martinos74

My Social Trading Dream : Chapter 2 : Shortlisting eToro Traders

24th December 2015 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Well, it has been one of the worst starts to a year in trading history with stocks plummeting to levels from 4 years ago, so a lot of the traders in eToro took big hits this month, particularly those who hold a high percentage of their portfolio in stocks.

However, every cloud has a silver lining, and this proved to be a useful time to see how traders reacted to these losses and how much this impacted their accounts. This helped me to remove a couple of traders from my shortlist who made big losses, and gave me more confidence in some traders who (even though most of their portfolio was made up of stocks), only made minor losses.

Of course, when everything goes down, this also presents another buying opportunity, so I am looking to invest in the next month.

I’ve got my account verified on eToro and am torn between investing $1000, which will give me a $300 eToro bonus, or if I invest $2500, then I will get a bonus of $1000. The only thing is that these bonuses are paid in the way of eToro points, which can only be withdrawn after you have made a certain amount of trades. I’m not 100% sure of how this works, but I think the amount you can withdraw gradually increases over time.

eToro Trader Shortlist

eToro Best Traders Shortlist — My Shortlist of the best traders to copy on eToro

Finding the right eToro trader to invest in can be a bit daunting at first, especially for the newbie. There are thousands of traders to choose from, some with incredible percentage gains, but you really need to be careful and spend a bit of time interrogating their statistics.

eToro gives you a great search filter which helps you to choose who to invest in and using a few simple filters you can start to find traders who match your risk profile.

TOP TIP : Some key things you should look at:

History of the trader, did they make any huge losses during a single month
How long have they been trading for… the longer the better
What is their risk level.
What do they invest in.. commodities, stocks, forex
How many open trades do they have. Often if they have lots of trades open, this may mean they are chasing the loss, hoping it will come back one day, rather than taking the loss. This is bad, because you will then take on these bad investments if you invest in them.

Remember it’s good to have a balanced portfolio of at least 5 traders, investing at different risk levels and across different markets in case something goes wrong with one of them.

You can have a look at my eToro Trader Reviews here and look at some of the criteria I used to select them.

All I need to do now is take the plunge and make an investment!

LAST MONTH’S TASKS

Choose 10 traders to invest in – COMPLETE

NEXT MONTH’S GOALS

Make the initial investment
Undestand etoro points

TOOLS AND SITES USED

eToro

Chapter 2 : More Free Bets and Rollovers

24th December 2015 By martinos74 1 Comment

Well, I’m not a matched betting expert yet, but I’ve been steadily putting bets on every weekend and working my way through the free offers over the past month and am getting to grips with the whole Matched Betting technique.

I’ve gone through most of the easy and medium difficulty sign up offers and this month I completed offers with the following bookmakers:

Bet365 Offer

Things are starting to get a little more complex now and I need to make sure I pay attention to detail with each offer that I sign up with an thoroughly understand the terms and conditions.

For example I have just signed up for the Bet365 introductory offer, where they will match your deposit up to a total of £200 bonus

This offer and a lot of the more complex offers come with something called a ‘Rollover’. The Bet365 offer has a rollover of 3 times the value of your deposit and bonus, before you can withdraw the bonus. This means that you must place bets of £200 (deposit) + £200 (bonus) x 3 = £1200 within a period of 90 days, before you can withdraw your money.

Now we’re starting to talk bigger sums of money so it’s important to get this right and choose the right matches. For this offer the odds need to be greater than 1.5, and so far I have placed 3 bets of £200 at just over these odds. The bad news as I have discovered is that because these odds are quite low, it is quite likely that this event will happen, so all of the money is being added to my Bet365 account. This unfortunately means that I have to keep re-depositing in my Smarkets Booking Exchange account to lay the bet against this.

In general I’m losing about £7 per bet so should hopefully be able to make about £150 from this offer.

Matched Betting Facebook Groups

There is still a lot to learn about Matched Betting especially when it comes to the more complex offers, betting on horseracing and things like accumulators, but I’m going to bide my time and come onto them later on.

In the meantime, however, I have found that there are loads of Facebook groups around Matched Betting such as:

and I also found the Matched Betting Guru and Matched Betting Blog Websites really useful.

