Those digging around looking for the Holy Grail....

.... needn't put the spade away just yet!

It had to happen; tonight trading with real money would have been a nightmare situation. Here's the spreadsheet detailing today's trades:

That's 15 games for a £450 loss! Or £30 per game down, and it's all down to the numbers catching up with me. The main culprit was the friendly pre-season match between Hadjuk Split and Barcelona. One of the premises of this little exercise was that there was to be no pre-match research, so I don't know if Messi and co were playing or whether Pep fielded the under 10's. Whatever, I would think most traders would not have a problem with the concept of laying the draw involving these two teams. Which brings us to the major problem - not so much the fact that it finished 0-0 but rather taking the game on at odds of 5.8 and having no cover whatsoever other than tightly crossed fingers!

As the notes say two games over consecutive nights in the Republic of Ireland also finished 0-0. These were league games, not meaningless pre-season curtain raisers, and both featured strong favourites. In fact the 8 games 'traded' so far that finished 0-0 have cost an average of £213 each, working to lay stakes of £100. The effect these games have had on the whole exercise can be seen by looking at the summary below:

It is interesting to note how the average winnings have slid from a healthy £20 odd on day one (albeit with the losses understated by £100 on that day) to the rather uninspiring amount of £1.35 per game as of close of play tonight. When you put that in the context of the liabilities involved, and the time spent hunched over a PC the conclusion that you can't rely on blanket LTD alone as a money making trading strategy is crystal clear.

I can't say that I'm surprised, or indeed disappointed, that this has happened. I expected a glitch or two, but a night like this really explains why football trading needs generally to be considerably more than a mechanical exercise.

I do believe LTD can be a highly effective trading method, and from here on in I'm going to change tack in the days leading up to the major leagues starting up. Still paper trading, but with a couple of tweaks.

Firstly - research. It won't and can't be too detailed as most of these games have no precedence to get a track record from, but I will at least have a look at scoring trends of both teams - after all the key to the trade is a goal or two!

Secondly, and this is difficult, I'm going to try to assess how easy it is to get some free 0-0 cover pre-match. This is difficult to paper trade as I know from past experience that getting matched on some of the smaller games pre kick off can be extremely difficult - and you need to get matched on both sides of the market obviously - you don't really want to be taking a £100 0-0 back in play as we all know an early goal is all but guaranteed if you do!

Thirdly I'm going to take some trades in-play. Maybe these will involve the unders / overs markets, the CS market or something more off beat - we'll see.

Lastly I'm going to experiment with how best to react to goals...especially if the underdog scores first. If the favourite scores and leaves a nice potential green is there any mileage in simply taking all or most of your liability on the draw out of the market leaving larger potential wins if the game is not drawn, with a small loss, profit or scratch on the draw?

One thing I'm definitely going to do for real from hereon is to place a little trade at just over evens on the draw and green up three minutes or so later at 1.8 ish. A quarter of these paper trades have required a lay at either 1.8 or 2 - and I honestly can't think of one in which a goal was scored between those odds!