Quick catch up....

As I expected would happen, as soon as I switched my attention to helping out a number of subscribers with advice and Excel help for the upcoming season, the blog goes a little bit quieter than earlier this Summer.

I think I’ve now caught up with all the emails over the past week. It’s been a very busy week and I’ve been working on TFA stuff every night this week for a few hours.  If I’m being honest, I’ve really enjoyed it and after spending so long this Summer looking backwards and analysing systems and building ratings, it’s great to be able to get back to looking forward and discussing portfolios of systems to follow, staking plans, ways to play the bets and so on. Much more refreshing and I’ve said to a few others, it’s really whet my appetite for the upcoming season now. I can’t wait for it to get started.

I expect I’ll have another batch of subscribers to help in the upcoming week, so I don’t foresee too many deep insightful posts on the blog but I’ll to do the odd post to keep the blog ticking over until the bets start.

A few people have asked if I’m keeping this blog for next season and the answer to that is yes. I did think of migrating to the new website but I like the fact that this blog has been here since the inception of the systems and I’d like to see it through to the end of the project. This is the 3rd and final season in terms of the project from when I started out and I’ll reassess the purpose and use of the blog after the upcoming season.

The blog will track the results of all the systems and although I may not manage daily results posts like the previous two seasons, I’d hope for weekly updates as a minimum.  In between the results updates, we’ll have the usual thoughts and opinions on how things are going and with so many systems on the go, I’ll hopefully have plenty to talk about next season.

In terms of helping out subscribers with their portfolios for next season, it’s gone well so far.  Everyone who has been in contact so far has come to me with different ideas about the systems to play or different staking plans and it’s nice for me personally to see so many different methods being used. I guess I always hoped that one day, people would just be taking my systems and doing their own thing with them and I suspect this will happen this season, even more so than last season.

Of course, there are many systems being used by most people and therefore, I’m kidding myself if I think that the results of everyone are going to be totally independent. There is going to be massive correlation between everyone’s results but this is the way it should be. If I was giving out bets on so many systems that weren’t correlated in some way, you could have the situation where someone following could make a large profit and someone else could make a large loss and IMO, this isn’t the way the service should work. If the combined systems don’t perform well next season, (UK or Euro), I can guarantee that most of us following will struggle and therefore, these systems are the ones that should be tracked to monitor the performance of the systems.

One thing that has arisen in a few emails this week has been around target Return on Capital figures. Thankfully, I’ve not had any discussions around ROI targets and most people are concentrating on ROC I think which is the right thing to do. As I’ve said before, I’m happy with a 5% ROI each season as long as I double my betting bank whereas others may see a 15% ROI and 50% growth in their betting bank as acceptable.  It’s horses for courses at this game and for me personally, I’m not fussed about ROI and what it looks like. If I can achieve a level of ROC that covers my time and makes me some profit, then I’m a happy chappy.


One common theme has been the desire to aim for 100% bank growth and I suspect that's the high level aim of everyone following next season.  I've achieved this for the past two seasons, most subscribers achieved this last season and therefore, although it's a very ambitious target to aim for, it isn't impossible that some may achieve this if things go well again next season. 

Although I’m not going to share any portfolios that people have derived themselves or with my help, here are a few graphs showing the historical P&L of the portfolios.  This is from 4 portfolios I’ve seen this week, either through from people asking me to run a portfolio for them based on their ideas and staking plans or from me pulling together a portfolio for them, based on their requirements.

Example 1

Example 2

Example 3

Example 4

I think the historical P&L graphs and the P&L summaries give a good indication of the targets that some people are aiming for this season.Of course, past results can never guarantee future success as everyone knows but at this game, historical results are all we have to go on and so far, most of my systems have stood the test of time as they’ve gone from backtesting to a live environment.

I’ve proofed over 8,000 bets now over 2 seasons but next season, I’ll be proofing another 12,000 system bets across 10 different leagues, so I think this is the most important season by far.  I don’t want to say the first two seasons are irrelevant as that’s slightly unfair on myself and on the systems but basically, this 3^rd season is going to be much, much more important than any of the other two seasons thus far.

Really looking forward to it now and looking at the sample portfolios above, it’s hard to not get excited that the first bets are only 5 weeks away now.

Bring it on……