What Is Your SOL Quotient?

If you are trying to build a career as a punter, you hopefully have a spreadsheet where you track your wins and losses. Whether you are testing or betting live with real money, you need to keep an eye on a number of key statistics to evaluate the performance of your betting techniques:

• Win percentage
• Win/loss ratio
• Average win size
• Average loss size
• Total number of wins
• Total number of losses
• Net profit (adjusted for fees and spreads)
• SOL Quotient

You can read more about all of these statistics in my article about Analysing Your Performance Through Statistics.

I want to talk in this article a little bit more about your SOL Quotient. Most of the statistics that I recommend you track are fairly self-explanatory, but that is one you are probably not familiar with.

If you follow my articles on a regular basis, you may know I have some background in investing. Sports betting is actually a form of investment if you know what you are doing, so there are a lot of commonalities between punting and trading.

One Forex trader whose blog posts I followed for a long time was Rob Booker. Rob Booker developed a statistic he called the “SOL Quotient.” But I do know it is an incredibly useful statistic.

Your SOL Quotient = Your Net Profit / Your Largest Loss

This is a risk-management statistic. It tells you how many of your largest loses you could sustain before you blew all the money you’ve made.

This is an important statistic to know, because a losing streak could feasibly consist of losses which are every bit as big as the worst one you have endured. And what if your SOL Quotient isn’t a large number? That would mean that even a small losing streak could potentially wipe out your account.

For example, imagine you have been testing for a few months, and your net profit so far is £394. But your largest loss is £80.

£394 / £80 = 4.925.

In other words, you could feasibly lose all the money you have made to date with just five big losses.

Now, think about that for a moment. It isn’t uncommon in the world of sports betting to lose that many bets in a row. Even people who successfully manage to bet for a living typically have a win percentage that is under 60%.

In fact, if you look back over your betting history, you can find out exactly how large your biggest losing streak is. If you find that it is larger than your SOL Quotient (or even close to your SOL Quotient), that is a cause for concern.

For this reason, you should do what you can to reduce the sizes of your losses in proportion to the sizes of your wins. In another field of investment like Forex, you might be able to get away with larger losses because you also have a much higher win percentage. But that simply is not going to be possible with sports betting.

So now you know what your SOL Quotient is and why it is important when betting online on sports. It is important for the traders that it was originally developed for, but it is arguably even more applicable to sports betting punters.