I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Daniel from Sportyy for their website Tipsterminds.com . Click on the link to read

It was certainly a testing year for us at SoF but we pulled through with some trademark form in the second half of the year.

Everything now points to a good a 2014.

Please read my full review of the year by downloading the file below.

Enjoy

I just did a Google search for confidence and this was the first thing that came up "The state of feeling certain about the truth of something"

I'll come back to that in a minute as we recently went through the worst 5 months in my history of betting producing a downturn of 25 points which ultimately cost the bank and over 50% of my membership. Now if that doesn't knock your confidence a bit I would be completely ignorant to what is going on around me.

Not many tipsters talk about their confidence and why would they? We need to always put on a positive spin, along the lines of, nothing has changed, you must expect losing runs, the bad luck will even itself out over the season. All these cliches do have some merit and are probably true with the mini runs of losses we all experience. However when you are on a long downturn, unless you are a robot, your confidence will be knocked. Even the greatest footballers, struggle with confidence. Beckham occasionally missed penalties, even Ronaldo went through a spell of missing every opportunity he had for Portugal because his confidence wasn't there. Everyone knew Walters was going to miss his penalty against Liverpool on Saturday! Why would a tipster be any different, especially if they use judgement as one of their picking criteria?

So what is my point as I ramble on talking about confidence. Well as a tipster you need to admit when your confidence is low. Without doubt, it clouds your decision making process, however strong your selection criteria is, and followers should be aware of this. At the lowest point I felt sick searching for selections because the picks were not jumping out. When you are out of form the goal gets smaller, the ball seems to take a bobble and you cant hit a barn door with a banjo! It is exactly the same for a tipster. You can suddenly find a million reasons why your pick didn't win and when you study the fixture list... every bloody outcome looks possible!

1 month ago today, I wrote to my members confessing it was sad day as our bad run had equated to the bank bursting. Although I didn't specifically say my confidence had gone it was very obvious from my email we had a lot of rebuilding to do. In some respect it was a confession to clear the air so we could move on. Stick with me as your star striker or transfer me out and buy Van Persie (and hope they don't turn out to be Andy Carroll)

1 month on, my confidence is back. Since that email we've had 22 bets, 15 winners, 6 losses and 1 void. Amazingly the last 14 bets have produced 12 winners, 1 loss and 1 void. There is still an incredible amount of work to do to get us back on track for the year but I can safely say the confidence is back. Its funny but all of a sudden, the sending off 's go in your favour, the last minute winners are for your team but all that is just coincidence. The real difference is... I can look at a fixture list, hear a piece of team news, spot a weakness in the opposition and without doubting yourself for a minute you can pick a great selection. I have a state of feeling certain about the truth (outcome) of something!

As I've said already there is a long way to go but I'd like to thank all those who kept faith in their struggling striker!

Woohoo the Brazil Football Season is very close to kicking off and I'm already getting a little excited. Far more excited than when the English Premier League comes around. Why? 3 reasons

1)This is my bread and butter and where I believe the most value can be found.

This service was really built around the MLS and Brazil Serie A because I felt there was a niche in the tipster market (not many tipsters predict these leagues successfully) and it would allow punters to enjoy a service in the Summer months.

I have found great success in these leagues by finding exceptional value. In my opinion the value comes from bookmakers not following these leagues as efficiently as they do with the big 4 (England, Spain, Germany and Italy) and they particularly struggle with having good access to team news etc. You will see some big price movements because we will often know Neymar isn't playing for Santos long before the bookmakers do and a flood of money on their opposition will drive the prices.

Team news is certainly not easy to find on Brazil Serie A unless you speak Portuguese. I challenge anyone to use google and find some comprehensive team news. You will struggle. I certainly don't claim to speak the language but I do claim to have some incredible resources to help me with my betting decisions. Knowledge is power and this is a huge factor to why we succeed in this league

2) Our results are outstanding

My job is to repeat these results but our form is staggering over the past 2 seasons with a 66% win rate at evens odd in this market.

The chart shows in season 2011 we had 47 winning bets and 30 losing with a profit of 20.58 points!

In 2012 this performance was practically repeated with 46 winning bets and 17.53 points profit .

What will 2013 bring?

3) It is very entertaining

If you haven't watched Brazilian football before then I encourage you do and there are some really good quality streams available to watch free online. The games are often end to end and with plenty of goals but you will be amazed to see some many teams still play with a old fashioned sweeper. You often think a player is clean through only for someone to come in to view on the edge of the penalty box! This league also uncovers some of the best players in the world. Neymar is an obvious one but there are so many more who will be featuring in the big 4 leagues soon.

