Trading ‘Normal’ Horse racing markets

Trading ‘Normal’ Horse racing markets

Picture this: it’s the Monday right after a major horse racing meeting. Festival hangovers are everywhere, liquidity is thin, and the racing calendar has slipped into its least inspiring slot of the week. Perfect, I thought—let’s hit record and give you an unvarnished look at a bread-and-butter trading day.

I wasn’t swinging for the fences. With the camera rolling (you can watch the full video above), I dialled back the aggression and traded each race exactly as I would if you weren’t looking over my shoulder. The goal? To show you what consistent Betfair trading on pre-off horse racing really means.

We all love the jaw-dropping profits that surface during the big festivals, but those red-letter days aren’t the backbone of a professional’s P\&L. It’s the mundane Mondays—the “weakest” days of the week in a quiet stretch of the season—that reveal whether your edge is genuine.

So how did it pan out? Steady and solid. No fireworks, no adrenaline spikes—just disciplined entries, tidy exits, and a respectable green figure at the end. Exactly the sort of result you must rinse and repeat hundreds of times a year if you want to turn trading from side hustle into serious income.

The takeaway is simple: master the ordinary days and the extraordinary ones will take care of themselves.

Results : Trading pre-race on Betfair horse racing markets

I booted up Bet Angel, opened the card, and worked my way through 19 races. Three of them clipped me for small, tightly managed losses; the other 16–19 ticked over nicely, leaving me with an 85 % strike rate for the session.

That sits right in my long-term sweet spot. After years in the trenches I expect to finish in the green on seven or eight out of every ten markets and happily absorb the rest—roughly a 20–30 % loss rate is baked into the plan each day.

Monday’s numbers nudged past that benchmark. If I’d guessed beforehand, I’d have put money on dropping four or five races out of the 20. Shaving those extra losers off the ledger was a tidy bonus—and a reminder that disciplined risk control keeps the engine running smoothly.

Winning long term is about a balance of profits and losses

The Numbers Behind a “Typical” Card

Cast an eye over the stats in the screenshot and you’ll spot a tidy pattern: average profit per race came in at roughly £14, while the average loss barely registered on the meter. That’s no fluke—I spend more energy throttling losses than hunting monster wins, and the long-run maths loves me for it.

Now, full disclosure: I knew this session was headed for the highlight reel, so I reined in the risk a notch. Cameras rolling tend to make even seasoned traders a shade more cautious—call it the YouTube effect.

At the big festivals I’ll happily shovel serious liquidity into the market, provided every penny is deployed with surgical care. On a routine Monday card like this, I naturally slip into defence-first mode. Knowing the results were going public nudged me even further down that path; a touch more aggression might have squeezed out a fatter headline figure, but it would almost certainly have invited a few extra reds as well.

Performance anxiety isn’t just for England players on penalty duty—pros feel it too. The key is converting those nerves into disciplined execution. I kept things crisp, clipped off the winners, and left the day looking neat and orderly. Could I have pressed harder? Probably. Would that have guaranteed a better bottom line? Not necessarily.

The moral of the story: small, repeatable gains with microscopic losses are what an everyday trading card should look like. Nail that, and the blockbuster days will simply add gravy on top.

What would I expect from ‘normal’ markets…

Volume + Liquidity = Fireworks—But Here’s the Everyday Reality

When chunky volumes collide with deep liquidity, I can crank out headline-grabbing results. Take those two ingredients out of the pot and the flavour changes entirely: ordinary cards feel slower, scratchier, and—let’s be honest—a bit beige. On a typical day’s racing I’m conditioned to expect:

• More losing trades
• Slightly bigger red numbers

This Monday bucked that trend. From the first market I slipped straight into the zone, reading the order flow like a seasoned jockey reads the pace, and picked off crisp entries all afternoon. Fewer losers, titchy stakes on the ones that did surface—job done.

Was I subconsciously steering the ship towards a YouTube-friendly outcome? Probably. But the session still played out exactly as outlined in my “trading normal markets” playbook: get in, manage risk, clip tidy greens, repeat. Nothing spectacular—just the dependable engine room of a professional’s P\&L.

What do you need to look for when trading in any market?

The Three Levers of Long-Term Profit

Strip away the jargon and every trading strategy rests on just three moving parts:

1. Strike rate – the percentage of markets you finish in the green.
2. Average win – the pay-out each time you call it right.
3. Average loss – the cost of the trades that go against you.

Think of them as sliders on a mixing desk. Push one up and the others need to shuffle to keep the track sounding sweet.

• High strike rate? You can afford to bank smaller profits and stomach slightly bigger losses, because most trades still end up green.
• Low strike rate? You’ll need chunkier wins and razor-thin losses to stay afloat.

The dream combo is obvious: a sky-high hit rate, healthy winners, and losses that feel like rounding errors. That’s exactly how Monday’s session played out—but let’s be honest, days when all three dials land in the sweet spot are the exception, not the rule. Most of the time you’re tuning and retuning, edging each lever into balance so the long-run maths keeps stacking in your favour.

Why keeping records is important

Record-Keeping: The Compass for Consistent Profit

Every time I close the laptop, I circle back to just three figures in my trading journal:

1. How often do I win?
2. How much do I win?
3. How much do I lose?

Get a clear grip on the first two and the third practically sets itself. When you know your strike rate and average payout, you can calculate precisely how much red ink each losing trade can spill without sinking the ship.

