Last year I did pretty well in the NFL games and very well in the NCAA tournament. I decided that for the 2005 NFL season, I'm going to try to set up some goals. I pick the conservative games and almost always to win. This means I don't use the spreads (although they pay out better, they are riskier), but only pick who will win the games. A heavy favorite might pay out 10 cents on the dollar. Great, ten cents. But if you remembered my post (it's somewhere in the archive) that with amounts like this I look at the return. In this case this will be a 10% return in one week's time (technically it can be less than one day since you can place the bet before the game).
My Goal
I want to make conservative bets and try to average a 10% return per week by picking the heavy favorites. Part of this is subjective, since I will be picking the games and not just the highest favorite. I want to start with a set amount, try to average 10%/week for four weeks, and then take out the profit and start the fifth week at the original amount.
I'll be using $500 as my example.
Payout: with compounding the $500 will grow 10% a wee for the first four weeks. This will result in $232 of profit.
Starting on week 5 I will not use the $232 profit and start over at $500. By week 8 I will hopefully have another $232 profit and then start back at $500. This will continue till the end (note that the last segment will be 5 weeks since the season is 17 weeks in total).
Total: $1501 including my original $500, so I'm aiming for $1000 in profit.
It will be tough because one loss will drastically set back my capital, but by starting over after four weeks I will be able to protect some of my profits.
Note: I used $500 as an example and it might not be the actual value used (since I consider $500 a good amount of money).
We'll see how it goes...
Just a few other things
- For 2005 I will be able to contribute $4000/year (which I will try to do) into a Traditional IRA. This, along with my yearly deductions from work for transportation, can reduce my taxable income by $4700 (transportation: $140/month for the rest of the year plus $4000)
- I'm setting up monthly spreadsheets (I've seen this on a few other blogs) to track the growth of my assets as well as expenses.
- Once I put some tables in this blog, I will be able to show the growth and explain the expenses.
- Last week I had $103 in expenses (food, misc, entertainment, etc.)
- 28% of these expenses were due to buying lunch at work. I might start bringing my lunch a few days per week (Fridays they give us free lunch), or buy something cheaper. This is slightly hard to do since everything is expensive in the financial district, but Subway is cheap (and healthy).
