8th January

And an early finish today - dont fancy trading on netball! and my wife might start questioning my motives of watching tall athletic ladies in short skirts.

Did I learn much today - I better had - I made some errors that I shouldnt have but it's all good provided I learn from them.

Women's Tennis - doing my head in again today - after watching a match for a long time and predicting the way the market was going to go in my head - bout 40 times in a row I predicted wrongly so I had to put it to the test and subsequently got it wrong for a loss of £6.50. I then proceeded to watch the young Japanese tennis player who looked good yesterday, he was against Mathieu who is a solid tennis player but i think vulnerable to other solid games. Short of it I got it wrong again and the market went against me and I lost again but this time £34.

Watching tennis on the internet is a bit of a daft thing to do if the screen is always buffering or stuttering and after this mornings losses I decided to remove and reinstall flash player - it works a lot better than it did this morning and so did my fortune.

Roddick - number 4 seed, former no.1 in the world with one of the best serves in the game was playing a chap who again I did not know but a bit of research showed he was mainly a clay court player had a losing streak against Roddick and is about 50 or more places lower in the rankings than Roddick - so answer me this then why the f...k was a 2 sets to nil result trading at 1.72 pre-match - I dont know but I do know what to do when it is - I backed once and then returned a few minutes later to find odds of 1.77! - So I backed again.

Roddick won the first game of the first set and his odds went to 1.66ish and an immediate profit of around £16 - not for me though, I wait and see - his opponent holds and Roddick starts his next game and is love - 30 down - I trade a little out at 1.67, Roddick gets to 15-40 his odds drift out, he does his big serving and it's Deuce and hte price is at 1.82 - I have a little of that - not too much as I got over double of what I usually have exposed and £50 went in. Roddick breaks the other guy who looks well out of place against Roddick and Roddick's odds plummet and at 1.27 I traded out for a nice chunk of cash, I dabbled again at 1.08 and traded back out at 1.06 when Roddick broke in the second set and I traded out for over £62 to make up for the morning.

Nadal and Monfis played their match in a difficult game to tell who was going to win I only had one bet and I traded out at the same price and just watched Monfis do what he is capable of doing, if he puts his mind to it.

Wasnt really watching the Federer and Kohlschreiber match but when I did look up and load up the trading software, Federer had just broken for a 4-2 lead in the match and I looked at the +4.5 handicap and did the maths and promptly 1.26 and 1.27 odds that were being offered and traded out for £34 profit when the others did the numbers. I mentioned installing the latest flash software on to my machine and the lack of problems on the stream - the stream was about 2 seconds ahead of Eurosport and once Federer hit the winner at the end of the match for a +5 games win on a 4.5+ handicap, I hit the back £500 at 1.01 odds - to my surprise the trade went through before the other trader who presumably was watching on Eurosport and not only that but it went through at somewhere between 1.01 and 1.02 for an extra £8 profit.

Finally the Murray match and a man o watch out for is his opponent - I had thought that Murray would want to go through in straight sets as he has got Federer tomorrow and needs all his energy for that match - so I got a trade in at 1.18 and from the first thump of his serve, I knew my bet was in trouble - his name is Stakhovsky he comes from the Ukraine, he is young and he has been tearing the challenger tour up (apparently) and boy did he give Murray a run for his money - I was glad to just have been down about 64 pence with him. Having won 6-4 in the first set then I thought the over 17.5 market was trading at the wrong levels - but after the umpire gave Murray a bit of a talking to after Murray received some comments from his coach, and the new young upstart Stakhovsky had done to Murray what Murray does best in the world i.e. playing really disguised drop shots and got Murray a bit cross with the young upstart - Murray did his best to scupper all plans of me winning my over 17.5 games bet. by winning the first five games in the second set meaning that if he holds his serve or if he gets broken and then goes on to break the new chap then he would got me scuppered - I did my best to find a lay bet but the market didnt have any liquidity and I had to settle for a loss of £64 quid...

Leaving the results for the day at.... Minus 21 pence.

Here's the pictures: