfing most of the time, so feel free to say what you want about him as he won’t read it.
Also remember you don’t have to do better than breaking even and still make a very nice profit on turnover.
Sure, but that is the hardest thing, isn’t it? 🙂
Hey Steve I have seen you mention on twitter a couple of horse racing services which you follow e.g. trial spy but I never see you mention there performance in your blog posts. Just wondering what the reason for this is?
lack of time. If this blog made me money, I would happily spend all day writing articles and reviewing services. Until that day, this site is very low down on my list of important things.