Here's to another successful summer betting on Brazil football and I will take a 10-15 point profit any day!

I was delighted to discover last week that I had topped the voting charts from the Secret Betting club for 3 Tipster Awards! I was hopeful of 1 but to get 3 is simply amazing and I have to thank all the readers of the Secret Betting Club for voting. THANK YOU and long may I continue to help you profit on football. The 3 Awards were

This was certainly the most pleasing award because this is exactly what the service is all about - Tipping on Football! We also topped the charts by a clear margin which is very satisfying. However my big challenge is going to be maintaining our success and winning this again next year. That is certainly my goal and we have a made a great start to the year but we have to remember it is a marathon not a sprint!

This second award is arguably more prestigious as it carries the title Sports Tipster meaning tipping every sport apart from Horse Racing. This obviously starts the great pub debate of what constitutes a sport but I will leave that for another day. I don't tip anything other than Football so it was great to be recognised in this category which included so many other services (golf, tennis, NBA etc). This award was a much closer affair and I had the pleasure of sharing the title with Sportyy who received the same percentage of votes. I certainly don't mind plugging the competition either if they are good and Sportyy appears to be run by an excellent guy and delivering great results on Tennis and Football. Remember I'm here to help you make money                                                 betting so If I can recommend other services I will!

The final award was best newcomer and I guess I should cherish this because I doubt I can win it again! LOL . This feels a bit like Most improved which is the award you never wanted to win as a kid because it meant you were previously shit but I guess I am being a bit hard on myself. Seriously though, this award is an achievement in itself in what is such a tough service to succeed in. Believe me, it is not easy getting members (in fact it is bloody hard) and running a service 365 days a year...thinking of your next bet almost every day, so being recognised as arriving on the scene is pretty special and I look forward to seeing who picks this up next year. SBC do such a great job proofing the tipsters and I know they are busy                                      proofing quite a few right not who are making a lot of noise in the market place!                                               Good Luck to them.

Finally, every industry you can think of has awards nights or dinners or conferences etc so why don't we? I mentioned to SBC that this is something they should seriously consider and it may be something for the future. I can see something along the lines of a Sports personality to MC the event some major sponsorship from the bookmakers and then a charge of 150 quid per head to attend for some nice food and entertainment. I think it would be a great stage to reward the tipsters and the punters who are taking their betting/investing seriously. Perhaps there is already something out there that I'm not aware of so please let me know. Also let me know if you would be interested in such an event?

I apologise immediately for how this post unfolds but it is going to follow my thought process while I was away in Europe for the Christmas break. Hopefully you find it interesting.

As you know I love analysing our results to see where we are going wrong and where we are going right and an area I highlighted in our 2012 review was that I felt we were doing poorly in France due to the underdog always doing well and perhaps the bookmakers were pricing games wrong. This weekend there was a number of results where heaps of value could be found in France. For example Nice won away to Lille and PSG failed to win at home again. 

France aside I started to think about value. In short, value in betting is defined where the odds of something happening are greater than the odds on offer by the bookmaker. Obviously you are likely to find less value in the favourites when betting for the simple reason demand will drive the price down and bookmakers aren't going to risk losing their healthy margins. LIGHT BULB MOMENT FOR ME! OK this isn't rocket science and I'm sure everyone already knows this but if there is greater value in the underdog why aren't we betting on the underdog more?

My next thought process answered this quickly by arguing it would be hard to manage long losing runs, trying to pick out 10/1 winners (Eg Real Sociedad v Barcelona this weekend) and what the hell do I know about picking big priced winners? I've never done it before and have no history of doing so. MY NEXT LIGHT BULB MOMENT!....ASIAN HANDICAP...

Every week I scroll the Asian Handicap markets and laugh each week at some ridiculous handicaps being offered for the underdog. A prime example is the Championship where anyone can beat anyone but an away team can still be given a +1 or +1.5 start. This of course happens in all our leagues and particularly Liverpool's opponents. I started to notice that more often than not the games I mentally picked were coming through more often then not.

