so as you set out on your bet Fair trading Journey you probably have all sorts of goals that you want to achieve and things that you would like to view as a success but how do you get there and what are the key things that you need to understand in order to set you off on the right path now I've been trading for a very long period of time and there are certain things that I would say to myself if I had to go back to where I started to give myself the best possible start
and if you want to find out what those are then just watch the rest of this video so two key fundamentals to start you off with the first one is the big secret is that there is no big secret if you are prepared to work hard you approach it in the right Manner and you do roughly the right things you're going to be just fine um and I'll come on to explain that in a second the other thing as well is that you don't have to have any particular knowledge or qualifications to get to that
first base and Beyond because when I started doing this um I didn't have anything that would particularly suit me to this um lots of people were very skeptical uh nobody really truly understood what I was trying to do and you know everybody would give you a whole list of reasons as to why it wasn't possible or why you couldn't particularly do it I've sort of got used to that throughout my life everybody's saying that's not possible you can't do that that's impossible this isn't the way you need to get this to get there and stuff
like that and I'm afraid it was all just absolute rubbish it was the worst advice that I've ever received and you wouldn't um underestimate uh if you've got the energy enthusiasm and passion to do something that you could actually achieve it you know sure it's not going to be easy and there is no particular shortcut uh and this is why I said that you know the big secret is there is no big secret because too many people are looking for shortcuts or some way to accelerate their progress when you go to university you try and
train to get a particular skill so that you can get a particular job uh but when people attempt to make money such as trading or betting or any other way like that they seem to try and do it the other way around they just expect to make money immediately without putting the effort in and unfortunately you cannot do that so yeah uh my first advice to you is that particular starting point I didn't have any particular reason why I should have succeeded but I did so never forget that when you're bet Fair trading all that
you're trying to do is to get two bets matched the way I often summarize this is when I first discovered bet Fair trading what I was trying to do is actually car so I was trying to lay a lower price that I could back out with a bookmaker and then one morning I woke up put both those bets on the exchange and they matched and it was like oh wow I've got like an unlimited you know Market a market worth tens of billions a year in which I can do this but my core focus in
has always been on just getting those two bets matched now when you look at football tennis horse racing pre off and in play there are different ways of doing that and the videos that I produce are giving you hints and tips as to where to look in the market in order to to anticipate that one of the bets will get matched before the other or how those bets get matched if you focus on that you'll be absolutely fine and people sort of get distracted they look at historical data they look for some incredible system that
will allow them to accurately predict that but there are so many different ways of doing this some of them involve just putting two bets in the market and leaving it uh you know it gets no more complicated than that so if you keep your focus on that goal and understand that that is your key fundamental goal that the most important thing that you can do for want of a better word the way that I suggest that you learn the best way of doing that is just to about a bit I know that sounds a really
weird thing to say but that's how I learn I would go into the market I would say well what happens if I put two here or what happens if I open here and close here what happens if I do this what happens if I do that and every single strategy that I've ever developed is based around that what happens if I do that sort of moment but yeah you know you could it's easy to get distracted and look at stuff that is irrelevant such as if you look at historical data doesn't predict the future it
just tells you what happened in the past just focus on getting those two bets matched and you'll be able to make rapid progress so one common mistake that I see people making when they're trying to learn to trade is they just try a whole mixture of different strategies they sort of ask loads of questions about one particular strategy and then next week they're asking loads of questions about another strategy I'm thinking hold on you've just spent one week on that strategy it's like what if you pick up a set of golf clubs you can't go
down down the driving range for a little bit um and then suddenly start playing in the PGA Tour you know some of these guys spent years practicing their art and when you're actively trading or trying to develop a strategy giving it only a short amount of time is pointless you won't achieve anything you won't see anything you won't learn anything it's really important to understand that you've got to focus on one particular thing really feel like you've mastered that at least you understand it even if you're not particularly making money at least you completely understand
it because that will give you the base on which to build to a higher level if you keep skipping from one thing to another you will learn absolutely nothing so it's really important to sort of focus on one thing sort of think right this is the sport that I'm going to do this is what I'm going to do within this sport this is what I'm going to be looking for these are the sort of strategies that I'm going to use and then you relentlessly focus on that because when you've mastered that you can move on
to other strategies after many years in the market I don't need to do that I can turn up to Market I know roughly what that market is likely to do and then I will fit a strategy into that market Market that I have traded hundreds of thousands of times and but that's just a skill that's been built on those foundations just one step at a time and that's why I suggest you focus on one thing and doing it particularly well so if there's one thing I wish people had told me when I first started trading
