Lughnasadh

Taking it easy as the month wound down, I took some time to play with the spreadsheet and take a look at my end of month performances relative to the rest of it. Since 1.Jan.2006, when I started keeping records, the breakdowns of my months in thirds are as shown. I've adjusted for Leap Days and the 31 day months, but it does rather look like I take my foot off the pedal in mid-month. Seriously, I can't say I see any significance in these numbers, but I was mildly relieved to see that the end of the month doesn't show a slow down. That would have been embarrassing.

Richard on Twitter @priceyohyeah claimed (all typos are his by the way) that it is: "better to lose 23% of your time and be a big winner than trade like a clown 100% of the time and lose" - clearly logic is not his strong suit. No one ever suggested that the last week of the month sees losses for Mark. All Mark said was that 'fear and greed' mean that he 'often' trades less optimally in that final week of each month than he does for the rest of the month, which, one assumes, means reduced profits in that final week rather than losses.

Why Richard thinks it is not better to lose 0% of the time and be a big winner, I have no idea. When asked about it, he responded with: "nobody trades optimally every day unless u r a robot, human lives effect everything. Nobody trades 24/7" English may not be Richard's first language, but I think he means that emotions affect your trading. My point all along is not that people don't have emotions, but that seasoned professionals learn to control those emotions when trading. They learn to control the emotions that come after a loss, or a win, and they don't allow their decisions to be influenced by meaningless short-term 'goals'. They trade, or should trade, in the same proven way consistently. Richard is correct that no one trades 24/7.

He also issued a challenge which was "maybe you would like to bet if your way is better than marks over a month? I would take marks side every time". I'm not sure how this challenge would be adjudicated, but with mark a professional and myself a gentleman amateur, any contest would hardly be fair. Besides, it's not a competition. It's merely a difference of opinion about whether recording a monthly profit at the cost of long-term gains is worth the cost of the lost profits.

And now for something completely different - Ian Erskine's latest newsletter contained this:

Welcome to Lay the Draw, 1st half markets.We have been trialling this officially since the beginning of May 2012. During the period between May 2012 up to and including July 201, the author has selected 144 bets. During the trial period the author selections turned a £1000 starting bank in to just over a £2000 closing bank, and this was achieved to £50 lay stakes - which for a laying service is impressive.

It was that last part that caused my left eyebrow to rise. Why should a laying service doubling its bank be any more impressive than a backing service achieving the same? You back or you lay when it is value to do so. I'm not sure I understand why some people seem to think that the principles of laying are any different to backing. Whatever next - a system that is claimed to be all the more impressive because you can follow it during the last week of the month? Value is value, whether it's on the back side or the lay side, and incidentally, the date is irrelevant.

My excitement at being able to normalise my forum chat name was premature. As fairfranco commented:

looks like your name will be changing back:

"As some customers will be aware, a technical fault has meant that some forum users have changed their chat names recently. We fixed the problem yesterday, and today we have undertaken work to change chat names back to what they were before the issue started.

We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused, and would ask any customers who believe their chat name has been incorrectly changed today to email forum@betfair.com"

And changed back it is. C'est la vie.

August is here today, and historically it's a strange month for me. Tenth overall, I've never had a losing August, but it's also the only month when I have never had a daily average in three figures. In part this is due to my often taking holiday or getting married during this month - not that I get married often, just the taking holiday part, but this year should see a full trading month. The NFL is back on Sunday night with the Hall of Fame game between New Orleans Saints and Arizona Cardinals, followed by four weeks of pre-season exhibition games where form can be ignored, and then the season starts for real in September.

The top European football leagues are also back, starting next Friday with the Ligue 1 game between defending champions Montpellier and Toulouse.

Today's top search term landing on Green All Over, (excluding 'green all over') -