Last Time Out Winner Lays - Does This Horse Racing Strategy Still Work in 2026?

Can you still profit by laying last time out winners in horse racing?

In this video and podcast, we break down the Last Time Out Winner Lays strategy for Betfair in 2026 and look at how this approach works, why many traders are drawn to it, and what you need to watch out for before using it.

A lot of traders like this angle because it feels logical. A horse won last time, the market may overreact, and that can create opportunities to oppose short-priced runners. But as always, the real question is not whether the idea sounds good — it’s whether the numbers stack up.

Inside this video, we cover:

• What the Last Time Out Winner Lays strategy is
• Why the market can overvalue recent winners
• The type of races and runners traders often focus on
• The risks of blindly following simple angles
• How data can help you test and refine the strategy properly

If you want to trade horse racing with more confidence and less guesswork, this is the kind of strategy you need to analyse properly before risking money.

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Transcript

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Hello, welcome to another video from lightspeedstats.com, the sister site to BetFairTrading Community.com, where we focus purely on horse racing trading. Today we're going to look at a strategy which focuses on laying the last timeout winners, laying horses that won their last race. With the theory being that hey, if a horse run it won its last race, the market's probably going to fancy it, probably a little bit more than it should. Um so we try and take advantage of that. And what I love about the software on lightspeedstats.com is that we can test this theory instantly. We can test it and see how it would have worked using real Betfair data, the real data from BetFair on the in-play results and things that happen within the market. So that's fantastic, right? Guys, if you haven't signed up to lightspeedstats.com again, um, why not do it? Why not do it? It says here, why trust Lightspeed? Well, I've got a few hundred thousand reasons um from the creator here. And by the way, someone said to me, you know, why should I trust Lightspeed? Well, here you go: a literal notary proof, solicitor, you UK solicitor signed off proof of the profit that the creator of LightspeedStats.com did. So, you know, you are basically getting software from one of the best horse racing traders that's ever been on Betfair, um, and we can use that software to back test our strategies and do the things we need to do. The other thing I want to say on that, because someone said to me the other day, um, does do football members get a discount? Because obviously they're already paying for football. Yes, you do. Football members get a discount, and it works out roughly 50% discount. Okay, so if you're a football member and you're interested in horse racing trading, now is the time. You can get 50% off this because you're already a member of that, kind of combines the two, and you get um kind of a platinum package, if you will, um, when you sign up to that. So if you want that 50% discount and you you're a football member or you have been a football member, just say in the comments uh 50%, and I will get that over to you. So do that in the comments, and that'll be great. Um, but anyway, getting back to what we want to talk about today, we want to talk about strategies, right? If you want me to share this strategy with you, just say LTO on the comments, and I will share this with you if you're a member. Um, but I wanted to look at we've done last time out beaten favorites before, right? But last time out winners really interest me. And I had an email from Daniel and he was asking me about well, what's the best way to do last timeout winners? Um, how do I find that in the software? And again, the great thing with the software is that Adam's built it with the idea that you can look at loads of different things to do with the last time out winners, or last time out second place, last time out third place, and this is all combined within one filter. So I'm gonna show you how to do that right now. Now, when you come to the strategy builder here, first thing you're gonna want to do is just click new strategy here, and this will bring up a new strategy and it will tell you the number it's given it. So here it would be new strategy six, and but we're not actually gonna go to that because I've already had a little play here, a little play that sounds a bit dodgy, and but it is L I've called it lay LTO winners March 2026. Obviously, that's when I'm doing this video. I mean it's might be about the start of April, not sure how far ahead of schedule I am at the moment, but when you've done that and you click the little dot here, it will bring you to the horse selection rules, okay? And this is where we're gonna start to create the strategy. So, when you go to choose the rules, you want to scroll down and it's a fair bit down, but you're gonna want to find finishing position, okay, because this strategy is to do with finishing position. We want to find horses that won their last race. Well, what did they do? They came first, okay. So we'll add this rule. Now, what this rule, this is incredible, what this rule allows us to do is we can basically look at anything within when they finish where and how many times within their last few runs. So, for this, if you select value, we could look at a horse that's been first to tenth here if we wanted, and then you know, in a certain percent of their races, so maybe 70% of their last 10 runs, right? We could do that, or we could look for a horse that'd come second, so we just do second as the option in 100% of its last one runs. So we could look for horses that come second last time out, okay? So basically, you've kind of got a plethora of things you can choose to do, and again, depending on what you want your strategy to be or what hypothesis you have for your strategy, the options are there. This is why it's such pro-level software right here, but also it's fairly simple, right? Because this wasn't difficult. Um, and when someone asked me about this, I was like, I haven't actually looked at last time out winners recently. Um, so I was like, well, how would I do this? And then I just thought, well, it's all about finishing