This engine does one thing: it takes bookmaker prices that are longer than the exchange says they should be. Below is every settled bet it has placed, and how far above the closing market those prices actually were.
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The first two figures are the edge itself, measured against Betfair’s starting price — the market’s final word on what each horse was worth. The rest is what that edge has produced so far.
It is the whole claim, so it is worth being exact about.
Betfair’s starting price is where a horse ends up after every opinion and every pound has had its say. It is the best estimate of a horse’s real chance that exists, and unlike a tipster’s view it cannot be argued with after the fact.
A horse that finishes last still tells you whether the price was good. That is why this figure moves so much less than a profit figure: it is built from every settled bet, not from the one in ten that wins.
Around six bets in ten beat the closing price. The rest do not, and some miss badly. The edge is what shows up across thousands of bets, never something you can count on in any single one.
It is not a profit forecast. A price advantage is the thing that makes profit possible over time; what you actually make depends on your books, your stakes and a great deal of variance.
Every settled day, in order, nothing smoothed and nothing left out. The drops are real and some of them last a week.
A value bet is a claim about a price, not a prediction about a horse. Over a month that claim can still be buried by variance — which is why the losing months stay on this page.
Some books price better than others, and two of these have cost money — while still taking prices well above the close. That gap is the useful half of the table: a book can be pricing you generously and still be losing, because ten bets in a hundred win and they do not arrive on a timetable.
The stake the engine meant to place that day. If a book only accepted half, that bet counts as half a unit — which is the honest way to show a book that is starting to squeeze you.
Profit divided by everything staked. Not a return on a bank and not a monthly yield — a 20% ROI on a hundred £1 bets is £20, not a fifth of your account.
Around one bet in ten wins. That is what backing longer prices looks like, and it means long losing runs are normal rather than a sign that something has broken.
The price figure is the reliable one — it is measured on every settled bet. The profit and ROI rest on the one bet in ten that wins, so they will swing about for a long time yet. A single big-priced winner moves them; it barely moves the price figure at all.
Bookmakers do not want this business. Take enough of the wrong side of their prices and they will cut your stakes, then close the account. It has happened to every account behind this page and it will happen to yours. That is why the engine runs fourteen books and why more are added every few weeks — not because restriction can be avoided, but because it has to be planned for.