Many a Mickle
Can’t imagine how I haven’t used that title before, as it has always been my intention to set up multiple income streams, diversifying my risk and making my overall profit more reliable. I guess my focus has switched around from novelty to even newer novelty without ever securing a solid performance along the way. from anything along the way.
The way it should go with all of the bots is the way it is working with the Shanky poker bot at the moment. By dint of years of trial and error I have hit upon a combination of bot, script, poker room and staking levels where the income has stabilised at around £33 pounds per day, or £1,000 per month. Now I’m trying to replicate the same situation with the greyhorsebot, using the greyhound forecast markets (predicting first and second). My aim has to be to gather together a clutch of half a dozen reliable performers in different arenas and start to crawl back towards overall profit from these adventures.
Because, let there be no mistake, I have not made an overall profit since starting on this journey. I have been guilty of being enthusiastic too often and too quickly about strategies which quickly went south. Even worse, I haven’t returned to edit my gushing prose, to warn off those who might be tempted to follow me. Why does this trouble me? Because just today I received an email from someone who bought one of my recommended bots and tried to travel what he was led to think was the road to instant riches. The result, unfortunately, is that he has dug himself into an even deeper financial hole than he was already in.
My conscience is torn between continuing with the occasional post, with caveats and warnings on every other line, or just calling it a day and shutting up shop. The jury is still out…
End of an error…
Actually my mistakes are legion, but I’ll confine myself to mentioning just a few of the bigger distractions to which I fell prey. It was only when the time rolled round to renew all of the domain names which I acquired in my SEO binge last year that I realised just how big that endeavour had grown. To do a one-year extension of all of my renewing sites at GoDaddy was going to cost well over $400. So, as I hadn’t made any money to speak of from any of them, I decided just to let them expire. So, farewell ebooks4ipad.info and beatpiles.info, which were never more than feeders for my clickbank affiliate id. More of a wrench was the proper blog site of clickbankrefunds.com, which was always fun to write, but didn’t really have a payback strategy. And the jury is still out on whether I leave my autobloggers up and running for a while. forexjumpstart.com actually earned a little money from banner hosting and blackhairfocus.com developed an unexpected siaeable following. But there are only so many hours in the day and, as mentioned before, I need more focus rather than more and more websites to monitor. So farewell to the SEO jungle, with its backlinks and articles, adsense and nonsense – I won’t miss you at all.
Read More…
Up from under
OK, let’s not dwell on the fact that two months have passed since my last post (if anyone subscribed to the blog via Kindle, I’ll look favourably on any request for a refund). The important thing is that it was a fruitful silence, occasioned by my being far too busy with actual botting to sit down and write about it. One little flurry of activity has involved poker, where the shanky bot has benefitted from a number of new (and rather high-priced) tournament scripts. I’ve struggled (ie failed) to get tournament starters running correctly on my VPS, but even with manual startups as and when I have time, the KGB and Jackal scripts have both earned their cost back and a bit more besides in under a month.
More interesting and novel have been my continued adventures with Smart Live Markets, the first spreadbetting venue to offer MT4 (and therefore Expert Adviser) access. Out of the multitude of products available I tested maybe 30 and after successively chopping out losers have been left with EURUSD, Brent Oil and Wall Street 30 which seem to show an overall positive expectancy.
Remake, remodel
After a little hiccup in the LMAX bot development, we’re off and running again. Tiago may have been spirited off to more lucrative employment, but just in time, along came Madan! Actually sourced from the eponymous peopleperhour.com, Madan has proven amazingly adept in absorbing the java api provided by LMAX and turning my sketchy specification into a working bot in under a week! Not quite the same bot that Tiago was building – this is a short-term exploit, which we hope will help fund the remaining development work. But it has been a very good exercise in getting used to the asynchronous workings of the LMAX java api wrapper.
That’s about as technical as I’m going to get. Fortunately, not all of the botfarm’s current interests involve hard-core java development. I experienced one of those all too rare examples of fabulous customer service, when the long-forgotten developers of Virtual Trading Studio sent me a comprehensive upgrade to their product, with new license keys and documentation, including video tutorials. An amazing piece of kit for me to play with – essentially a complete Integrated Development Environment for MT4 Expert Advisors!
And, in a very opportune turn of events, I got the chance to try it out immediately…
Focus
An old and well-revered boss of mine used to tell his troops that we needed to have a “global focus”. This was one of his more coherent statements, but still the cause of much mirth, as we imagined going cross-eyed in the attempt to focus on everything at once. Unfortunately, I could have done with practising this skill more diligently, as lately even my distractions are getting hijacked by sub-diversions to the point where I forget my original gameplan completely.
Case in point – manual poker was settling down to a nice little profitable pattern, as shown below,
The Dark Side
They say that during the great Gold Rushes the people who made the enduring fortunes were not the claim-stakers and river panners, but the owners of the hardware stores back in town, selling the tools that the others needed to pursue their dream. The attentive will immediately spot the reason for my saying this.
As well as slowly acquiring some paid advertising (though only for companies I know and trust), I am of course funding the development of the world’s first cfdbot, which we hope will see the light of day before too long. Ideally Tiago and I would like to make money both from using and from selling this little baby.
Read More…