Ultimatcher Spreadsheet

The other thing that you need to do with Matched Betting is keep track of your winnings, as there are lots of calculations to be made and your money will be distributed around many different Bookmakers.

In Month 1, I was using my own spreadsheet to keep a track of this and calculated I’d made a total of just under £200, however, I wasn’t confident in this number and it was quite an arduous process to update.

After doing a bit of digging around I found that most Matched betting professionals use the Ultimatcher Spreadsheet to keep a track of their winnings. On first glance this seems like a really complicated spreadsheet, however, after a quick read through the instructions it is actually a really useful tool to use.

All you need to do is to set up bookmakers and exchanges that you have accounts with and for each match that you bet on record your stake and the odds that you put your bet on, as well as the type of bet (free or qualifying) and it will do the maths for you and give you a running total.

The other nice thing is that it gives you detailed statistics of things like where your most profitable bets were made, which could prove fruitful in the longrun. Best of all is it is entirely free to use and available to download here

The only drawbacks I found is that if you make a mistake it is difficult to undo it and I don’t really know how to record bets where there are rollovers and you just get a bonus instead of a free bet, but I’ll get to grips with that soon.

Overall, it is proving a little more time consuming than I had imagined, but I think if you focused solely on matched betting then it would be easy to get to grips with.

I think I’ve made around £350 over the 2 months since I started, but I need to do a little bit of work on my numbers to be totally confident.

How much have I earned from Matched Betting so far?

XXXXXXX

What Free Bets did I complete?

- 188bet
- Totesport
- Betdaq
- Betway
- StanJames
- 32Redsport

Next Month’s Goals

Complete Bet365 Offer
Place an Inplay bet offer
Get an accurate balance sheet

Last Month’s Tasks

Complete the free offers for the next 10 bookmakers – 6 Offers COMPLETE
Understand how to use the ultimatcher spreadsheet – COMPLETE
Create an article on 5 easy offers – INCOMPLETE

Tools and Sites Used

My Website Dream : Chapter 1 : Making a Website

24th November 2015 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Wow, I have to admit, that was one heck of a month and I feel that I have learnt an awful amount of stuff around my key topic of how to make money online. I also gave up drinking for a month as part of ‘Go Sober for October’, so I had an incredible amount of energy and ideas flowing, that it was actually difficult to try and focus on my core themes.

Focus

Well, I’ve obviously taken the first few steps and started up www.mylifestyledream.com and even though I’ve worked in Digital Media for the past 15 years, I’ve realised this month that there is soooo much to learn and that if you want to do things well, then you’re going to have to invest a lot of time into it.

The other thing I’ve learned is that even though there is a lot to learn, it is actually really exciting stuff, and you find that because all of your efforts are going towards your own business, you will have a lot more drive and enthusiasm to learn and create. In fact, the hardest thing that I have found this month is deciding what to focus on as there are so many things I want to learn and master right now!!!

WordPress Set Up

Getting WordPress up and running was really simple and painless and I’ve described the process in my article: Setting up a Website – 3 Simple Steps

It was really tempting to start messing around with lots of different plugins, themes and bells and whistles, but for now my goal was to get the basics in place and move on to more valuable things. My thoughts were that I can easily come back and make changes once I have the core of the site up and running.

Keyword Research

After going through and setting up the basics of this website, the main curve ball that has taken up most of my time this month has been keyword research.I hadn’t actually thought about this much before at all, and the more I read about it, the more valuable I realise this subject is. The key learning that I have taken away from this month is that you really, really should try to understand your market before you head off writing articles and basing your whole business on a whim that you might have had.

Doing detailed keyword research really helps you to understand whether there is a market at all, how many visitors you think you could get for a potential market and most importantly what your potential returns will be. You’ll probably find that the market that you thought you could enter is already saturated with high ranking sites, that you’re never going to compete with, so you need to look at alternative strategies.

The best approach that I have found this month is focused on ‘Long Tail Keywords’. These are keywords that have less traffic and less competition for them, but means that you are more likely to be able to rank well for them. Rank well for a number of these long tail keywords and your site will start making money.

