15th March 2013

As mentioned yesterday I have not traded for the last 4-5 months. I felt I needed a break; I felt I was just plodding along with no real goals or objectives. I also felt as though I had become obsessed with trading, so much do that the rest of my life was suffering. I would come home from work and jump straight into trading; I had no balance to my life. It was a case of work and then trade; nothing else.

The last few months, I have done other things; I have signed up for a 10k run at the end of April and I have got a place in the great north run; so I have been doing quite a lot of training, which is getting me physically fit. I have also been doing some projects on the house.

The last couple of weeks I have started thinking about trading once again; I re-read my blog and my old thread on racing traders. I also had a good read of other peoples blogs. I feel as though the break has brought me a bit more balance to my life and hopefully a different perspective.

If I want to succeed in trading, I need to trade only 2/3 sports and no more; I need to also ensure that these sports operate all year round; I need to concentrate on fewer sports markets. The old saying 'less is more' is so true when it comes to trading. Therefore I am going to stick to football and tennis; however, with working full time there is not a lot of tennis on during the evening, so I do need another sport to trade when the football is not on. To this end I realise that I really need to master cricket trading. I know I said this last year, but I didn't really stick to it; this year I have to give it a serious crack.

A few days ago I started with a bank of £200; I have £100 for football and £100 for tennis. I will try and put another £100 in for cricket in the next month or so.

My goal is to try and make 20% of my bank every month. Therefore my target balance for the next 6 months is;

March 2013: £240
April 2013: £288
May 2013: £345
June 2013: £414
July 2014: £497
August 2014: £596

I will report my progress as I have done in the past. I will try and produce some stats for upcoming football matches; like I have done in the past. However, it is time consuming, so I will see what spare time I have.