What Is the Weighted Average Price on Betfair?
The weighted average price is the matched price on Betfair adjusted for how much money went on at each level, and it stops you laying too far out.
Recorded August 2025 for The Grind Ep3: Mastering Betfair SP, Lays & Market Angles – A Professional Approach. Any figures mentioned are from that time.
On the more detailed Betfair screen you get a figure called the WAP, or weighted average price. It is not simply the average of every price that has been matched. It is the average price weighted by how much money went on at each level. I use it as a guard rail, mostly when I am laying, because it tells me where the bulk of the money actually sits rather than where the last few dollars happened to trade.
How the weighting works
Think about a market where $10,000 has been matched at $3.10, then $10 at $2.80, $10 at $2.70 and $10 at $2.60. A plain average of those numbers would drag you well below $3. The weighted average price would sit close to $3.10, maybe around $3.08, because almost all the money went on at that level. That is the whole point of it. The small amounts barely move it. The big amounts do. So when I look at a runner and see a weighted average price of $4.27, I know that is roughly where the market has been doing its real business, not just where it flickered for a second.
Why it stops you getting ahead of the market
Prices move around constantly. They go up, they come down, they go up again. The key to laying, like the key to backing, is getting the right price, and in the case of laying that means the shortest price you can get. The weighted average gives you a reference point for that. If the weighted average is sitting around $4.30, I do not want to be laying at $5. That is getting too far ahead of where the money actually is. Even if I had a runner marked longer and the price got right out, giving me the chance to lay at $5, I would still be more patient and wait for it to come back. The weighted average is what tells me to be patient instead of grabbing the first number that looks generous.
Where it matters most
This becomes far more important if you are running automated betting. If you have written a robot that feeds laying bets into the market, you want a safeguard in there. It matters less if the robot is taking offers that are already sitting in the market. It matters a lot if the robot is putting offers into the market itself. Without a limit tied to something like the weighted average price, you can bust out well past where the money is and affect your own price in the process. That is where people get into real trouble, and the bigger you are betting, the faster that trouble arrives.
So treat the weighted average as a boundary, not a signal. It does not tell you whether to bet. It tells you how far past the market you have drifted, and whether it is time to wait rather than push.
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From the full video: The Grind Ep3: Mastering Betfair SP, Lays & Market Angles – A Professional Approach
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