That’s where my own journey began. I’d jump into the market, jot down the typical loss, then reverse-engineer the rest: If I’m dropping £X on a loser, I need £Y on a winner and a Z % hit rate to keep the graph pointing north.

Simple. Measurable. Brutally honest—and the best scoreboard you’ll ever use to keep your strategy accountable.

Understanding your Strike Rate and Betfair Scalping

Strike Rate: Skill Meets Strategy

First and foremost, your strike rate reflects how sharply you can read a market and nail the entry. But there’s a twist: trade style also skews the numbers. Drop into pure scalping mode and your hit rate can soar, simply because you’re clipping tiny moves—those jagged little zig-zags that make up the market’s heartbeat. In other words, it’s not just where you pull the trigger, but how you choose to play the game that determines how often you end up in the green.

Tick Tactics: Why Distance Dictates Your Hit Rate

Drop two opposing orders a single tick apart and watch them clear almost on autopilot. Whether you open with a back or a lay makes little difference—those micro-fluctuations will usually tag both prices fast, gifting you a sky-high strike rate.

Push for anything under a five-tick swing and your success ratio still looks rosy—provided you let the trade breathe. Scratch out too soon and you torpedo the maths, slashing the strike rate before the edge has time to pay you back.

In short:

• One-tick scalp? Fills come thick and fast.
• Bigger move? Each extra tick you chase shaves points off the hit rate.

So choose your distance wisely: the shorter the hop, the more often you’ll land on green—but the smaller the bite you’ll take out of the market each time.

However, the amount of profit you get from that move will be quite high. So it will offset losses that you make when you get that wrong.

Strike-Rate Physics: Scalp vs Swing

Scalping is all about speed and certainty: you nip in for a single tick, bank the pennies, and rely on a sky-high hit rate to keep the ledger green. Because each win is capped at one, your entire edge hangs on how often you’re right—miss too many and the arithmetic crumbles.

Swing or trend trading flips that equation. You aim for the big, sweeping moves and accept that your strike rate will sag. The trick is ruthless damage control: the moment a position smells wrong, cut it and move on. Yes, the losses come more often, but the occasional monster win more than cancels them out—provided you’re hunting in markets primed for volatility.

Put simply:

• Scalp: tiny profit × very high strike rate
• Swing: chunky profit × lower strike rate, disciplined exits

Choose the tool that matches the market mood, and let the maths do the heavy lifting.

Treat strike rate as the “price” you pay for a trade. Go for a one-tick scalp and your hit rate has to be sky-high—if it isn’t, the long-term maths will eat you alive.

Dial up the ambition to a bigger swing and you can afford fewer winners, because one well-timed surge wipes out a string of scratches. You’ll cut more trades early, reload, and wait for the move that finally runs.

Success comes from balancing those three levers—hit rate, average win, average loss—until the equity curve drifts steadily north. Nail the blend and the profits look after themselves.

Analysing your trading

Before I even shut down my trading screen, I grab the day’s raw data from the exchange and drop it into a spreadsheet. A quick bit of sorting and conditional formatting turns the sheet into a crystal-clear dashboard:

• Win frequency – how many markets went my way
• Average win – what I banked when they did
• Average loss – the damage when they didn’t

One glance tells me whether the machine is humming or needs a tune-up.

• Losses too chunky? I’m either entering late or letting losers linger.
• Plenty of greens but the profit column looks anaemic? Time to give the winners a longer leash.

Your strike rate and your win/loss sizes are like two gears in the same gearbox. If one slips, the whole drive train shudders. That’s why meticulous record-keeping isn’t optional—it’s the only way to spot the rattle before something snaps.

Don’t rely on gut feel; your spreadsheet will tell you if you’re firing at 30 % or 70 %, how much each winner adds, and how much each loser subtracts. Tweak those levers, run the numbers again, and let cold, hard data steer the strategy.

The Invisible Edge: Knowing When Not to Trade

Out of the 19 races on my sheet that day, I flat-out skipped several. Why? Because the quickest way to dodge a loss is to sidestep a market that isn’t offering one shred of edge. Spot nothing, stake nothing—it’s that simple, yet wildly underrated.

There are endless reasons to sit on your hands:

• A familiar market stalls and refuses to move.
• The order flow looks like spaghetti and you can’t read a single strand.
• Gut instinct says “no clue what’s going on here”—trust it.

Too many traders dive in purely because they want to earn, rather than because they can. The discipline to walk away is often the difference between a tidy P&L and a day you’d rather forget.

Trading non-feature meetings – Summary

Everything I’ve described so far is my bread-and-butter routine for the quieter cards and softer mid-week fare. When the quality’s modest, I play it tight and tidy; as soon as the calibre—and liquidity—kicks up, I loosen the reins and let the stakes climb. In short: defensive outside the big festivals, assertive when the spotlight’s on.

My stake size flexes with three things:

1. What I expect the market to do
2. How aggressively I intend to trade it
3. Which race—or meeting—I’m trading

Stack my Monday stats next to a Cheltenham or Ascot sheet and you’ll spot the pattern instantly: small, consistent greens on routine cards; chunky spikes when the heavy hitters roll in. It’s the classic 80/20 split—everyday markets fill 80 % of the calendar and fund the campaign, while the remaining 20 % delivers the headline profits.

Miss that gear change and you’re flying blind on risk. Track your figures religiously, know when to throttle back or punch forward, and you’ll keep the equity curve drifting north—season after season.