Saturday, February 11, 2012

The clock starts now!

A small profit over the last couple of days has helped move the account in the right direction but still no real progress on the year but with the weather improving I'm hoping things will continue to pick up.

Have made some changes that look to the future and will help me make the right decisions over the next few weeks.....

I've said repeatedly that I needed to minimise my subscription fees and aim to reduce the number of services I follow so... I've signed up to two more services.... on top of the formlab trial I've taken.

WTF you are probably saying... well there's method in my madness....

The two new services are Hudson Horses and Herbie Fogg. Both who charge very very reasonably subs (especially with the SBC discounts).

So why add more services you may ask... Well the aim is to effectively live trial these services against the services I have running at the moment over the next few weeks and pick the best at the end of the trial taking into consideration subs, performance (both over the long term through my results and for the new services from SBC proofing and short term in how they perform over the next few weeks), and service such as message delivery etc....

Why not just looking at proofing? Well the reality is that proofing is a good indicator of how a service is performing but the proof is in the pudding s when you are at the coal face yourself putting bets on, struggling with prices / fighting restrictions / doing your own job / timing etc etc.

Remove sentimentality... functionality, performance and price are the only things that matter!

So I now have 12 active services (which is completely ridiculous) but want to whittle this down to 6 by the end of March / April and what happens between now and then will finalise my decision.

The clock is ticking....

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

I admire your approach. I hope your decision isn't too difficult come March/April. It's probably time to ditch Equine and SLH: both are expensive, out-of-form and both have past their respective primes.

elist said...

I work and with Hudson and with Herbie.Good choice!I like them,especially Hudson.

Anonymous said...

Why are you following so many services?ive also been with most of them albeit trialling,you are with mark littlewood the best there is no doubt about it,so up your stakes keep maybe 3 services save yourself a headache getting on and enjoy punting,after all you have no loyalty to any of them I have yet to receive money back from an underperformance tipster.
I mean slh is kidding us on with his selections I am still a member and thank god I haven't bet 1 of his donkeys since November a mean that horse at muss y/day omg need I say more.
Ps .coral bookmakers are an absolute joke 6 month off restricted bets then due to commercial reasons your acc is closed! Where is the winning & losing come into it ?greedy boystards.
Great blog
Baz

Anonymous said...

agree wit the last poster you have no loyalty to any service they dont have any to you they lose and keep your money..

Anonymous said...

you dont seem to have considered that it is not impossible that all 12 of your 'services' underperform during this period which could leave you skint. If you need to follow someone limit it to 2 or 3.

mrh-beats said...

Hi anon - thanks for your comment. Agree with you re SLH and Equine - times they are a changing!

Hi elist - thanks v much - good to hear from you.

Hi Baz - totally agree that I have too many - that's why I aim to cut to a max of 6. Will come back to you on the loyalty point once I've had a think - there's a post in me somewhere about that. I've been ok on Coral so far but having said that all bookies are the same - they absolute do not want winning punters.

Anon 2 - thanks - will come back to you on that.

mrh-beats said...

anon 3 - well if that happens I'll be packing my bags and looking for a different path. Take your point though - I'm on small stakes and have a bank to cover it so should be ok.

Bruce Herbert said...

MRH, when does your current subscription to the SLH Private Service finish? I would suggest ditching it at the end of March. You must know by now that Steve is not good during the summer (1st April - 31st September) as he does not understand flat racing as well as some other tipsters. Even this National Hunt campaign is going badly, but I hope he comes good for the Cheltenham Festival in mid-March. I am terminating my subscription on the 31st March at the end of the current National Hunt season and then waiting until the 1st October for the new National Hunt season to start before trying again.

TERRY BRENNAN said...

Amazed that people are willing to pay exorbitant fees to tipsters when there are many online free services performing as well if not better than some of these high profile names.I have done the rounds of them and like yourself have found very few if any have performed to my expectations.I now follow Patient Speculation who provides a maximum of one selection per day (somedays none)all selections to be backed to a half pt e.w. and is showing a profit since October 1st of just over 10pts with only one month showing a slight loss todays selection third at 15/2 because of the high win and place strike rate their is very little downside to these bets and I bet them with maximum confidence.
I also follow Jerrys best bets which have been doing really well since he concentrated on claiming races soley.
Another recent addition to my portfolio has been Braidleys bets not many bets but showing a nice profit.
I also subscribe to The Betfair Guru service who for a tenner a month provides a daily e-mail full of information and selections for trading Tennis, Horses and Football so for an outlay of a tenner a month I have four profitable services and no worry of covering expensive subs. I believe it is the way to go.

mrh-beats said...

Bruce - thanks for your comment. In answer to your question - 31st March. Definitely a very important 6 weeks for my subs to Steve between now and then. Steve's flat tips aren't the greatest I'd agree however over the last two summers profit has been made so I don't think it's as straightforward as cutting subs for the summer months. Will dig into my stats and see what comes out. Thanks for your thoughts.

Terry - thanks for your comment. You make a very interesting point and thanks for the info on who you've been following. I do think you're right on fees and some services do justify the cost - Systematic Betting being a prime example. However you need to back up that cost with consistent year on year profit and as a punter high stakes are a must. I've made a mistake with following too expensive services with too low stakes and that's something I'm trying to address in the next 6 weeks.

Generally their appears to be very little correlation between cost and performance from what I can see.

Anonymous said...

I’d echo the other comments regarding the excessive number of services followed while noting that you intend to prune some. I had as many as 10 services briefly and found it simply unmanageable.. I had intended to cut to 4 and replace with my own bets. I haven’t quite managed that but I am not far off. I currently have and will probably keep:

Systematic
Piecost
Market Examiner
Northern Monkey
Narrowing the Field

Systematic and Piecost throw out the equivalent of 3 times a “normal” tipsters bets so there is a significant workload in that. The other services are a lot less labour intensive but fill a niche. I’m also using a number of horses to follows list (One Jump Ahead / Martin Julien) which is doing nothing spectacular but for less than €25 I won’t complain. To be honest I don’t know how you have the time (or accounts) to follow all these.

I’ve subscribed to Formlab Black for around 8 months and its improved quite a bit in that time in terms of customer service and improvements to the engine. Be aware that some bets tend to do a lot better than others – the under 2.5s do not do well for some reason whereas the overs (2.5 & 3.5) do much better. The under 1.5 goals do well too. Result and half time full time betting are only so so too. I would go back over the profit and loss records when you get a chance. Not sure does the Lite version have full functionality but theres a nice niche for corner supremacy betting too when you go into the meat of the queries. Note also that the recommended bets are simply Formlab’s opinions of the best of the matches from the notes. Read the notes also.

Good luck. Probably have some tricky choices to make.