Not for children

Warning: The following post contains language unsuitable for young children, and old children as well.

Imagine you backed a loser at its lowest price. You’d be pretty pissed, right?

Now imagine you’d won £250 despite backing a loser at its lowest price. How would you feel?

How about more pissed off? Without a doubt, the most pissed off I have been ever from trading.

For as long as I can remember, I have advocated laying early favourites in Rugby League, and, it’s fair to say, I’ve made reasonable profits by doing so. However, around June this year, I decided to change and to keep my lays of early favourites.

That is to say, to leave them and to carry on trading the markets as if the lay had never been placed. Since then, I’ve not had much success. I’ve not had many failures however; my trading irrespective of the lays has been good enough to avoid significant red.

Until today.

Wigan v Huddersfield was a strange game with Wigan being 1.06 to lay despite the score only being 4-0. However, I never really lumped on in the way I thought I would but a late first half try allowed me a second opportunity and I took it. Earlier trades had also ensured a massive green on the draw and allowed me to really avoid significant red on Wigan.

However, as the second half carried on, the money kept pouring in and I caught myself with far too much liability on Wigan so I started trading out at just above or equal to the lay price, only for Wigan to look to score.

At which time, I looked to get out for a price below my lays. £200 at 1.04. Now, for f**k’s sake come on. I don’t go into profit and loss on here, but £8? That’s less than 1% of my yearly earnings, if I had let the bet run. Why the f**k do I need £8? Of course, I don’t. Well, I mean everyone does – no-one will turn down £8 but in the grand scale of things, it makes no sense.

So why do it? It goes back to the age old problem of treating each trading event as a “match” where green, no matter the size, is declared the winner. A stupid, stupid approach that I had hoped to long consign to the history bin.

That said, the worst was yet to come…

Stung by the sheer idiocy of my trades, I started to green up. First when Huddersfield score to make it 10-6, securing £50, then when Huddersfield made it 12-10, for £100, and then when Huddersfield 18-16, for £170.

The problem was, this was not what I had promised I would do. I had vowed to leave green on the underdog in the knowledge that big wins come in, and come in regularly. And, the biggest wins come from the most unlikely of situations.

So, here I stand. Comfortably £500 worse off than I should be, and more than that, having regressed to old trading ways which only serve to keep this as an obsessional hobby, as opposed to a lucrative activity.

The fact is, the pressure was applied, and I broke.

Excuses can be made for sure, like the fact that I had a train to catch at 70 minutes, but it is what it is – an excuse that does not compensate for a woeful trading performance. (And given that I was not watching the match, it makes trading out all the more ridiculous.)

And could the evening get any worse? Well, how about spilling drink over my bag and forgetting event tickets for a friend. Yes, I’d say this was a pretty shit night, but more than that – at the risk of hyperbole – I really feel that this could be the night where the trading train was derailed.

For good.