For a long time Profit & Loss figures were the only records I was keeping from my trading. One year I got so slack I didn’t even keep up with P&L for around 6 months and I had to email Betfair to ask for the spreadsheet. I was clearly only interested about the bottom line and wasn’t prepared to look deeper statistically at where I could improve. I guess it’s easy to become complacent when things are going well but when things slowly stop working and you can’t pin point why I can tell you it is extremely frustrating.
I recall a post made by Peter Webb a few years ago; he had noticed that his return on investment (ROI) on certain strategy was in slow decline so he knew he had to start making changes. Although I was doing well at the time I should have taken more notice as I and probably many others have struggled to adapt to market shifts in the past. I have had to work very hard to reinvent my trading methods to continue to profit from the exchange and keeping good and detailed records has played a big part in this transition.
Record keeping has also helped with goal setting and making monthly/yearly comparisons.
Below is my P&L comparison of January 2011 and January 2012.
Initially I was a little disappointed that I hadn't greatly exceeded last years Pre-race total but looking in more depth I had actually traded 30% less races compared to this time last year. This fact reassured me of my progress where previously I may have had doubts. I started trading In-play around 15 months ago so it was no surprise to see an improvement here and it will be interesting to see how far I can go with that this year.
Finally, Go here for a great Spreadsheet for monitoring your P&L by Multiple criteria.
http://betfairtradingmindgames.blogspot.com/2011/04/results-summary-v2-spreadsheet-is-here.html
