As portfolio betting, especially cross sports portfolio betting, becomes increasing popular, we’re often asked how to distill the vast number of betting systems and tipping services available into a manageable betting portfolio. Another question that we’re asked over and over again is how to actively manage a betting portfolio once it’s established.
There are no hard and fast rules about which systems and services to include in your betting portfolio provided:
They’re all proven, by virtue of proofed results, to be profitable in the long-term.
They’re sufficiently diverse that a sequence of adverse results affects only a small proportion of the bets that you place.
They reflect your attitude to risk.
Collectively, they generate an acceptable number of bets per week.
The chances are that you’ll want to get your betting portfolio off the ground at the earliest possible opportunity so, realistically, you may not want to invest time in proofing selections from various systems and services on your own. If that’s the case, you’ll need to rely on a reputable, independent proofing service to do the job for you. I can personally recommend the proofing service provided by Michael Wilding at Race Advisor, which provides comprehensive statistics for nearly a hundred of the leading tipsters in the country. This is the service that I use to proof my own ‘Willy Weasel’s Nap of the Day’ tips, with which you may already be familiar.
If you need proofed results for other systems and services, you’ll find numerous websites that review betting systems and proof tips from tipsters, not just for horse racing, but for various other sports as well.
The purpose of a betting portfolio is to minimise risk across the portfolio as a whole and prevent you from losing your entire betting bank. However, if you’re betting bank isn’t sufficiently large, you may end up using too much leverage or, in other words, investing too much of your initial capital on an everyday basis, and still run the risk of losing it all.
If you have proofed results for each of the systems and/or services in your betting portfolio, you can estimate the size of betting bank you’ll need by looking at the longest losing run, historically, for each system or service. If a service that advises 1 point stakes has a longest losing run of, say, 20 points, you can safely assume that a betting bank of 40 points should ensure that you don’t lose more than 50% of your capital if you’re unlucky to join the service at the start of a similar losing run. Repeat the process for all the systems and/or services in your portfolio and you’ll have a good idea of how big your betting bank should be.
Of course, 1 point can represent any amount of money that you want it to but, realistically, you want to be betting in amounts large enough to make operating a betting portfolio worthwhile in the first place. If you need time to put money aside for your betting bank, you can use that time to record the results of the systems and/or services in your portfolio and you may discover that, by concentrating on selections in a certain price range, you can increase the return on investment. If you can, your time’s been well spent!
Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results, so you’ll need to review and manage your initial portfolio choices from time to time. That doesn’t mean that you should immediately jettison any system or service that fails to generate a profit in the first month of operation, especially if the portfolio as a whole is in the black, but if the losing run continues for, say, three months, you might like to think about reducing your stakes or removing the system or service from the portfolio altogether. On the other hand, if you discover that, after a similar period, a system or service is performing particularly well, you may have grounds for increasing your stakes.
