October in Perspective

It seems that when writing a weekend, weekly or monthly review that I often use the phrase "good in parts", with my first reference to the curate's egg all the way back in January 2010, and it's hardly surprising.

For those of us who have a number of systems or strategies, it's to be expected that over any given short-term period, some will be up and some will be down. If each individual system has a positive EV, the overall trend will be positive, but the more systems you have, the rarer it becomes for a month where everything was up, or down for that matter. 

While the big picture financially last month was positive, a welcome change to how much of the year has been going, the sports investing division of Cassini Holdings wasn't the cash cow I was hoping for, with an 'official' loss of 10.77 units, a negative ROI of -3.8%.

The EPL Draws extended their losing run to seven, with the one selection this weekend (Brighton and Hove Albion v Chelsea) failing. Longer losing runs when you're backing the draw are to be expected though, and hopefully the record of 15 will not be broken this season. 

The two seasons that started last month (NBA and NHL) haven't started off well, and while it's always a concern that something has changed in the close season, I've not seen anything along the lines of last year when NBA rule changes directly impacted the number of points being scored.

Hopefully with a few more matches in the ledger this month, things will have settled down. Handling losing runs never ceases to be difficult, but looking back at past results is always helpful, and implementing a stop-loss after a drawdown is one strategy where you reduce or even stop betting and just monitor results until your confidence returns. 

Overall though, October was a good month, the second best of the year after March, but still down almost 13% from my high, and 9.2% down year-to-date. The major indexes all had good months with the FTSE100 up 2.9% but the S&P 500 was up 8% and the narrower DJIA almost 14%. It also helped that my company's share price hit a new all-time high on Halloween, with those stock options nicely in the money.

It was also a good month for exercise and weight. I covered 226.5 miles on foot, slightly fewer than September, but well on track to average 5 miles a day for the year, and despite my wife going off on holiday, I was more self-disciplined than I thought and only consumed alcohol on three days resulting in a losing month on the scales. 

The worst part of the month by a long distance was losing one of my dogs, which put into perspective a few losing bets. She was 12, had congestive heart failure and was starting to suffer, so we had to make the tough decision to put her to sleep, and it was a lot tougher process to go through than I thought.

An animal rescue charity in the US runs a 'poorly drawn pets' fundraiser where you send in a photo of your pet with a donation, and in return get a drawing. I was rather pleased with mine:

If you're not a dog or pet owner, you won't understand how upsetting the loss of one can be, but I have two more with me who are probably wondering what the heck is going on after my wife has also disappeared from their lives, although she should be back this weekend.

Life goes on, and here's to a winning November, with a major football tournament to turn our attention to.