LG, the original post sounds attractive to me. I work in Financial Planning, i'm 25 years old and had to watch as clients accounts stagnate or even in some cases go backwards over the last 3 and a half years since starting my job. Now compare that to starting with say $20,000 and your achieving 10% POT with turnover of 1x so basically your yielding 10%. Even just compounding that over 3 years you've now got $26,620 or made 33%. Find me anyone interested in wealth creation who would knock that back over 3 years, particularly the last 3 years.

Here's a short story of my very limited foray into the punting arena. I've always had an interest in horse racing, used to go to the trotts and dad would put on bets for me when i was 14 just as a laugh for $5. He's always been into punting and I guess thats where i've got it from. As I turned 18 i'd punt sometimes just by having a look at a horses recent form, or doing a trifecta or quaddie, basically having a crack at anything with no real system or ideas but just for a bit of fun. Obviously i was in the crowd who just threw away money but at least I enjoyed myself doing so.

Anyway once I started working 3.5 years ago I got into sports betting a bit and started having a greater understanding of how I could actually make some money. At this point I also started my own shares portfolio using research obtained through work and borrowing $2,000 from my parents. My sharemarket knowledge continued to increase while working and I think this is what fed my sportsbetting knowledge as I became more and more interested with systems, statistics and how they can influence your betting towards actually being profitable.

Last year I started taking it a little more seriously. It started with having some luck on southern speed which I had for the win and also the trifecta in the same race kicking my account up to $500. From there I would regularly chat to a mate who was really into sports betting. Every night we would talk about the following days NBA plays, discuss all the negatives and positives and lay our bets down. I also did some AFL betting on the side as i'm a keen supporter of the swans and watch probably 3-4 games a weekend. Between early November and February I managed to take my account from roughly $500 to $1,500. Thats where my poor discipline and mentatlity kicked in, I started thinking it was too easy and just putting any old bet on and talking less with my mate about the NBA plays and just doing whatever.

My account started to dwindle down and before I wasted it I took $1,000 out of my account and left $200 there as play money which I eventually lost as well.

All of this gets me to where I am today, using Shaun's spreadsheet i've managed to adapt it into my own ratings which i've found to be profitable given some relatively simply filters (Slow/Heavy, only bet overlays etc). I started betting it with real money about a month ago now, but it probably wasn't the best time to start as the end of the winter season has meant its performed poorly in more recent times. I'm still confident i'm on the right path though and will continue to follow my plays as I bet 1% bankroll and so it will take a huge run of outs to decimate my small bankroll. I continue to read LOTS about punting both on here and various other forums and currently looking at predicting NBA scores using various equations, checking correlations and other statistical functions. I haven't found an edge yet but its an enjoyable exercise for me and hopefully it will improve my sports betting.

I've now got $40k in shares with a further $10k in the bank looking to buy my own house. My aim is that eventually my punting becomes another investment stream that I can enjoy at the same time. Time will tell I guess. Sorry for the long post LG but figured it may be of interest to some. Once I started typing it just kind of flowed haha