June review

I want to keep June's performance review as top line as possible, simply because my own results are not really representative of the service's themselves due to my missing a week of it when on holiday. To give just one example, my personal WRT figures are considerably worse than the "actual" figures the service attained as I know for a fact I missed a 14/1 winner.

So, please forgive me for my general vagueness, although I will give my actual total figures at the end.

Basically, the month has been a nightmare for my betting on horses (The Market Examiner aside, whose efforts are all the more admirable bearing in mind the shocking weather over the month that must have made life difficult for racing tipsters), but acceptably decent on football.

With the exception of The Market Examiner, it's been a month to forget on the nags. The roi figures for Northern Monkey, On The Nose and Winning Racing Tips were all very similar (in fact within 2% of each other), and were all very clearly in negative territory.

The football has been promising. My main aim of increasing turnover during the quiet months has been achieved, although the poor performance of the racing services has meant that a loss has been accrued despite this. However, the overall loss would have been much worse than the actual £244.72 that was accrued had I not diversified as I did. This in itself I think, is a triumph for the diversified portfolio approach to gambling.

None of the football services have had storming months, but together they negated 70% of the racing losses.

The actual figures for the month state that £9,694 was staked, and a loss of £244.72 suffered, an roi of -2.52%.

Half way through 2012 and it has to be said it has been a very tough year so far. This has been the first losing month, but January was a break even month and there has not yet been a month which has produced a profit of over £1,000, which is disappointing. After the cost of subscriptions has been deducted, the profit stands at a shade over £2k and at an roi of just 4.15%. Tough going.

These periods of slow growth have been endured previously though, and in the past have been followed by spurts of growth. The lessons from history that I have taken is that an roi of 4.15% can be seen as being decent once given the context provided by future performance. In other words, if the second half of 2012 brings in good profits, the relatively stale 4.15% growth over the first half of 2012 is considered as the portfolio doing it's job, ie. avoiding large scale losses when things aren't going well.

Of course, there are no guarantees of strong profits being made between now and the end of the year. That's why to my mind, serious gambling is so testing mentally - you just never know how things are going to progress.

As far as moving forward on the blog is concerned, I do need to make a slight alteration to the way I record the results. As I mentioned yesterday, I am beginning to use BetButler more. This has been forced on me by the continued closing of bookmaker accounts. The BOG accounts I have still available are those with BetInternet, BetFred (amazingly!), Paddy Power (restricted), Corbett Sports (restricted), and Hills. I've been completely closed by Boylesports (of course), Sportingbet (of course), Skybet (of course), Ladbrokes (shame), Bet365 (shame), Stan James (pfft!) and can only get minimal amounts on at Corals, Bodog, 888/Bluesq and Totesport. The trouble is, BetButler don't seem to necessarily update accounts on the day of placing the bet, especially those bets that run in the evening. I can't just report on what I think the returns might be because commission needs to be deducted and to be quite frank, I can't be bothered to work it out every night. So what I'm going to do is give a general run down on what happened during the day, and then give weekly figures.

The other thing to note is that I have joined (yet) another football service to provide that important turnover during the summer months. The problem is though, is that prices are sensitive, and the tipster involved doesn't actually want any extra publicity. The service is closed now anyway to new members, so in the circumstances I'm simply going to call it Service X. Please don't ask what it is, because I've given my word that it shall remain private. I don't wish to be all mysterious but I have to respect the wishes of the gentleman kind enough to let me have first option when a place opened up. The only reason I'm mentioning it at all is that obviously it is going to impact on my bottom line figures that I'll be reporting, one way or the other.

So, there we have it.

Best of luck for July, chaps!