A question for people who make money on this site?

Everyone goes through terrible runs.

bet too % of bank will help

Ideally you will not just have an edge, you will know roughly how much that edge is worth. You can then work out what the mean and variance of your returns should be, and therefore how large you should expect temporary blips to be.

Yes. After making a profit every week for 52 weeks, I had a period with three losing weeks out of six, culminating in my worst ever loss.

In 2009 I paid close to £10k in Premium Charges, so far in 2010, I've paid 12 quid (that's 12 pounds not 12k).

Effectively after 52 weeks of continuous profit, I did slightly better than break even over the following three month period (dec '09 - feb '10)

I would add that one of the biggest risks that many people ignore is model risk. Even if you are making money, you need to be aware that that may be due to luck. The same applies if you are losing money: make sure it's not just due to a bad run before discarding it.
Sometimes it can take a long time for flaws to surface.

That makes sense Investor. Maybe the large ammount of time I spend watching football and all the stress involved is not worth it! Theres not much point making good money and then throwing it away and been depressed about it. I am finished until September, going to join up with 2 mates so that I dont have to spend as much time watching soccer. See how that goes. The theory is that surely the big punters here must take a hit too. Nobody is invincible? Or are they?

difficult to not let losing runs bother you.

I had a tremendous month in Feb and March with continuos success.However since April and into May i have had a shocking run of bad luck through a sequence of unlikely outcomes.

It's interesting that you are describing your losses as unlucky and unlikely, and your winning run as tremendous. Why is it not the other way round, a lucky run followed by a correction ?

Someone was able to lay Nick Clegg to be next prime minister at 1.50 for £500.

Those are the kind of bets that put money in your pocket ;)

You just need to accept that long losing runs are going to happen.  OK, they could indicate that your edge has been eroded by something new on the scene, but more likely is that it's just the vagaries of the market.  I had a long period of losses for about 2 months after Xmas.  For a time I was (justifiably!) worried that something was affecting my results that I wasn't taking into account.  I reduced my stakes a bit, but carried on. Then since the end of Feb I've had my best ever run. 

Remember that a conservative staking plan is vital to get you through these losing runs.  Don't worry about missing opportunities because your stakes are low compared to your bank.  In the long run it's the best way.

Decky you say you have had a shocking run of bad luck. Can you give some examples of some of your recent losing bets? Perhaps it was bad judgement rather than bad luck?

Perhaps neither bad judgement or bad luck. Perhaps just that winners and losers don't come along in a nice neat sequence that suits your staking. As long as you are happy with your methods you should be ok, but patience required when the inevitable losing run arrives.

Losing runs are pretty much an unavoidable hazard of any form of betting. (pure arbing aside I suppose)

From my experience two nasty truths about losing runs are that no matter how many you've gone through in the past the next one will still shock you at just how bad it is and how long it drags on. The human mind underestimates the effects of randomness and it's very hard, if not impossible, to train it out of that.

And secondly, no matter how you try to deal with them, when you are in the middle of a losing run it feels horrible. (I think central to this is that when you are in the middle of a losing run you don't actually know you are in the middle of it - you fear you are only at the beginning of a very long, possibly permanent, losing run).
Following that logic, when you are near the end of a losing run it feels really horrible: it's always darkest before the dawn as they say.


It's not all doom and gloom though - the upside to losing runs (for me anyway) is that it motivates me to put some work in. To go back and explore the possible deficiencies in my models/strategies that I'd suspected were there but had been too lazy to go in to before and thought I could get by without dealing with. Sometimes you end up not changing anything, but even that helps restore your confidence that you're doing the right things and it's just a run of bad luck.

Just listen to Ken.