So who am I and what am I all about?
Well quite simply I'm just a normal guy, very much like you who once worked a normal job and ended up through sheer coincidence doing something that I really enjoy for a living each day!
I first began 'trading' in 2007 although my approach back then was very much different than it is now as when I began I really had no idea that this entire area of the betting industry even existed. I was simply trying to put some thoughts I'd cobbled together on arbitrage into practise and pinch a few ticks off of the morning horse prices each day.
I was heavily under the impression that what I was trying to do was a new idea that very few people had even thought about before, never mind put into practise - I was very green at this time! - and so, feeling rather self-satisfied I kept at this approach on the side whilst working my regular job on a chemical site.
As the economic landscape began to change during the latter part of 2007, it became clear on site that there would be redundancies and as we were officially only contracted labour it was likely we would be the first ones to go. No matter I had been on the site for 4 years and worked directly for client, when it comes to cutting numbers we were contractors and that was that.
It was with this upheaval in the background that I became interested in trading, even if as we've discussed, my initial ideas were a little primitive.
With the usual worry about bills and kids foremost in my mind, I decided that I really needed to take a look around and try to learn more about what I was doing to try and turn this into something I could seriously look at doing in the future and earning some proper money from it.
Through my research I began to learn more about trading and on first discovering the Geeks Toy forum I realised that there actually many people already doing exactly what it was I was planning to do and I wasn't the first to think of it!
After months of practise and a healthy pay-off once the inevitable happened I found myself in a situation where I could tick over from month to month on a very basic level but still wasn't making the riches that everybody dreams about when they start off in betting and so i set to work expanding my armoury into Football trading as before I'd just been playing the Horses and Greyhounds markets.
I'll be honest, I was not a fan as it all just seemed too chaotic and I never really felt in control of my position during a match and it wasn't until quite recently that I became truly comfortable trading a football match. I also had a problem in that the season was shortly due to break for the Summer and that would leave me with only Horses and Greyhounds again to fall back on.
And don't get me wrong, I was doing ok out of them with a good deal of pre-race trading and a bot running on the dogs which was picking up some decent money for the effort I was putting in. What was lacking was that real big earner that I know now is so important to my own business and style and in searching for other sports to trade during the quiet summer months on football I stumbled on what became my breakthrough, a sport which allowed me to truly live the life I wanted to live - Tennis.
Tennis is not for everybody and a lot of people will have lost a lot of money from following bad advice and strategies but believe me when I say, if you have a good strategy you can make a hell of a lot of money from it once you know what you're doing!
In the months that followed, my trading returns picked up considerably and in mid 2010 I published a series of beginners guides for a variety of sports and sold them on Ebay. These sites contained some strategies that worked and more importantly pointed out those that didn't along with ideas on general trading and highlighting of all the mistakes I made early on in my trading career.
Despite not expecting too much from the guides when I listed them, they sold like mad and far and wide! After a couple of months I received a message from a buyer from Russia asking me if I'd considered setting up a service which supplied suitable selections with which to trade using my strategies. She felt she would benefit greatly from something like this and couldn't see it being done anywhere else.
I doubted whether this was something that people would be interested in to be perfectly honest but saw little harm in testing the water so I began looking into what other people were offering... they weren't! If I was going to do this, I would have to pioneer it and when I realised this I was committed to it for the long haul. I was putting my selections into spreadsheets each day anyway so it was really no extra work for me to send them out to subscribers when they were complete.
I began offering free trial subscriptions to customers who'd purchased guides from me on Ebay and following a lot of interest and a surge in membership early on, I realised this was something I could make work long-term and over the next few years up to present day, I've built a substantial offering on my website catering to all levels of sports trader in a variety of niches.
It's been a long road but with the focus on improvement every step of the way, I'm happy where we ended up and look forward to what the future brings.
NOTE
In 2014 I was forced to take a short break from service to care for my father and unfortunately during that time there appear to be a couple of "Betfair Guru's" sprung out of the water offering much the same things and even in one case advertising my actual products for sale.
Be advised there's only one original and that'll be me!