position, right? Now it can sometimes be easier just to write the number in, so I'm gonna do that here. And we want horses that finished between first and first 100% of their last one runs. That means they won their last race, they won last time out. I'm gonna click next, and then we're gonna need to pick what our bet actually is. Well, we know that we're we we're looking to lay with this strategy. You could pick back or lay, it's up to you, and but we're gonna try and lay it. We think that's where the hypothesis in our heads is saying there might be some value here. We need an entry price, that's another thing you're gonna want to set. Now, in this scenario, we don't actually um want to have any prices set. I want to see what the kind of I want to see what the results say, and then kind of take it from there. Keep everything else um as it is already. Then very simply we're gonna run strategy. Now, sometimes we might find this here. I'm gonna click, no, we haven't, but sometimes when you click run strategy, it will say something like um oh you've missed this section here. All you have to do then is go back, like sometimes you I forget to put the back or labor in, um, and then I just go back and do it. It's it's fairly simple to get through that. But again, if you ever get stuck with anything on the software, just get in touch. I run the customer service, so you're gonna be speaking to me, and if I can't deal with it, it goes straight to Adam. And Adam is really, really good at his kind of customer service feedback. He's so in depth. I mean, obviously, he created the software, he knows it like the back of his hand. Obviously, I know it pretty well. Um, so you will get really really good help in that regard. Then it does its magic and it will give you the results. And well, nice little profit here. Um fairly small ROI though, but you know, profit's profit, I can argue that huge amount of trades, obviously. Get a winner every race, so there's gonna be a hell of a lot of data you're looking for. But it is interesting to look and see this. Now, what I didn't show you that's really important is in the betting rules, and I've done a video on this recently, as you'll as you might know, depending on whether that goes out before this. I'm not 100% sure it will, but anyway, customized results. You actually want to go into this section and pick things that you want to customize. So here I've got month and year, okay, but what I really want to look at is a few more things. So I'm gonna look at course, I'm gonna look at going, and what this does is it will it will separate this in and out in the results. So I will now be able to see when I run this again how the going performed, how the countries performed. I want class, um, classifications is often quite a good one, but I'm gonna leave it for now. I don't want to get this too kind of bogged down for the time being. Race distance, number of runners, another ones I like. Obviously, race type. There's a few that I kind of just put into everything. Um, I like age as well, um, and I don't want to do too many more because um, you know, hell, we don't want this video to be too long, do we? I'm just gonna go for entry price as my final one. Let's scroll down, and then you're gonna want to run the strategy again. Now, obviously, it's gonna give you the same profit level, but what it will then do is it will have all those results broken down, which then means we can look at what works and what doesn't, and this is really really critical in any strategy you run. Okay, so like I said, you're gonna get the same um profit level, obviously. Now, as we scroll down, you want to get down to this bottom section here, and this really is the gold. This is the gold of looking at your results and customising your results. We can see the month breakdown here. Let's have a little look at year. Now, remember at the moment, this is hugely wide in scope. We have not filtered this strategy whatsoever. We're just literally looking at every single horse that lost. Um, so it's quite interesting to look at the profit levels year to year, but it's so wide this strategy that at the moment I wouldn't really look too much into that. Um, profit across the countries, which is interesting. Um, okay, good to soft, heavy. Um, soft's done alright, but standard not so good. But what I really want to look at here is entry price. Because I feel like what we're trying to take advantage of is where the horse has gone in terms of its price. Um, now it's so wide this filter that we might look at it and go, oh, the higher odds are actually done right. But actually, the higher odds haven't performed particularly well here. It's a bit up and down across the board, um, but we can see here that 5.0 seems to be a decent starting point. Um, and then just going through this now, you're not going to want to go above 25. And again, when you're laying here, I'm just saying this here. You might want to cut this at 12. Okay, so for time, and because I don't want this video to go on forever, I've gone back, I've gone through a couple of the options here, um, added a couple of bits that made a lot of sense looking at the results. Again, this is something you can do on your strategy. And here we're looking at obviously last time out winner, we're looking at what's successful. Um, so yeah, that's how to create a strategy with last time out winner. Again, there's a lot of variables you could use, there's a lot you could do with this yourself. If you want a copy of this one, just say the letters L T O in the comments or anything really, just to ask for it, and I will send that over to you. If you enjoyed this video, um let us know. Subscribe to the channel, that will help. Obviously, this is a small channel at the moment that we're growing. Uh, hopefully, get it to the size of Betfair Trading community. So, yeah, any subscription will help us, but also help you because you'll get notified about videos on these strategies and on these tutorials to the software. Like I say, if you haven't signed up, if you're a football member, you get 50% off, so you should sign up. If you're not a football member, you still get 50% off your first month anyway. So that's well worth signing up to and take advantage of that offer. Alright, everyone, I hope you have a great week, but most importantly of all, of course, I hope you make some money trading the horses on Betfair.