Accountability Thread (AKA Cockups!)

Adam

Mistakes are how we learn quickest. Having a growth mindset and leaning into those mistakes instead of trying to avoid them and feeling ashamed of them results in the quickest rebound and most improvement.

I also think writing them down and describing them to others forces you to think them through and understand them to a greater level of detail.

This is a thread to lay bare the cockups so we can all learn better from each others' mistakes. I guarantee if it happened to you, it's happened to someone else!

Suggested format:

What happened
Why did it happen?
What will you do differently next time?

Could be anything, e.g. "I let my trade go in play", "I decided to trade when drunk", etc!

Richard Latimer

@Nick-Segura for better or worse I just do mu own stuff now like you.

If I follow someone else's trade and it loses I always feel worse than if I lose on one of my own.

? Offline

I have made many many mistakes, all kinds of crazy stuff as well as more subtle errors. The biggest one in terms of losing money was jumping into tennis trading with 0 experience/data and laying a player using a huge liability and letting it run. I then freaked out and traded out for a massive loss. I think I lost £900. I was coming from match betting with a lot of profit in the bank and a reckless attitude. I was used to making a lot of money easily, staking big etc

I have tried to rush the process, focusing on making money rather than learning. I jumped from a strat to another, being very inconsistent. I am still guilty of being impatient but I am managing myself a lot better and I am very consistent. I am gathering my data and working on my craft, one day at the time.

As a beginner, I've let people influence me, sometimes for the best but also for the worst. I became very sceptical of a lot of things/people, including BTC and I think it distracted me from what I needed to do - focus on my craft and learn at my own pace. I still don't really trust anyone. I tend to be very self reliant which can be a good thing but not always. Very much a personality thing I think. I am making effort though, posting on the forum every now and then.

I have exited winning trades out of fear the market would go the other way and stayed in losing trades hoping they would end up being winners. Just a lack experience I'd say. I try to be more aware of this when trading.

I've developed biases (leagues/teams) which stopped me entering winning trades when there was value. The reason for this is fear and being short sighted, focusing on a trade rather than the bigger picture. I am now fairly aware of this and will enter the trade provided it meets my criteria and is "value". Can be quite uncomfortable.

I have followed trades from people I don't know, hoping for the best and fearing the worse. Just plain laziness, looking for shortcuts. I stopped that altogether. I don't look at what people will trade, have traded or anything like that. It does not help me. I either end up comparing myself or wasting time thinking about what they do rather than what I do.

Currently, I am being quite obsessive about my trading, working really hard on it and probably too hard at times. Again, managing my personality and traits of character is an ongoing thing. While I am becoming a more patient trader, I am still being impatient in other ways.

I could probably go on and on, but these are some of the mistakes I made.

Richard Latimer

I've made a ton of mistakes. Important thing is I've now started learning from every one.

Martin

@Adam worst thing I ever did many moons ago was just after I got married took out a 5k loan to start trading properly. Chased some losses and blew it in about a week.

It was a big turning point for me, I had done something wreckless that didn't just effect me anymore.

I've never chased losses since.

Maybe it was actually the best thing I did!

Adam

@Dan-MacKinnon My worst bot cockup ever was quite early on, in the antepost market for the Grand National.

My bot had been betting for the entire year and it was looking good. I planned to hedge up just before the market ended, but didn't realise at the time that this happens 2 days before. I think I'd based the market close time on the actual race time, not the end of the antepost market.

So 2 days before the race, I'm left with positions all over the place and no opportunity to hedge everything. I tried to figure out how to hedge up against the win market but I don't think I had the bank to cover it even if I could have figured it out.

As the race unfolded, Ballabriggs and Niche Market were fighting over the lead. If Niche Market had won, I would have won £20k+! If Ballabriggs won, I would lose £3k.

Ballabriggs won

I normally watch the Grand National at the pub but had to watch this one at home as knew how stressful it was going to be. Tbh it's the only time I've had the feeling of having the gambler's mentality, shouting at the TV etc

I guess it gave me a pretty good trigger to watch out for in the future, that horrible rising anxious feeling as you get more emotionally involved in what's happening.

Dan MacKinnon

Talking of issues with bots, when I first tried Fairbot I set up a bot which was only meant to risk £1 as a trial to see if it worked. I must have had some repeat betting that I wasn’t aware of at the time. Before I knew it I watched the bot put my whole bank on this one trade!

