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Hi Darky,

Paul is off for a few days.

Essentially what you said there is in the ball park, and absolutely correct! The percentages will vary based on a method/system that one employs, but the premise is;

Most times your bank will be less then its best point, even if you are a winning punter.

The drawdown and ultimately the success of a method depends on a few things;

The strike rate; the higher the strike rate the greater the chance that your deviation from your bank high will be smaller and easier to recover.

Punter Risk Threshold; Our Axis program has a betting analysis module that flags the risk to the bank like max and average bank drawdown percentage and many other ways to see the risk involved with the method that one is testing. I have seen successful methods, ones that deliver profit at the end of the test have a max drawdown of over 100%, that means somewhere along the way the bank went bust! Or other times I have seen it at 80% drawdown, still something that is unacceptable to nearly all punters. Knowing the depth of the risk about your method is ESSENTIAL.

Bet Size; Most of the times conventional software employ one-size-fits-all scenario, leaving punters unaware of the pitfalls along the punting timeline. One thing that one can do with our software is to adjust the bet size to suit the system, and re-test until the risk and reward is acceptable. This may also involve adjusting the bet size up to suit a system that under-utilises the methods performance to balance the reward vs risk scenario. Sometimes it will also mean that you discard a system because the balance is not found.

You have obviously been around a while to know all this anyway, but it is surprising the number of people with rose-colored glasses that put their failure down to bad luck or the forum curse rather then facing the realities of punting. Their misfortune is just the that, the reality of the punt, something that cannot be avoided. That doesn't mean that the drawdown can't be managed and a profit derived from the punt. It is one of the main differences between winning punters and loosing ones.