This series is about creating a ‘click-of-a-button’ process to do the Excel-based work you currently do manually before your main football trading activity at the weekend.  

In other words, it’s about saving time that you could use to think more analytically about your trading … or to do something else altogether!  It’s about harnessing the power of Excel and VBA to work efficiently and avoid those situations that leave you thinking, ‘There must be better way!’.  Welcome to Automate Your Weekend Process.

The first session contains no technical content.  It’s about establishing the basics: the purpose of this course, what you can (and cannot) expect to get out of it, and a shared understanding of what is meant by a ‘weekend process’.  I deliver it largely though Powerpoint with just a few quick demos in Excel.

I invite you to think what ‘automation’ might mean to you?  

Yes, a ‘click-of-a-button’ process that provides all the analysis you need would be perfect: but is it realistic?  Many of the real-world solutions I’ve created are more ‘semi’ than fully automatic.  You’ve got to think what is possible for you according to your current level of Excel (VBA) ability and the time you can invest in this course.  Yes, automation cannot be achieved overnight; you should take a few months to work through this course and gradually implement the ideas in your setup.

With that said – what’s this session all about?  I share an overview of a typical ‘weekend process’ based on the dozens of projects I’ve done in football trading.  Hopefully it represents your process well enough for this course to be useful.  You’ll see it consists of 3 files: (1) a fixture file containing the weekend’s games (2) a model that does the analysis and (3) a summary file or ‘database’ of the season’s bets and results.  Note the model itself is not the focus of this course – there are other courses about modelling in Excel (VBA) For Football Traders, including the New Horizons series.

With that framework established, I talk through the issues you’ll encounter when trying to create this ‘automation’ and boil it down into 5 ‘painpoints’ that we’ll focus on through this series.  I preview a few snippets of VBA code that might get the juices flowing.

This course is more challenging than anything we’ve done on Excel (VBA) For Football Traders.  I invite you to be deliberate about it: take the time now to write down your objectives and consider if they’re really achievable.  Managing your own expectations is really important – you are your own toughest customer!  Then, I hope you’ll enjoy the coming weeks and months as we work though the automation process together.

Tools And Techniques