Scalping and Swing Trading

I'll start with a warning: since I haven't so much as loaded a poker client since my last post there will be no poker content in this poker blog post. Maybe I should change it to a life blog, I find the "life" bits of poker blogs I read more interesting than the poker bits anyway.

I have been more focused since my last post, and I feel better for it. The two main things I've been doing are learning iPhone development, and learning about trading (mostly relating to Betfair odds-trading, but a bit of currency trading too).  The iPhone stuff seems to be sticking in my head at last, it is a steep learning curve as I've not previously done any Objective-C / Cocoa / Mac related coding at all.  I"ll have to have a go at thinking of a nice little app I can write to add to the App Store when I've learnt a bit more.

I stumbled upon Adam Heathcote's blog, and very quickly became interested in trading odds swings on Betfair after reading that he has made almost £100k so far this year!  I have taken up the trial of the BetAngel software he uses and had a play with it on some horse races.  It's very addictive when you have a series of races 10 minutes apart, you move straight from 1 race to the next and before you realize what has happened 3 hours have passed.  I have kept my "tick size" (the profit/loss for the smallest odds movement) small, between 5 and 50p.  Sadly my worst trade coincided with the 50p tick size (a £10 loss) and my best result with the 5p tick size (35p profit woo). I'm down about a fiver I think, unsurprising as I just got stuck in without knowing what I was doing, but I think I can see how I could be profitable with a bit of time and effort.  The main lesson I learned from the £10 loss: be careful with short-priced favorites (below evens) as the odds tick up/down VERY fast, if you back at, say,  1.68 the "tick" is 0.01, so the odds only have to move to 1.5 and you're 18 ticks down in a few seconds. With higher odds each tick is bigger, so at 3.2 it's (I think) a 0.1 tick so you would only lose 2 ticks if it goes to 3.0. It seems the way to profit (or one of the ways) is to scalp and/or swing trade each race from 10 minutes before the off.  If I find myself with some time on my hands I"ll give it a serious go, and try to learn the patterns/signals to predict the odds swings.

Other than that I've done a bit of reading, "Richest Man in Babylon" an old book on money management, too cautious an approach for my tastes but definitely worth a look. Also read "The 4-hour work week", some useful nuggets, but not worth the effort as it's more a list of resources and a "how to be great by copying the author exactly" book. You realize very quickly that the book itself is part of the authors own get rich scheme (aren't they always).

Good luck at the tables, I might even play there myself at some point!

Simon