Matchbook And Betfair Risk/Reward Ratios

Would you rather make many bets that pay 1 and risk 5 or many bets that pay 5 and risk 1?

Let me ask you a question on ratios. What’s better – taking many trades that have a reward to risk ratio of 1 to 5 or taking many trades that have a ratio of 5 to 1?

Would you rather make many bets that pay 1 and risk 5 or many bets that pay 5 and risk 1?

If you answered the latter you’d be dead wrong.

On the surface the idea of making many trades that have a positive risk reward profile looks immensely attractive. Who wouldn’t you want to get paid 5 every time you risk 1? Unfortunately many traders confuse the idea of payoff with the probability of actually collecting those payoffs. The probability of consistently making a trade that makes you 5 while keeping risk to 1 is generally very small – MAYBE 15% if that. Ratios not so good then?

But assuming you have a long term positive expectancy (i.e. say you lose 3 for every 1 you make, but your winning percentage is 77% or better) you should do as many trades as possible for the same reason that insurance companies write as many policies as possible – the law of large numbers works in your favour. As long you keep each individual trade loss to a very small risk size (between 0.5% and 1.0%) your risk of ruin is manageable. The more you trade the more profits you’ll build up and the more capital you’ll have at your disposal to survive.

The high reward/low risk trades have the exact opposite profile. You spend a lot of time bleeding away money until you finally hit a good trade. The psychological toll of constantly losing money also makes traders much more reluctant to pull the trigger just at the moment when they need to.

So the lesson of the day is if you trade like an insurance company don’t be afraid to write a new policy after a hurricane wipes out your profits.

JuiceStorm TV

Trading The UK, IE, US And AU Betfair Horse Racing Markets 24/7

The Betfair selections we are trading above are UK time. Only filled trades or bets appear on JuiceStorm TV.

Unsure how to get involved? Take a look here.

In 2021 TradeHost traded 7,937 Betfair UK, IE, US & AU horse racing and greyhound markets.

2022 saw TradeHost become even more profitable with 22,698 Betfair markets traded.

2023 less markets were traded – 17,459 – but a with a similar profit to 2022.

All trades and bets were streamed live on JuiceStorm TV which was was watched by 124,209 traders in 2022.

All results for the 48,094 Betfair markets traded are here and the charts are here.

Top 100 Comments on JuiceStorm.com

Racing Traders has over 20,000 registered members and more join every day. Find out why with a free trial.

BetTrader from RacingTraders.co.uk was the 1st application for Betfair & introduced the ladder UI. Invest £99 in yourself with a JuiceStorm EXCLUSIVE crypto only offer for a BetTrader lifetime license and no further payments.

Successful Betfair Traders have the simplest Betfair Trading systems. The difference is their selection process, experience and execution level. Get that difference for yourself with automated trading by TradeHost.

Our AI articles are NOT written by a real person and are provided for entertainment only. They may contain content which is inaccurate but we are hoping our AI bot, Rose, will become better over time. The AI category is the ONLY section of JuiceStorm.com that has zero human input.

1 Comment
  1. JackTheHat says

    So true. All my automated TradeHost trading strategies have a market strike rate of better than 70% and have returned a profit year after year since 2017.

    Thanks John.

Leave A Reply
Comment Rules

  • Please show respect to the opinions of others no matter how seemingly far-fetched.
  • Abusive, foul language, and/or divisive comments may be deleted without notice.
  • Each JuiceStorm member is allowed two daily comments. Use them wisely.
  • Comments must be limited to the number of words displayed above the comment box.
  • Use branded capitalisation, eg. JuiceStorm, TradeHost, BetTrader, etc or John will get upset.
  • You agree that any comment you make may be used for marketing purposes by JuiceStorm.com.
  • You need more than 20 words? Click here for the largest Telegram community for Betfair Traders.