if you go all the way back to trading on financials was that trading is about taking risk not avoiding it too many people make the mistake of being overprotective of their position or overprotective of their bank and therefore they just focus on trying to minimize losses but that's only one side of the equation you need to be able to make the money in order to be able to soak up any losses that you make at a core level trading is a process of anticipation you're looking at something that could happen you're positioning yourself ahead of
that in order to profit when it does happen but you have to accept that sometimes that doesn't work out and even if you get a really good setup sometimes even that doesn't work out but you're just trying to win slightly more than you lose you're doing that through a process of anticipation and a process of taking risk not avoiding it so another thing that I think is really important that I wish people would have told me is about psychology not just the psychology of trading but the psychology of yourself um of the market of the
field of play when we're talking about sports it's much more important than I could have ever possibly imagined and I'd say that this was my breakthrough moment with trading is I'd had a purely stats based approach to what I was doing up until I discovered in detail all of the psychology of trading and that got me to a certain point but in order to get the much higher point that I got to it was the psychology that taught me how to think um and how to appraise what I was looking at within the market because
when you're looking at a market what you're trying to do is you're trying to think about what people are thinking about it's a really important thing to do and I have actually done a great video on this um where I've uh discussed this with my daughter and we've done a couple of little things um so yeah watch that video if you want want to get a true understanding of that once you begin to understand the psychology not only of yourself but of the market and the field of play it really transforms the way that you
think about what you're attempting to do because I could sit down with somebody teach them exactly what they should be doing when they're actively trading and they will not be able to do it and that is because they're just in a different place and I was in a different place all those years ago and I had to unlearn all of my bad habits and get myself into the situation where I had loads of good habits and began to understand exactly what was going on and internally but also within the market so yeah never underestimate um
how psychology can play an influence in everything that you do when you set a Target when you're trading don't set it over the short term because that will influence how you approach achieving that particular Target so say you'd like to make a £100,000 or something like that what you don't do is reach for that Target you don't um look at it and sort of think what do I need to do I need you know a th000 here 5,000 there what you should do is say this is my target I'm going to achieve it over a
th000 markets 2,000 markets whatever you want and then you will actually end up with a much more achievable Target I have done some videos specifically on this but my general sort of thrust here is that little and often soon adds up so my objective isn't to be some incredible genius that just gets absolutely everything right or uses massive Stakes or does anything wild like that all that I'm trying to do every single time is just sort of nudge myself ahead uh at a reasonable risk and when you multiply that over thousands of markets that soon
adds up to a really big total so that is the way that I measure myself I don't look at what I'm trying to achieve on the next event or the next trade on the next day I take a much longer term perspective and that means that those individual targets are much more easier to achieve because any small amount multiplied by any big amount is going to be a big number and as I've often said little and often soon adds up whether you're betting or trading one of the things to realize is that over the long
term the market tends to be fairly efficient now that efficiency comes from you get really good guesses and really bad guesses and the two sort of net each other out but the wonderful thing about the way that the market works is that even if you bring no skill to it as long as your staking uh is correct and you've got control over your risk management uh then you will be break even technically you'll be break even minus a bit of commission but all that your objective is is to just nudge yourself slightly ahead of that
and I know that sort of sounds odd and unusual but that could be through making slightly better decisions whether it's the trading strategy you're deploying the market you're deploying it in or just actually doing it just a little bit better being faster more efficient using better tools all of those sort of things because if you participate in the market random you get random results but those random results are actually break even minus a little bit of commission so if you're looking to get profitable that's the only barrier that you need to overcome so what I
tried to do with this video is not do any sort of preparation whatsoever I just thought what would I say to myself if I had to start all over again what would be the key things that I felt were important that I've learned on my journey over the last 20 25 years and what I did was just did did it off the cuff basically thought you know what are the most key and important things that I would say to somebody if they were sat opposite me and each of these things I have actually covered in
other videos so you will often find them resonating through individual videos that I do uh but these are the sort of things that I think would be most key and important to me if I was starting out now things you know a base a foundation to build upon uh and a philosophy that I could sort of take forward uh in everything that I attempted to do so anyhow I hope that that video has been useful for you e