For example, you might be passionate about ‘Basket weaving’ but you will find that this keyword is heavily competitive and will be difficult for you to get onto the first page in Google. The long tail approach would mean that you would curate articles specifically around similar topics but your keywords (typically 3+ words) would be things like “A beginners guide to basket weaving” or “What are the most popular basket weaves”.

I’ve written an article on this, but have to say that my head nearly exploded this month, trying to figure out what I should target for both this website, and other website ideas that I have.

All of this keyword research led me on to the concept of ‘Niche Websites’, which I hadn’t really come across before either, but is another great way to make money online. This all backs off of the idea of doing keyword research to uncover niche markets that have a decent amount of traffic, low competition for the Top 10 slots on Google, and are sought after by advertisers.

The idea is that you then set up a basic website specifically targeted at that niche and make money through the Adwords banners that you put on the site. This is a really exciting angle that I am dying to get started on soon, but will probably need to focus on this a little further down the line. If you’re interested in learning more about this then I’d recommend heading over to http://www.nichepursuits.com/ and following the Niche Site Project 2, where you are taken through a series of tutorials on how to set up a Niche website that makes you over $500 a month.

There are some great tools out there as well that can help you with your keyword research and I signed up to trial versions of Long Tail Pro and SECockpit, both of which can give you invaluable data that you need to start your websites, but be warned, you are likely to sink hours of your life into this activity, which is often compared to sifting for gold to find the right keywords.

Website Hacked!

The other key thing that I’ve learned this month is about WordPress security. I previously ran another website for many years on Drupal, that never had any issues, but to my surprise one of my test sites got hacked last week. I’m still not really sure what happened, as I just set up a test instance of WordPress on one of my domains in my hosting account and then got alerted from my hosting company that I may be involved in some kind of phishing scam! Needless to say, I deleted my test accounts as soon as possible and then beefed up the security on my other sites.

Summary

I definitely see potential online income streams from setting up niche sites in the future, which looks like a great revenue model to help me with my lifestyle dream of travelling the world and working as little as possible. I like the concept of doing some hard work up front to set up something that will continually reap you rewards for months after. Feels a little bit like digital gardening!

The only downside at the moment is that there is sooo much to learn and it is so time-consuming, without providing any short-term financial reward. Some potential other online income streams that have come out this month are looking at affiliate sites for Amazon products and the concept of drop shipping…. But we’ll save them for a later date

Next Month’s Goals

Finalise the structure of www.mylifestyledream.com (At the moment I can’t decide whether to have a site based on posts which are structured by categories and tags, or a more traditional page based site)
Choose a suitable theme (I need to understand more about themes and how they can be customised, because I can already see the limitations of my simple ‘Atomic’ theme that I am currently using)
Understand backlinking strategy (As soon as I have got the core of my site together I am going to need to start generating traffic towards it)

Tools and Sites Used:

My Social Trading Dream : Chapter 1 : A Look at eToro

24th November 2015 By martinos74 1 Comment

My second dream of of making money online was based on the concept of Social Trading and it has been an interesting first month as well.

There are plenty of social trading platforms out there like Zulu Trade, Ayondo and Signal Trader, but I wanted to start by looking at the most popular and probably the most accessible platfrom, eToro.

Again, there is loads to learn and I have had to stop myself from jumping in and investing my money, especially when I have seen the potential returns that some traders were making. However, I’m glad that I have actually taken a much more measured approach.

My original plan this month was to understand how the platform worked and start to look at the profiles of some of the traders on the network. I wanted to shortlist 20 traders, who I would then observe for this month to look at:

Their monthly earnings
Their risk profile
How responsive they were to comments on their trading profile

There are thousands of potential traders out there so choosing who to follow and potentially invest your money in can be a long process, but you definitely want to weed out traders who don’t match the profile you’re looking for.

eToro Chosing A Trader — How to Choose an eToro Trader to invest in

My approach was fairly simple, where I just looked at the top 40 popular investors and went through one by one looking at things like:

Risk level
How long they had been on the platform
Percentage profits over the previous years
Activity on their social stream
What they wrote about in their profile

After a while you get a general feel from what the traders are like so I managed to whittle this list down to 20 traders who I wanted to ‘follow’. Then in my virtual portfolio I invested $1000 in each of the traders, and since then I’ve just been sitting back and watching their activity, although unfortunately, I didn’t get to spend as much time as I wanted on this activity.

