Horse Racing Tips: How to build a profitable long term strategy

• Peter Webb on develpoing long term betting strategy

• Keep up with racing between big meetings

• Increase your winnings without raising stakes

Unsurprisingly, Royal Ascot last week was one of the more significant weeks of the year for me.

When a big race meeting comes around, it's always about maximising the highly voluminous betting markets. These markets often carry their momentum, especially at emotive meetings Frankie Dettori's final Royal Ascot.

Don't just get involved in headline events

But Ascot is now firmly parked in our memories and we switch back to more standard racing fodder.

You may think this is a negative, but the fact is that the vast majority of the racing over the year is lower grade. Roughly 75% fits this general characterisation.

Big meetings are important to me but it's the day-to-day stuff that is my bread and butter.

Find the market momentum

As a trader on the Betfair Exchange, my objective is straightforward. I want to find the betting momentum in the market.

I'm trying to win slightly more than I lose over time. The best way I can summarise this is that I'm trying to be marginally better than random.

I know this is boring and very different from the cut and thrust of picking a winner, but it's the best way I've found of profiting from my knowledge, and it works.

If I trade any market randomly, I know I'll break even minus the commission I pay on winning trades. So that's the hurdle I have to overcome, and it's yours also.

Practice and patience are key

Once you know the bar you have to hurdle, you realise that it's about finding slightly better ways to avoid being random.

When you start trading, you will see things after they happen. You see the price of a horse drift like a barge, and you learn afterwards that it's raining at the course and the horse doesn't like heavy ground.

Or perhaps it's steaming in because the jockey won several previous races. Maybe the second favourite is running loose on the course, having shipped its jockey on the way to the start.

Whatever the reason, at first you will be behind the action. But over time you will learn and eventually catch up with the action and, eventually, anticipate it. It just takes some practice.

Increase winnings without raising stakes

Once you have found yourself in the position of getting to or slightly above break even, it's a question of scaling it. But we are not talking about increasing stakes.

Increasing stakes increases your risk, so we need to find a way to scale without increasing stakes.

While I enjoy trading the massive meetings, the smaller meetings greatly contribute to my overall result in a year.

Smaller races are lower in betting volume, but because there are more of them in the aggregate, they make up the bulk of my activity over the year. But this also determines your over all goal when trading.

Focus on the big picture

Using a stake of £100, what is more manageable - making a £100 profit on a race or a £1 profit?

Referring back to my process of trying to do slightly better than random, which objective best fits this?

It is difficult to double a stake of £100 and probably very risky. But getting a 1% return on it through trading is a lot easier, and this is the key to what I do.

But this is also why you should focus not on the next trade but on the bigger picture. Betting and trading over the long term is about being more right than wrong.

Losses will happen, you need to account for them, not chase them, and you will likely have good and bad runs.

But let's say you aim to trade an ambitious 10,000 events over a year, looking for a £1 profit per event. That's a far more attainable goal than gunning for perfection or taking significant risks.

Of course, you'll have to find a break-even strategy or above to attain a positive expectancy. But this approach makes your objective more transparent and more achievable at a lower risk.

More importantly, you can use a small stake or bank, and you 'leverage' that by just putting it through many markets.

Is it realistic to trade that many markets over a year? Thankfully using tools like Bet Angel, you can automate your strategy. So that brings that objective clearly into the realms of possibility.

Don't overlook daily racing

While I love the big races meetings where I can use much larger stakes. A lot of my activity over the year comes from standard race meetings.

While these betting markets are much smaller than a big market like a Royal Ascot or a Cheltenham race, there are far more of them.

This means I can use the same stake repeatedly and aim for a much more achievable result across many markets. This is made much more attainable with a bit of automation.

So don't ignore the daily racing between the big meetings. You may be missing one of the best ways to maximise the opportunity available on Betfair Exchange.

Get daily racing tips form Betting.Betfair's experts.

Read Tony Calvin's on this Saturday's big race - the Northumberland Plate at Newcastle.