The trouble with P&L blogging...

...is that sometimes it doesn't tell the whole story.

Eddie (aka Soccerdude) wrote an interesting piece outlining the pro's and con's of blogs that consist of, or at least feature, the blogger's P&L. I know some people find these blogs incredibly boring, others find them fascinating. I fall into the camp of 'don't mind' on this subject - as long as the blog is interesting I'll happily read it, P&L or no.

The title of my piece is not referring to those bloggers who might suffer from what might euphemistically be termed 'memory lapses' (ie. they blog the 'P' but not the 'L' :-)) although I'm sure they exist.

I refer instead to the fact that a P&L doesn't always tell the whole story. By way of illustration here's my P&L from midnight last night:

Not tremendously impressive, is it? However the small profit shown masks a number of decisions that were made, and, without exception, were the wrong ones to have been made. Ignore the first one - that was a speculative lay made in the last minute or two to catch a late goal - they sometimes work and pay well - in this case it didn't. Move on.

The Fortaleza game, a Brazillian cup match, had the home team as heavy odds on favourites. I looked to get involved at half time with the match goalless, but the odds weren't good, and knowing nothing about either team I decided to leave it alone. On glancing at the match again at 60 minutes I was somewhat surprised to see that it was still 0-0. So I laid Under 2.5 goals at 1.2 for £100. Two quick goals at 66 and 70 minutes would have returned over £50 but, me being me, I held on, greening up for the £27 shown a couple of micro seconds before the third goal at 88 minutes. Doh!

I had a game plan for the Copa game between The Strongest (gotta love that name!) and Internacioanal. Along the lines of my previous post I'd managed to nick a green of £120 on 0-0 scalping one tick at time pre match, and set up a standard SG trade at the same time. A little trade I sometimes execute when I've got a risk free green on 0-0 is to lay U2.5 goals for the profit I've got on 0-0. When this trade comes off it really is a good payer! So, in this match at half time, with the score still 0-0 I had a hedged figure of £26 on the 0-0. Laying 2.5 at 1.26 for £100 would leave me with an overall loss of about £7 on the match as a whole if it had finished 0-0. The first goal went in during the first minute of the second half, whilst my hedge bet on the 0-0 was still waiting to be matched. Convinced there'd be more goals I let the 2.5 trade run. There was one more goal, an equaliser, in the 88th minute - landing the SG side of the trade - but too late to do anything serious about the 2.5.

So, there we have it. A profit of £12 on a total maximum liability of just over £70 (ignoring the pre match scalping stakes). This represents a return of 16% on stakes - a figure I think is perfectly acceptable. With better timing and decision making though, the profit would have been enhanced by over £120 to give a percentage profit on stakes of getting on for 100%.

Perhaps I shouldn't trade when tired?