strategic policy decisions

so, as it turns out, all was not right with my robot at all! i now need to re-seed it with more capital, but having done plenty of analysis of my initial trading (interestingly, it turned over more than GBP 30K of trades on just GBP 250 initial capital) i know what an optimal (and profitable) strategy should be. looking at the graph below, should show that if i ignore one type of trade (a 'lay' bet, that is a bet that something will lose) and had just placed normal 'back' trades, the system would be clearly in profit and growing steadily. i also note that the periods when i was risking a larger than advisable (that is, multiple-kelly, rather than fractional-kelly) percentage of my stake, the fluctuations were larger and profit almost negligible.

this shows profit and loss lines in blue for lays, red for backs and green for the total - the dots underneath are volume (number of bets).

i now need to wait until monday, when i can put more money into the account, however i hope that by then i will have access to a server where i can run the system 24x7 (you know who you are - thanks!) and see how the newest strategy works out over this week.

i've read so many papers on gambling, trading, risk management, capital allocation and probability in the last week, that i don't think i really remember any of them that well. it's been quite hard to translate a lot of them into anything that actually makes sense or is useful in the real world. many start off with unrealistic assumptions, or something equivalent to "first, consider a spherical cow..."! i did, however manage to get some good advice on improving my robot performance (financially speaking) and a lot of them are actually quite interesting in their own right, and i'm going to go over them again - i'll choose a few of the best and post some links here.