Every result I put up is in points, and a few people have asked me to just say the pounds. I won't, and it's not coyness. It's that the pounds are yours, not mine.
A point is whatever you decide it is. For me it's £100 at the moment. For someone else it's a tenner, or £500. If I wrote that a month made £1,500, that number means something to me and nothing to you. If I write that it made fifteen points, you can multiply it by your own stake and know exactly what it would have meant in your account. That's the only honest way to publish results, and it's how the proper services have always done it.
So here's how to read the book. A win bet is one point, so if a point is £100 you've £100 on. A place bet is a quarter or a half, so £25 or £50. When I say a month made fifteen points, that's fifteen times your point, after commission. When I say the worst dip was eleven, that's eleven times your point that you were down from the top at the worst moment, which is the number that matters more than the profit for deciding whether you can live with this.
The bank is forty points. At £100 a point, £4,000. That isn't money you bet with in a month. It's the money that sits behind the bets so that a bad run is a dent and not a disaster. If the worst dip in the book is eleven, forty gives you nearly four of those in a row before you'd be out. You won't get four in a row. The forty is there so you never have to find out.
Two more things about points. The first is that they go up with the bank and never with your mood. If the bank grows, a point can grow. If you've had a good week, it can't. The second is that a point is the same on a Tuesday at Southwell as it is on Gold Cup day. The biggest race of the year gets the same stake as the smallest, because the bet is the bet, and the size of the crowd has nothing to do with it.
That's it. Points, your stake, your pounds. The book will always say the first and leave the rest to you. The card tells you the stake in points every morning. You set the point.
Lee
Update, 26 May 2026. The point went up for the first time this month, from £100 to £150, because the bank earned it. The rule in this post hasn't changed: the stake follows the bank and never the other way round.
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