From £1,000 to £10,000 Part 3 Carole

Hi guys, sorry this is a little late this month (just in case any of you were holding your breath!!) I did promise an update on my progress on the 9th of each month but I have had a terrible month this month and been somewhat distracted. Terrible from a personal point of view rather than a trading point of view but more of that in a moment.
If you haven't read Part 1 and Part 2 you might want to go back and read those so that this update makes sense.
So.... what has happened since 9th October how much closer to my goal of £10,000 I am - well my balance at 9th October was £890.74 and my balance at 9th November was...............tatata............£891.50!!!!!! Now to be fair I have hardly been trading this month at all as there has been a family crisis followed by me being very ill and not able to get out of bed for a week!
However there has been some trading and a couple of interesting things have come out of it - no further profit unfortunately though. So I want to tell you all about my record keeping (do I hear some yawning in the back!) and very important I think it is.
I have a fairly simple spreadsheet system where I log everything I do, how much my stake and porofit/loss is and my balance. I also have the date, time of the race, name of the horse and type of bet whether it is a LAY or a BACK to LAY.

The importance of keeping these records has really come home to me this month as I have gone through and studied where I am making profit and where I consistently make losses. Of course there has been a change from the flat season to the jump season and a change in the going - I always find trading dips around this time but taking that into the equation the following is what I have learnt from my stats.

1. The most common day for me to lose is Friday (I don' t know why I see no pattern or logic to this but I am way more careful on Fridays)
2. On back to lays my success rate for flats is 80% and for jumps 40% - giving a 60% overall - however now the flat season is over I have decided to do BTLs on the AW only (this works too) and not on the jumps
3. My success rate on lays is much better over jumps
4. Some of my biggest and most painful losses have come from lays - as anyone who lays will know its great when you get it right but expensive when it goes wreong. I can wipe out all my profit on one loss - even with 7/8 lays correct. This is really frustrating. I have decided only to do LAYS on jumps where I have much more success and only a few that I am confident of.
5. I still have the same painful habit of not stopping soon enough when I am up enough for the day - thinking of putting some sort of clever software into my pc to make it switch off when I have met my target but I know I'd find a way to get around it!! need to work on this one.
6. Key info from my stats was that I realised that I had stopped using the 1-4 stake system (see previous post 1 or google for explanation). Essentially I have been using level stakes instead. I have no idea how this happened as I know for a fact that when laying the 1-4 system works way, way better for me. So will be back using it again immedately.
7. Another major point was that when looking at the BTLs I had started to over analyse the race and take too much information into account. I was doing much better when just very simply picking out that front runner that trades shorter a high % of the time and checking the stats to make sure it trades low enough. So I need to go back to using pure stats only and ignore all else - it works much better for me.

So whilst all of this info is not worth anything to anyone except me it is essential for me to be able to measure what I am doing. I do hope that this will mean that the next month is again making profit - many more months and I will have to rename this the "From £1,000 to bust" blog!