The AntePoster: Profitability Report for Year 1
- The Anteposter
- Oct 12
- 5 min read
Introduction
The Saturday of Irish Champions Weekend a month ago saw a breed-defining performance added to the record of the Ballydoyle-trained colt Delacroix. It was quite a moment in his career. Disaster permitting, this colt will retire to Coolmore at the end of the season, probably after one final appearance on Champions Day.
On that very same Saturday, The AntePoster achieved an important milestone too, namely our first birthday (as marked by our first settled wagering recommendation).
Alas, we can’t now retire to a life at stud with a value of many millions. But our first year has been a profitable one for those who followed us consistently.
Although the question of profitability has never been far from the front of our minds since we kicked off this project, it is interesting that – either through blind faith, politeness, or general lack of interest – none of our followers or subscribers have actually asked how we are performing from a profit and loss perspective.
There are good reasons why we have only addressed this issue after a year’s activity in the horse racing world (see section below “Why have we not published before…”. And these are not limited to our (undeniable) preference for form study and racing newsflow over admin.
Anyhow, we have now compiled the data to address this issue comprehensively and retrospectively for our first year, and had this data audited by a third party. Read on for detail if interested (we think much of it is important) or skip to the numbers in bold and red font if you’re simply interested in the key figures. Supporting documentation can be found in the links at the bottom of this article.
What is our P&L based on?
The profitability figures given below are based on a spreadsheet in which we have tracked every single horse bet recommended in every single article posted on The AntePoster website.
These website articles are the only source of data. Our analysis does not include mispricing alerts on X (formerly Twitter) or any strong talk-ups of horses on the podcast (a shame, as – among many others – Leffard’s victory at a recommended 28/1 in the Grand Prix de Paris would have nicely helped our bottom line). Nor does it include any tips given by third parties, i.e. in our case those given by Ron Wood in his feature articles for the Dubai Carnival earlier this year.
When it comes to the question of what size of bet is recommended, we have never operated a points or staking system.
We have performed all our P&L calculations on the premise that a win-only bet is 1pt, while an each-way wager is 0.5pt win single and 0.5pt place single.
In the key figures below in red, we have assumed a £10 total wager for each 1pt in that system, i.e. a bet on a horse we recommend is either £10 win or £5 each-way.
We are happy with this simple system, and all future wagering recommendations should be considered to be made on this basis, unless otherwise specifically stated.
What is our headline P&L figure?
Over The AntePoster’s first year, a total of 106 bets were recommended. Based on the £10-per-bet staking system described above, this equates to a total outlay of £,1060.
Here are the key numbers:
Total stake: £1,060.00
Gross return: £1,292.08
Total profit: £215.33
ROI 1.20
(i.e. 120% return on 100% outlay)
We appreciate that not everyone who follows us will always have been able to act in time to get the recommended price. That is particularly the case for isolated cases involving illiquid markets where certain bookmakers respond immediately to just a few bets on a horse by cutting the price within minutes. Although these are a minority case, it provides another reason to hope we can improve on our P&L figure going forward.
What about non-runners that never made the race?
Good question. After all, a non-runner is an inevitable source of anguish (and loss) for the antepost punter. A total of 13 of our 106 ended up non-runners. As a long-range antepost betting site (the great majority of our recommendations are for races some weeks in the future) non-runners will obviously always be part and parcel of the game.
We think 12.2% is a tolerable figure – it clearly hasn’t stopped us being profitable – but then neither of The AntePoster partners has ever tracked their personal non-runner figures over the years to be able to comment on whether it is particularly high or low. Let’s see how this develops going forward.
All non-runners are obviously treated as pure losers and included in all the profitability figures given above.
Why have we not published our results before, e.g. on a monthly basis?
Why are we only now publishing of our first-ever results summary – covering a period of exactly one year’s activity? It’s not just because we prefer to spend our time on equine newsflow and study than on tedious admin/housekeeping tasks. Although as pointed out in the introductory paragraph that preference emphatically holds true.
Waiting for the annual P&L picture was important to us because The AntePoster puts out betting recommendations much less frequently, and – on average – at bigger prices than the vast majority of other industry pundits.
When combined, these two characteristics of our approach mean that any monthly view (never mind a weekly look-through) would be crazily skewed and unrepresentative. There would be astonishing, unsustainable profits in some months and truly haemorraghic losses in others.
This would hardly be helpful information, as well as being wholly unrepresentative of our underlying “real” performance.
One bullet or two?
Of our 106 bets, 59 were each-way recommendations and 47 were win-only. We summarize these in the table below, which shows we outperformed on single bets vs each-way by about £2.70 per £10 stakes. This is certainly not a recommendation to now just follow our singles, or worse an incentive for us to only recommend singles. We are only a year into this project, and our first year’s results are bases on only a small data set. The smaller number of single bets is also more likely to skew the results based on one or two bigger winners.
Further analysis of this question can be found in the “Mathematical analysis” document below.
The AntePoster
Daniel Morgan, Editor
10 October 2025
Underlying documentation
By clicking on the links below, you can access the following key documents regarding our performance:
Excel table of all wagering recommendations and their outcomes → Link to document
Mathematical analysis of our performance by Dr Guy Blanchard, based in Cambridge, UK, who has audited our figures (identifying a few minor formulae miscalculations) and drawn up his own report on the basis of the finalised data → Link to document
An excursus from us on the aspect of “expected return”, i.e. how we should theoretically have performed on the basis of our results and the prices of the horses we recommended both at time of recommendation and exchange starting price. → Link to document
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