Aintree Festival and the Grand National

11/04/2018 | By | Reply More

Cheltenham is behind us, and the flat season is officially underway and this weekend we have the last major jumps meeting of the year which is, of course, nations favourite race – The Grand National.

While Cheltenham attracts the more serious and seasoned punter the Grand National is undoubtedly the race that everybody knows and anyone usually has a punt or gets involved in some form or another. That usually throws up some great trading opportunities.

Aintree Festival

The Aintree festival starts on Thursday and takes place over 3 days so is one day shorter than other festivals like Cheltenham and Royal Ascot etc and based on past years I’d expect the turnover for the three days to be between £40m – £50m with around £9m traded pre-race on the Grand National itself. Curiously last years pre-race volume was down nearly £1m on the year before, while at the same time its in-running traded volume was well above average falling just short of £1m and making it the 2^nd highest traded in-running in a decade.

Unlike the Cheltenham festival you won’t see large chunks of money stacked up waiting to be matched around the current price except on the Grand National itself, so you won’t have the frustration you can sometimes get sitting and waiting for ages for your orders to be filled prior to the big race itself on Saturday afternoon. Generally, most races will trade like a regular Saturday afternoon feature race turning over around £2m pre-off.

For such a large field the BSP can still be very will often still be very close to 100%, in fact in two of the recent years it has dipped below, so you could have backed all runners at SP and secured a profit before the runners at the back of the pack even set off.

Trading In Running

If you’re looking to lay the field rather than doing so at less than 2.0 as you normally would you might want to look at doing so at slightly odds higher odds somewhere between 3.0-5.0. You will need to get more runners matched to lock in your profit, but the data does show that is more likely than laying at lower odds and that makes sense when you think of the distance and number of runners involved in this race.

Alternatively, you may want to look at DOBing, while none of the eventual winners have come from the top four in the betting since one of the joint-favourite won back in 2008 using a DOBing or back 2 lay strategy on the front 4 usually works quitee well. In seven of the last eight years 2 of the front 3 have traded at 50% there BSP or lower.

All that’s left for me to say is good luck to everyone who trades it and hope that we get to see a quality race to round this year’s jumps season off.