Now as a rule I don't pick these type of games for the Summer of Football service because they rarely qualify for selection using my strict criteria. The core of this service is built on home teams winning at average odds of evens where I see value. Its simple, it works and it won't change unless I blow the bank. ;o)

However we do occasionally bet on the underdog and I was staggered to discover our results. The SoF service has made 25 underdog bets (Ie we bet on a positive handicap) and 19 have been winners! 19! THAT IS A 76% STRIKE RATE

So where does that leave my thinking today. Firstly I have no intention of changing the core of SoF as we currently have a winning formulae but I have decided to religiously track my additional selections since January 1 and see if I can find another edge! 

Please let me know if you are interested in seeing the results and I will update again here soon

Happy New Year everyone. We had a cracking 2012 making over £3500 profit and a 143% Return on Capital. You can read all about it our review above.

As for my New Year it was spentwith close family in England where we watched the London fireworks and shared a bottle of champagne. A very quite time but thoroughly enjoyable and I must say the London fireworks certainly give Sydney a run for their money...maybe even better this year with the success of the Olympics and Jubilee thrown in with clever quotes and great music.

As I say in the attached Review....Bring on 2013

I tried to Google this question and found all sorts of answers ranging from 55%- 95% of people who invest on the stock market lose money. I couldn't find anything accurate or research based to support this which I thought was strange because it cant be hard to report how many people claimed tax losses from shares each year (in Australia this would be easy as everyone has to individually report it) However I think we can safely conclude it is over 50% which is arguably high if you consider the stock market has grown on average 10% per year since day dot!

While researching I also read that 40% of the clients with a highly successful fund making double digit growth, year on year for 10 years lost money. How does that happen? Simple.....40% of people left the fund because they joined during a peak and saw their investment fall and quickly left. The 60% who remained continued to make profit year on year.

So back to the stock market and why do more people lose than win. The simple answer is human nature. We are all sheep and the majority of us are followers. We buy something because other people have bought it and told us how good it is. The followers buy shares when they have already gone up in price. The followers buy shares because someone down the pub told them and didn't do any of their own research. The funny thing is, as followers we often don't sell our shares on the way down because we are scared of making a loss and hang onto them in the hope of the price returning. On the stock market - I have always been a follower!

I'm sure by now you can clearly see where I am heading with Sports betting and my little service SoF. I recently gained an influx of members on the recommendation of SBC, word of mouth, twitter and obviously cracking results. Everyone wanted to buy shares in SoF at their peak performance and then we hit a downturn. However unlike the stock market my new followers quickly left the scene and may not return but it will be an interesting percentage for me to work out come the end of the year. How many of my members lost money despite triple digit bank growth?

Personally I don't know if the saying 'buy low, sell high' applies to tipping services and would be interested to hear people's thoughts that manage portfolios or have tried this in the tipster community as we would certainly be a clev

Who would be a tipster? It can be so so depressing when you have a losing run, which is exactly what we are experiencing now. Those amazing highs of profit after profit and accolation after accolation have you feeling untouchable, and then WHACK, loss after loss and complaint after complaint hits you square in the face.

To be fair I am quite fortunate in having a very educated Membership base and the core have been with me through some amazing highs and they appear to be able to take this roller coaster ride better than most. As a tipster it does also get a little easier. I have experienced down turns before and let me tell you the first one nearly broke me. I had sleepless nights, the shakes and was receiving emails from people saying they had lost 10k, they wanted to kill me or worse still, fu*k my arse! I'm not joking....it was horrific. With each loss I tried even harder to find the perfect tip. I spent longer researching, analysed even more leagues....and kept losing. Members left me like rats leaving a sinking ship. I lost 73% of my membership in a 2 month period! Suddenly I didn't care I was losing and the membership had reduced so much the pressure was off and guess what?...I relaxed went back to my basic principles of selecting tips and we are now where we are today.

Today, we are experiencing another downturn and it is still depressing for me. I haven't received the abuse of previously mentioned but it still effects my mood at home, you don't sleep well especially when games are playing through the night. You are always desperate to get back in front of the computer and do more research or make sure you watch the games. My motivation levels to do jobs around the house or social things with the family just drop but that is getting much better indeed. I think having a child helps here because they are so much more important than a football match. Her smile lights you up and you forget about everything else!

Anyway, I'm not sure where I'm taking this blog entry but thought I would give you an insight to how a tipster may feel during a bad run. I'm actually excited about turning this latest episode around which I haven't felt before. Usually, I feel nervous about every tip but this time if feels different because I know if I keep to my criteria and find value we will come out the other side to meet a beautiful rainbow and a pot of gold.