Yield calculator

The number that compares two bettors

Yield is profit divided by turnover — the total of every stake you have placed, not the balance in the account. It is the figure bettors quote to each other precisely because it does not depend on how much money they have: 4% is 4% whether the stakes are 5 or 500. The input people get wrong is the denominator, and they get it wrong in the same direction every time. Turnover counts each bet's stake as it is placed, so 200 bets of 50 is 10,000 even if only 50 was ever exposed at once, and the 1,000 bankroll those bets were recycled through is not the number to divide by. That is why this page asks for the count and the average stake and works the turnover out in front of you. Measure the same profit against capital instead and you get ROI: the ROI calculator holds the other half of the comparison, where 400 of profit is 40.00% of a 1,000 bankroll and 4.00% of 10,000 staked.

A yield above roughly 5%, sustained over serious volume, is rare. Where it exists it usually lives in soft markets with low limits, and it shrinks as the stakes grow, because the prices that allowed it do not survive being hit hard. Treat any long-run figure far above that as a short sample, a soft niche, or a different definition of turnover. And under a few hundred bets the number is noise, not a result: with flat stakes at 2.00 one standard deviation of yield is one divided by the square root of the number of bets — 7.07 points over 200 bets, 3.16 over 1,000, 2.00 over 2,500. A +4% yield only reaches two standard deviations from zero at around 2,500 bets. Longer prices swing wider still: at 3.00 the same 200 bets carry a standard deviation of 10 points. Which is the honest reading of twenty winning bets — not an edge measured, just a sample too short to tell the difference.