Assessing performance

[brimson25]

I've been pondering this and would really benefit from some wisdom.

In the past 7 days, I've traded 25 horse races pre-off. I have been trading with a £1 tick size. I have lost in 2 of the those races (51p and 57p) Overall, I've made just over £6 or about 24p a race. Is this reasonable or too conservative? I have been grabbing a couple of ticks, so more like scalping than swing trading, and I've traded in every market I arrived at. My bankroll is about £1500 but I use portions of that for legacy activities, such as betting and other kinds of inplay trading. So, although the divisions are virtual, I have allocated about £500 for pre-off horses.

I'm obviously pleased to have such a high strike rate, and a profit. I am much less excited that that profit is so little.

In poker, there are so many metrics you can use to find out how you're doing (BB/100 or ROI in tournaments for example). In this, I have no idea. Obviously, it's good to win. But 24p a race seems pathetic. I've enjoyed trading, but it seems indulgent to be doing something which results in so little.

I've just picked the last 7 days for convenience. The pattern has been like this for some months.

Finally, I wanted to say that this is in no way a sort of "look at how good I am" post. I'm not proud of having such a low return - but I have so little to benchmark it against. Is it my:

- 1. expectations
-2. trading technique
-3. my bankroll/staking that needs to change.

Cheers for any comments.

[spreadbetting]

If you're scalping you'll never have a high return to investment figure. Once you're confident and consistent in your strategy it's really just a case of increasing turnover either by pushing your stake to the limit of the market or by increasing the number of markets you can play. Unfortunately the stakes you can push thru the market , when your edge comes into play, are generally a lot lower than we'd like them to be.

If you've got a high strike rate and in profit you're going the right way. Been a long time since I did any number crunching but I'm sure my ROI was only around the 1% mark. It's probably just a case of having to pull back your expectations for the time being and plodding on rather than trying to change your technique. Just slowly up your stakes for now and see how that goes.

[threedogs]

Hello re return on investment figure I find that I get a 10% return daily on my bank which means that my bank doubles every ten days so I dont understand what is a poor return there and as I see it this fellow's strike rate is good so all he needs to do is gruadually increase his stakes to make more money..
When I had a bank of about £150 I was making a daily profit of £15 a day which is £105 a week or £450 a month so not bad at all for a small bank ...Best wishes and good luck to all for the future ..

[Moniac]

I have been trading with a £1 tick size.

I've never understood why Tick Size is a staking option. Hedging at 10, 2 or 1.1 gives wildly different returns.

If your >6.0 trades are doing much better than your <2.5 trades, or visa versa, it will skew your results. Maybe consider staking By Liability (Back & Lay) which smooths that out a little, but be very careful once you go below about 1.6.

I quite like avg profit ticks vs avg loss ticks or other ways to look at the gains and losses seperately. Then just try and keep the number of gold tokens larger than the number of silver tokens and you could win a moderate prize.

Once you get playing with your spreadsheet, I'm sure you'll find at least as may ways to slice and dice things as there are in poker, probably more.

[ruthlessimon]

I've never understood why Tick Size is a staking option. Hedging at 10, 2 or 1.1 gives wildly different returns.

I don't understand it either

& if I need my staking level, I have to manually calculate it!! I'd go so far as saying by omitting that feature costs BA business to worse platforms - simply because of the usefulness of such a feature. I think a poll needs to be done; because I'd love to see a level staking feature added - & I'm sure a lot of other people do too

[Moniac]

I've never understood why Tick Size is a staking option. Hedging at 10, 2 or 1.1 gives wildly different returns.

I don't understand it either
I'd love to see a level staking feature added - & I'm sure a lot of other people do too

Obv it would only be approx because you don't know where you'll close at, but it would be great for scalpers/short swingers, and it's really easy to implement.