Use our Return on Capital calculator to compare systems and tipsters and to maximise your bank growth.
Return on Capital Calculator
ROI measures profit as a percentage of stakes. ROC measures it as a percentage of the bank required to survive the service's losing runs – a fairer comparison of how hard your money is working.
Why ROI Doesn't Tell You the Whole Story
If you follow horse racing tipping services, you'll be familiar with ROI – return on investment. It tells you how much profit a service makes as a percentage of total stakes. A service with 10% ROI returns £10 profit for every £100 staked. Simple enough.
But ROI has a blind spot. It says nothing about how big a betting bank you need to survive the service's losing runs – and that matters enormously.
Two services can both show 10% ROI and perform completely differently in practice. A high strike rate service hitting 35% winners needs a much smaller bank than a low strike rate service hitting 10% winners, because the losing runs are shorter and more predictable. That means the high strike rate service is doing far more with your money. It's growing your bank faster relative to the capital at risk.
Introducing Return on Capital
Return on Capital (ROC) fixes this by factoring bank size into the equation. Instead of measuring profit against total stakes, it measures profit against the bank you actually need to run the service safely.
The required bank is calculated from the expected longest losing run – a statistical measure based on the service's strike rate and number of bets. A service with a 35% strike rate over 1,000 bets has an expected longest losing run of around 17 bets. Add a safety buffer to cover the possibility of two bad runs close together, and you get the recommended bank.
ROC = total profit divided by the recommended bank.
To make fair comparisons between services with different numbers of bets on record, we also show ROC per 100 bets – this removes sample size from the equation so you can judge a service with 300 bets against one with 1,000 bets on a level playing field.
A Real Example
Dan's Shorties is a selections service that uses a high-frequency, high-strike-rate model. With a long-term strike rate of around 33%, the expected longest losing run over 1,000 bets is roughly 17 bets. With a standard 1.5x safety buffer, the recommended bank is 26 points.
The result is that for every 100 bets, Dan's Shorties adds approximately 62% to your bank. That's the ROC per 100 bets figure – and it's a much more useful number than ROI alone when you're deciding where to put your money.
How to Use the Calculator
Enter the total number of bets, total winners, and ROI for any tipping service and the calculator will tell you the expected longest losing run, the recommended bank, and both the sample ROC and the normalised ROC per 100 bets.
Use Compare mode to run two services side by side. The calculator rates each service from Poor to Excellent based on ROC per 100 bets, giving you a quick at-a-glance grade that ROI alone can never give you.
If you don't have bets-per-week data you can leave that field blank. Add it in and you'll also get a projected annual ROC – useful for working out how quickly a service could realistically grow a bank over a full year.