If like me you have probably spent hours upon hours searching for the perfect trading system. To me the biggest mistake you can make is not researching the system fully enough before parting with your hard earned cash.

Sometimes the best systems are the really simple ones to follow, a friend of mine asked me about if I new anything about one of the leading laying tipsters proofing to racing-index. I look at their results, they seemed quite impressive, however they lay many horses a day, so you would need to have time on your hands to make the service pay.

I decide to paper trade the service for a week, a day after from their results on racing-index. It only took me 3 days to come to the conclusion that you didn’t have pay the subscription, but go onto the racing post website and pretty lay every selection from every race with forecast odds of 6/1 or less.

That is what their service is all about, they make a profit from the blanket approach, but you would probably make higher one by cutting the number of races down. If you are into laying I have given you a starting point to make a profitable system even more profitable.

You will at some point tried and failed with a system and lost money, but what you don’t realise is that with Betfair you can play both sides of the coin. If it makes a loss on one-side then it might make you a profit going in the other direction.

So if you dream up a method and it doesn’t make you profit, work it back the other way, research it further, because you might have un-earthed a gem that will make you money.

When I look at developing a system, I will always look at the maximum downside I am prepared to lose. This should always be your starting point.

When paper trading your method I always work to £100 (or100%) it makes your calculations easier to work out.

From this point you will be able to workout the strike required or the percentage of profit you will need to take to break even at first. From this point you can look to take the system into profit.