Three weeks in, you have followed a tipster’s selections in good faith and lost on twelve of the first fifteen. It is tempting to call the service a dud and move on to the next one.
Here is the encouraging part. A dozen losers out of fifteen is an ordinary spell in racing, even for a service with a genuine edge. The people who profit from tipsters are usually the ones who knew that going in, set their trial up properly, and let the numbers have time to show.
In short. Profiting from a tipster is less about finding perfect picks and more about setting up a fair test. Choose a trial length in advance, size your bankroll for the quiet spells, and track the price you actually got rather than the price the tipster advised. Then judge the service by your own records.
What does making a profit from a tipster actually mean?
It does not mean finding more winners than losers. A profitable angle in UK racing typically wins somewhere between 15% and 35% of its bets, so most bets lose, and that is simply the shape of the maths.
The better measure is the A/E ratio, which means actual wins divided by the wins the odds implied. At 1.00 the market priced things exactly right, and anything above it means the selections beat their prices. We cover how to work it out in our guide to A/E ratios.
Strike rate on its own tells you little. Multiply the strike rate by the average price to see the picture.
- 22% × 4.5 = 0.99
- 33% × 3.0 = 0.99
- 50% × 1.7 = 0.85
The first two tipsters are on level terms even though one wins far more often, and the third is behind both. The price you take against the chance of winning is what counts, so it is worth tracking both together.
What market are you trying to beat?
The fair benchmark for any tipster is what you would have made by backing the market favourite every time. This table uses our database for Great Britain and Ireland, from 1 July 2013 to 14 October 2026, at Betfair SP with one point level stakes and 2% commission taken off. Fallers and pulled-up horses count as losers.
| Signal | Sample | Win rate | A/E | Return | Longest losing run |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Betfair SP favourite | 167,257 races | 34.4% | 1.00 | -1.4% | 28 |
| VDW Rank 1 (one of our rating systems) | 153,920 races | 21.6% | 0.99 | -3.8% | 59 |
| Race Predictor top horse | 167,314 runners | 25.5% | 1.01 | 0.0% | 36 |
Return is profit or loss as a percentage of the points staked, and longest losing run is the most bets in a row without a winner. These describe that stretch of racing and will not repeat exactly, so treat them as a snapshot.
The market is close to well priced right across racing. In an earlier analysis of UK single-favourite races up to March 2026, Flat turf favourites returned -1.5% across 58,831 runners, hurdle turf favourites -0.4% across 36,103 and chase turf favourites -1.9% across 22,426. That is a useful bar. A tipster who clears it consistently is doing something worth having.
It also shows why the price you take matters so much. If the tipster advises 4.0 and you get 3.6, a tenth of the price has gone before the race has started. The tipster’s record on paper might be positive while yours at the reduced prices is flat, and the gap between the two is slippage, meaning the worse price you took compared with the one advised.
How long should you follow a tipster?
Choose the trial length before you place a bet, and make it long enough that a quiet spell cannot decide the verdict. A good rule of thumb is to count bets rather than days and wait for a few hundred. A service sending around 100 bets a month gets there in about three months, and a quieter one takes longer.
Before you start, ask for the service’s full results history. That means every advised bet with its date and advised price, including the losing runs, so you can see the bad spells as well as the good months.
The table above shows why. Even the favourite went 28 races without a win at one point, and the other signals went longer. Losing runs of that kind come with every approach in racing, so a short quiet spell says very little about whether a service is good.
One more tip. Tipsters often advertise after a strong spell, because that is when their results look best. Joining at that moment can mean joining just before things settle back to normal, which is why a pre-set trial window helps. It lets the average show instead of the highlights.
How do you size a bankroll for the quiet spells?
A common rule is to look at the worst losing run so far and plan for more than that, because the worst run to date is rarely the worst run ever. With that in mind, a practical set-up for following any tipster looks like this.
- Set aside a bankroll of around 200 units, rather than 25 or 50.
- Stake about 0.5% to 1% of the bankroll per bet at level stakes.
- Decide in advance on a review point, such as a 25% fall in the bankroll. Reaching it means pausing to look at your records calmly, and then deciding whether to carry on.
Bankroll planning and spotting an edge are the same job. The edge has to be able to carry on through the quiet spells, and a sensible bankroll is what lets it. Our guide to A/E ratios pairs well with this, since it shows how to judge a signal by more than its average return.
How do you keep score properly?
The most useful habit is to keep two records side by side. One is the tipster’s advised result and the other is the result you actually got. Compare them at the end of every month.
Record these for each bet:
- Date, course, race time and horse.
- The advised price, the price you took and your stake.
- Betfair SP at the off and the finishing position.
For each bet, work out whether it won and what you made at the price you took. Turn each price you took into an implied probability by dividing 1 by the decimal odds, so odds of 4.0 give 1 ÷ 4.0 = 0.25. Add those up across all your bets to get your expected wins, then divide your actual wins by that total. That gives you your own A/E.
Use this to read the result.
- An A/E above 1.00 is encouraging, and the more bets behind it the more it means. Around 1.05 or better across a few hundred bets is a good sign the tipster is beating the market for you.
- An A/E between 0.95 and 1.05 means you are roughly at fair value, and the return will wobble around flat.
- An A/E below 0.95 means the edge is not surviving the price you can get. Try placing bets earlier, at other bookmakers or on the exchange, or end the trial.
This habit separates “the selections are not good” from “the selections are good but the price has gone by the time I get it”. They are different problems with different fixes, and your own records tell you which one you have.
What is the one thing to keep?
Profiting from a tipster comes down to a fair test. Fix a window, size the bankroll for the quiet spells, track the price you actually got and judge by your own A/E. No service can promise a profit, and a fair test gives every service a proper chance to show what it can do.
If you would like to try it today, open today’s race cards and note the Race Predictor top pick in each race, with its Race Predictor Win % and the Betfair SP. Track them at level stakes for a month as practice. One month is too short to judge anything, but it is a good way to get used to recording prices and working out your own A/E, and that habit is what pays off over the longer trial.
