Adam's Comments on 2005 Trading Results
2005 was a strange year all round for me. I gave up drinking completely after deciding that I couldn't take it anymore, the girl that I later went on to marry moved into my apartment as my flatmate which distracted the hell out of me, and I was trying to develop a live updating trading application with a programmer that soon got bored with the job and left me with a half finished, buggy piece of shit software application. A lot of time had to be spent using and testing the application on busy horseracing markets which meant that I couldn't concentrate on trading anymore, and you can see the effect it all had on my results. I was still making a living but that's about all it was now, and after 3 years of doing the same thing I was getting a bit jaded by it.
The first version of BetTrader was a complete joke compared to what it is now, it was extremely basic, built in Flash for some stupid reason, and only worked as long as you didn't let a race get suspended before moving on to the next race. If you let the race start before closing the market and going to the next one you would have to close down the app and relogin. But it submitted bets with one click on the ladder and displayed prices being updated once a second so it was better than using the Betfair website.
I was really having trouble getting anyone to use the app because it was so buggy and you had to know exactly how to use it. It was like an old car that you had to know to lift the handle in a certain way to get in it and then jiggle the key in a certain way to start it and you had to know how to use the gears to stop it stalling. As long as you knew all those things it worked perfectly! What got the ball moving with it was when I made a couple of demo videos where I used it to trade every race one after the other for 3 hours on two consecutive days with no editing. I think the videos were made on August 5th and August 6th. I used to get very vocal when trading if I lost so much as a fiver so a lot of people found them amusing but their main worth was showing people that you could use the application to trade every race without it crashing on you. After I released those videos then people started to try it out.
After that it started to get pretty popular and now I wasn't totally dependent on trading for a living. And being able to show that there was a market for a trading application with the ladder interface helped me to convince some friends and my brother that they should give me some money so I could start again with another programmer, and do a proper job of building a live updating trading application with loads more features which actually worked! In December 2005 we started development of the current application in .NET framework written in C sharp with 2 extremely talented programmers and ever since then I've been doing that full time with them. I found that it was impossible to trade effectively whilst also testing and developing software on the same markets, it just doesn't work, so rather than do both badly I was glad to take a break from trading.
Trading Results
Adam made over £100,000 profit on Betfair from a starting bank of £200.
Check out his complete trading results below:
Daily Trading Results 2003
Daily Trading Results 2004
Daily Trading Results 2005
Overview