Trading Easter Racing – Treading on Eggshells?
It’s an important weekend on the sporting calendar this weekend.
Easter can only mean one thing. The permission to eat your body weight in chocolate, especially for breakfast. However, word has it that, apparently, there are plenty of other reasons why we should celebrate Easter as well?
It’s traditionally a time of family gatherings and other events, and in times gone past, there wasn’t much sporting action. However, there are lots now , and in recent years even horse racing had joined in on this long weekend.
But the key question is, is it worth trading it?
Good Friday can be quite good
The card for racing on the betting exchange over Easter is actually quite interesting. Traditionally Racing wasn’t run on Good Friday, but the racing industry decided to break that tradition, and in 2014 they started racing on Good Friday.
There is one significant meeting which is Newcastle which hosts the all-weather championships which is a highlight for Good Friday if you choose to trade on that particular day.
I tend not to trade on Good Friday, especially if the weather is good, though that looks unlikely this year! But sometimes circumstances conspire, and I can trade it, and picking off some decent trades is perfectly possible.
If you want to trade on Good Friday, Newcastle is where the best opportunities will be.
Easter Saturday and Sunday
The Saturday card is pretty much what we would expect from a Saturday, and there’s obviously a lot less racing on Easter Sunday.
There will be features on Saturday, but there is a lot of action on, and it may clash as there are still a lot of jumps meetings to be sandwiched in. It’s not an ideal scenario, but better quality means you can pick and choose your targets.
Because Easter is early this year, the Dubai World Cup will add some spice to Saturday. My results on this race have been erractic over the years. It’s got one of the most varied results of major races for me. I have made over £1000 on this race, but I have also made a loss. All in the past five years!
It’s such a big race however, that I will be making a really big effort on this race.
On Sunday, there is racing going on, but I’m not going to trade that. I tend to use Sundays to recharge my batteries. I’ll put my automation on it, so I am sort of trading in some sense.
Fairyhouse would be the focus for me on the Sunday if you choose to trade.
Easter Monday
Then we come around to the Bank Holiday Monday. This actually isn’t one of my favourite days of the year because we are still in the jumps season, and there’s going to be a lot of racing on Monday.
Lots of racing will clash, so it will all fall over the top of itself and be a bit of a mess. So I’m not particularly keen on doing much on Easter Monday. It tends not to be very profitable, and it’s not going to be worth the sacrifice of not being able to enjoy Easter weekend with the family or part thereof.
One race I will definitely turn up for is the Irish Grand National. At this time of year, I try to pull off the feat of a decent profit on the English and Scottish Grand National, so I try to top that off with the Irish as well!
You can pick off some decent races on Monday, so I will probably focus on that.
Summary
The bottom line is that it’s a mixed bag of events.
Consequently, you may want to think carefully about whether you want to do it and, if you do, what targets you pick.
From my perspective, Good Friday is helpful if you can trade it; Saturday is like a normal Saturday, but Sunday and Monday and very missable apart from the feature races.
I hope you have a great Easter!