Overall, things were moving in the right direction, however, thanks to one trader ‘SociaInvest’ I learned a valuable lesson, which was that the traders who are making the crazy percentage profits and have high risk profiles, have a high risk profile for a good reason:

eToro's Trader 'Socialnvest' statistics — eToro’s Trader ‘Socialnvest’ statistics

This guy Sebastian for example, had been making profits of over 100% in some months, which is an incredible return over the past few months and had accumulated over 2000 people copying him. My initial feeling was not to put this guy on my list, as he wasn’t very responsive in the community and had a high risk level, however, most of the other traders I chose had a risk level of 7 or below, so I thought I’d take a punt on him.

eToro Bad Day — A bad day’s eToro trading

All was going well, until one day when I checked my account I noticed there was a $500 dollar loss. I couldn’t quite understand what had happened then I saw that this ‘Socialvest’ had managed to blow over 50% of the value of his account in one day. Wowsers! Luckily for me this was only 50% of $1000 dollars of fake money, and my virtual portfolio was spread ovoer 20 traders, so the hit wasn’t too bad, but a lot of people lost huge amounts of money. This trader was managing over £300k of other peoples money so there were a lot of angry people commenting on his profile this month! But to be honest, more than anything this was a great lesson in knowing the risks involved and how steady low risk growth is a lot better than going for quick win high profits.

Summary

Whilst doing my research there has been a lot of bad press about Social Trading and I think this is an area where you need to be very careful and not try to grab the big rewards. However, I still think this is something worth pursuing so am going to continue to look into this and will extend my research period by a month so I can invest in the New Year.

Next Month’s Goals

Choose 10 traders to invest in
Write a detailed article on how to select traders

Chapter 1 : Easy Sign Up Offers

24th November 2015 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

OK, 1 month down and I’m well on my way to becoming a matched betting expert.

Now the reaction that I’ve got from everyone that I’ve mentioned this to has been extremely negative with people telling me that I need to be really careful and that I’ll never make any money out of this. However, I have to say, my experience so far has been completely the opposite of this.

I think that as long as you are methodical and have good attention to detail then there is risk free money to be made. Admittedly, it is a little bit fiddly to start with and may take a while to get your head around the basic principle, but I can honestly say that there is risk free, and tax free money to be made fairly easily.

So far this month I have opened up accounts with 9 different bookmakers and placed a total of 20 matched bets (betting on both the event happening (backing) and the event not happening (laying)). I haven’t worked out the exact total yet, because I have a couple of bets in progress, but so far I have made about £200. One thing I have learned from this is that I really need to learn keep track of your betting activity, which I’ve been doing manually so far, but am planning to migrate to the Ultimatcher spreadsheet next month.

Originally, I had thought that this would be pretty much a one-off income stream and as soon as I had gone through all of the available bookmaker’s free entry bets (totalling between £500 and £1000) that I wouldn’t be able to do this anymore. Well, I was wrong. The good news is that the bookies are so desperate for your cash that they keep emailing you with offer after offer of free bets, which means that you can keep on applying the technique you have used for your entry bets to these re-load offers.

From what I have learned so far this can get you a steady online income of between £500 to £1000 a month depending on how much time you’re willing to put into this activity.

How much have I earned from Matched Betting so far?

Month1-Matched-Betting-Settled-Bets

What Free Bets did I complete?

William Hill – Sign up and Deposit £10 to get a £20 free bet

Ladbrokes – Sign Up and deposit £50 to get a £50 free bet

Coral – Sign Up and deposit £5 to get a £20 free bet

Paddy Power – Sign Up and deposit £10 to get a £30 free bet

Skybet – Sign Up and deposit £5 to get a £20 free bet

Titanbet – Place 5 x £5 bets and get a £25 free bet

Summary

Matched betting definitely looks like a winner to me and is something I am going to pursue further. Getting that amount of revenue per month for a relatively small amount of work really would be a big bonus for my Dream Fund and help me pursue my goal of location free living.

Next Month’s Goals

Complete the free offers for the next 10 bookmakers
Understand how to use the ultimatcher spreadsheet
Create an article on 5 easy offers

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