Everyone Has Enough Time For Football Trading Success

I am a family man, have two kids and am married. My son is very active in sports, plays club cricket and football and when I first started trading I ran a sports travel business with two others so time was very limited indeed.

What helped me was to find a way of reducing the workload. I created my shortlist; which is now available in the Goal Profits Members Area under 'Tim’s Shortlists'. It allowed me to immediately save time and whittle down a very long list of fixtures to a handful very quickly. I only concentrated on certain leagues and a handful of strategies. I only traded correct score strategies when I knew I had the time to be able to concentrate fully and wouldn’t be distracted.

I did a lot of my research late at night when the kids and my wife had gone to bed (she loves her sleep!) so I knew a day in advance exactly what games would be of interest to me the following day. This would very rarely take much longer than an hour a night. If I knew I would not be able to trade the games the following day then I would still keep a record of them so I could look back and evaluate how my filters, selections and strategies were doing.

The biggest thing that hit home to me was that in order to make a success of this I did not need to be glued to my PC all day every day. Take an average month; if I could trade just twenty days out of the month and make an average profit of just 0.5pt per day then that would give me a monthly profit of 10pts.

I very rarely traded correct score trades and concentrated more on the strategies that Kevin created which are almost set-and-forget. In the early days, the FH00 strategy was a particular favourite of mine as I could set that up and leave it to run whilst out and about.

The thing I love about trading is it is so flexible you can fit it in around whatever lifestyle you have.

I struggled with finding time and still do; it's such a precious thing!

A few years back I worked 60+ hours per week, was on call 120 hours a week with my retained firefighting job and had a family with all that brings time-wise.

Things have changed a wee bit now and, although I don’t work the 60+ hour job anymore, have enough on my plate. Just to give you an idea, I work around 26 hours with the Blood Service. I'm still on call around 120 hours a week and getting approximately 5-6 call outs on average a week (as well as all the training, etc that comes with the job). I'm a member of a Welsh male voice choir, have access to my daughter two days/nights per week and my son on two different days/nights per week. In addition, I am renovating a property which will become my pension fund along with another two properties which I partly own, manage and maintain. So as you can imagine, it's pretty hectic and finding time is still a struggle!

I’ll look at the whole weeks' strategy selections on a Monday night (a rare night off) copy/pasting the selections and stats from each strategy page into an excel spreadsheet that I’ve created. It has conditional formatting set up with my filters (nothing major, just some of the filters that Kevin mentions on the pages) so it highlights straight away the selections that pass my filters. I have a few strategies which I have to check manually in Team Stats but that doesn’t take me long.

My spreadsheets have saved me loads of time, especially on busy days when there are lots of selections for a particular strategy. Once I copy and paste, the list is reduced to just a few selections.

So, from this weekly shortlist I plan which fixtures best fit around my other commitments, then chop and change my Matrix around to fit. For example, if I’m singing with the choir that night I might do a few set and forgets or strategies that don't require in-play stats checks. If I have a free afternoon or evening, I might do a correct score or second half strategy which requires more in-play checks before committing. If I'm with the kids, I’ll trade on my mobile phone.

I have a plan in place pre-match, so I'm just waiting for goals. When they come Flashscores lets me know, then a few clicks and I’m traded out.

Unlike some traders, I don’t do a lot of my own testing and spend hours on recording and tweaking filters to get a few more percentage points out of a system. If I had the time I would; and I probably will do at some point in the future when the pension fund is set up.

Don’t get me wrong, I do feel that the more research and study you do the better it is, However, the point I’m making is that in my personal opinion you do not have to spend hours and hours looking at stats and doing research. If you have the time then great, I just get drowned in the stats sometimes and cant see the trees for the forest!

Team Stats and the strategies that have been developed for Goal Profits members are more than enough to make a healthy monthly profit and they save us hours and hours in research. In my humble opinion, the more important things to master are discipline and bank management. After all, without mastering these it doesn't matter how well your filters perform.

In my trading diary [on the Goal Profits forum] I’ll be documenting much more around my selection process and my weekly plans. I’ll see what I can do with regards to my spreadsheets in the future; I might be able to develop them into templates which would help members who also struggle with time.

Good luck with the time keeping. It's a hard balance to get right, but once you crack it you wont look back.