How Much Do You Move Your Own Price When You Bet?

Recorded December 2025 for 6 Months of TKZ: The REAL Results Exposed + What's Coming in 2026 🔥. Any figures mentioned are from that time.

Anyone betting seriously moves the market they are betting into. I have done a deep dive on how much I move my own, and the number I keep coming back to is three or four per cent. That is money left on the table that I cannot get back. It is not a complaint and it is not an excuse. It is just a fact of life in professional punting, and I would rather put it in front of you than pretend it is not there.

How I measured it

The way I tested it was to compare the official tips in a group against the horses that were not official tips but were very close to being one. Those near-miss horses are useful because they come out of the same form process and the same thinking, but they do not carry my money or my published opinion into the market. When I judged one set against the other, the gap pointed to me affecting the price by around three or four per cent.

There are two reasons for that. One is that I am selling my information now, so the form is public. The other is that I am betting off my own information. Both of those things push in the same direction. Neither of them helps you and neither of them helps me, but both are part of operating at this level.

Why it happens to anyone betting at a high level

This is not unique to me. If you are betting at a high level you are going to affect your own price, whether that is parimutuel betting or fixed odds betting. The reason is simple enough. We do not always know where the top of a price is. So we come in too early and take our own price, when the price might have drifted if we had waited. Sometimes the bookies keep things shorter, or firm them up, or play a few little tricks on us. All of that eats into the edge.

For context on the numbers I work with, the average of the high price across all the horses is minus five per cent if you backed everything at the high price. We are beating that figure by eleven per cent. So the edge is there. The three or four per cent I am talking about sits on top of that as a cost I wear.

Why I tell you about it

One thing I do not do is hide behind anything, and that includes results. If the results are bad, I will tell you they are bad. They are what they are. I report them, then I do my best to make them better. Market impact belongs in the same category. It is a real cost, it is measurable, and pretending otherwise would just make the picture look neater than it is.

So take it as a point of interest more than anything. If you are betting at a level where your own money moves a market, expect some of your edge to disappear into that movement. Know roughly how much, factor it into what you think you are getting, and make your decisions with the honest number rather than the flattering one.

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More from Kingsley

• "Why Can't a Professional Punter Get a Bet On?"
• Why Is a Horse's Best Run Sometimes at the Wrong Distance?
• "If My Horse Wins, What Runs Second and Third?"

From the full video: 6 Months of TKZ: The REAL Results Exposed + What's Coming in 2026 🔥

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