Adam

@Richard-Latimer said in Accountability Thread (AKA Cockups!):

My last massive c**k up was when my phone lock had turned off and I didn't realise.

I took the Samsung lock screen off as it kept making 999 pocket calls with the stupid emergency button that you can't turn off.

My Pixel does that, infuriating!

I was actually in profit I think but panic kicked in so fast I was unable to see what I needed to do immediately and by the time I realised and managed to cancel/trade out of every bet I was around £20-£30 down.

Reminds me of one time when my bot did something weird with betting on reserve runners. Can't remember exactly what happened now but I glanced at the BF homepage and saw my available funds were like 5p when the day started with about £2400.

Luckily I could just cancel all bets, fix it and restart but I think at the time you could only cancel one page of bets at a time in the "Current Bets" section so even that took a while as there were reams and reams of bets waiting unmatched.

Adam

@Dan-MacKinnon said in Accountability Thread (AKA Cockups!):

I’ll go

What happened?
I was using ratchet staking to grow my bank quickly. All fine when it was on the way up, but didn’t know when to pull the plug on the way down and ended up losing more than I started with.

Why did it happen?
A mix of overconfidence and naïveté. I understood in theory how it worked and that yes the downturn would be bad but the recovery would be quicker. I just didn’t consider the bank required to handle that sort of situation and when it had gone beyond the point of working it was too far gone so had to be scrapped.

What will you do differently next time?
I’m going to start withdrawing some of my bank during good months and top it back up during bad ones so there’s an equilibrium. I know that compounding works but maybe stick with % staking rather than ratchet.

Great post, thanks Dan.

I must admit, I prefer to keep it as simple as possible with staking, using a fixed % rather than trying to do anything too exotic. That way, if the strategy starts underperforming, it's easier to see when and why that started happening.

Richard Latimer

My last massive c**k up was when my phone lock had turned off and I didn't realise.

I took the Samsung lock screen off as it kept making 999 pocket calls with the stupid emergency button that you can't turn off.

I downloaded a 3rd party lock screen without this button but unfortunately it's not as reliable.

I had been making trades and rather than shut down the market I just turned off the screen. The next time I looked there were a ridiculous number of matched and unmatched bets against this same market. My available balance was next to nothing.

I was actually in profit I think but panic kicked in so fast I was unable to see what I needed to do immediately and by the time I realised and managed to cancel/trade out of every bet I was around £20-£30 down.

I now make sure to always shut down the market and exit as far away from that point as possible before turning the screen off.

Dan MacKinnon

I’ll go

What happened?
I was using ratchet staking to grow my bank quickly. All fine when it was on the way up, but didn’t know when to pull the plug on the way down and ended up losing more than I started with.
Why did it happen?
A mix of overconfidence and naïveté. I understood in theory how it worked and that yes the downturn would be bad but the recovery would be quicker. I just didn’t consider the bank required to handle that sort of situation and when it had gone beyond the point of working it was too far gone so had to be scrapped.
What will you do differently next time?
I’m going to start withdrawing some of my bank during good months and top it back up during bad ones so there’s an equilibrium. I know that compounding works but maybe stick with % staking rather than ratchet.

Adam

I guess I should go first, and this will show that it's not necessarily all rosy when you use automation!

I restructured my trading software the other day to improve performance, basically splitting different tasks into separate threads.

Unfortunately, I managed to duplicate something, resulting in 2 copies of every GB and IRE horse racing win market thread being started. My bot spent the day fighting itself for trades, resulting in a loss just short of £100, with the added insult of another £40 in transaction fees the next day for hammering Betfair's API too hard!

This basically happened because the logging and alerts system in my app is rubbish, as I set the basic framework up about 14 years ago when I first started trading and was more interested in testing the million strategy ideas I had than anything else. It should really have been immediately obvious that something was wrong.

Time to go through and plug some gaps. It also reminded me that I need to go through all my old strategy ideas and see whether there's anything good in there. There's every chance some of them seemed like failures due to natural variance and may have panned out if I'd given them more of a chance, or had the capability to backtest them!

I might actually start another thread where I go through each strategy one by one and you can all critique them with me. Should be fun picking apart things I came up with when I barely even understood how betting odds worked