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must play catch up. Their carefully thought-out game strategy is thrown out and the team resorts to predictable and undisciplined play. You can see this occur every Saturday and Sunday during college and pro football seasons. You also see this unfortunate situation repeated in the field of speculation. Losing trades are too large and the trader begins to panic and abandons his overall trading strategy. He tries to catch up with his offense by overtrading to make up his losses. But no offense can make up for a poor defense. His trading becomes undisciplined and emotional, and like the harassed quarterback, he starts to throw interceptions instead of touchdowns.
Neal: Your use of sports and betting are great. It seems that sports betting and trading are quite analogous. Did observing sports betting help you?
Phantom: Ninety-five percent of sports bettors are long-term losers. That is a fact. However, I was fortunate enough to meet a few select individuals who were consistently successful in their wagering activities. I was intrigued by these successful individuals and became curious as to why they were succeeding in an enterprise where nearly everyone else failed. I discovered that the one common trait all of them shared was a very meticulous record-keeping system. Over the years, they had all developed numerous handicapping techniques. As a new season began, each handicapping technique was funded with a beginning bankroll, and key statistics were calculated for each technique after a bet was made. The beginning bankroll was updated after each bet, going up if the bet won and going down if the bet lost. After approximately 20 or so bets were made for each handicapping method, some techniques would be doing poorly, some average, and some would be hitting a high percentage of winners. Basically, a bell curve was formed. Out of say 20 techniques, 5 would be doing poorlythe left tail; 5 would be very profitablethe right tail; and 10 would be in the middlemarginally profitable or unprofitable. The bettor would then bet aggressively (usually the Kelly %) the five handicapping systems which

 
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