Betfair My Markets: Building a Trader’s Custom View

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This is a cluster sub of our pillar on Betfair platform features explained. The pillar tours the whole exchange interface; this page goes deep on one feature that quietly makes you faster — My Markets — and how to configure it like someone who trades for the result, not someone who browses.

What My Markets Actually Is

My Markets is the panel, usually on the left of the exchange interface, where you pin the specific markets you want quick access to. Add a market and it stays there as a one-click link until you remove it, so instead of navigating the menu tree each time, the football match or the 3.30 at Ascot is permanently in front of you. It is a simple idea, and that simplicity is exactly why most people never set it up properly.

Think of it as the difference between a tidy desk and a pile of paper. The exchange has thousands of markets; My Markets is where you put only the dozen that matter to you today, in the order you want them. For a trader switching between several markets in a session — a couple of races, a football match going in-play, a tennis match to watch — that one-click access is not a luxury, it is the difference between catching a move and missing it.

Why Traders Should Care

Trading the exchange is partly a speed game. When a price moves, the trader who is already looking at the right ladder acts; the trader still clicking through menus arrives after the move. My Markets removes the navigation tax from every single trade. Over a session of dozens of market switches, the seconds add up — and more importantly, you stop missing the fast moments because you were two clicks away when the goal went in.

There is a focus benefit too. By pinning only the markets you have decided to trade, you reduce the temptation to wander into markets you have not researched. A clean My Markets is a form of discipline: it is the trading plan made visible. The work of weekend prep ends with the shortlist pinned and ready, so the trading session is execution, not browsing.

Setting It Up

Adding a market is straightforward: navigate to any market and use the option to add it to My Markets (a star or “add” control on the market page). It then appears in your panel. The skill is not adding markets — it is curating them. A My Markets list with forty stale markets in it is as useless as no list at all, because you cannot find anything. Treat it as a working set you build up before a session and clear down after.

My habit: at the start of a trading day I add the markets I intend to trade — today’s race cards I am interested in, the football matches I will trade in-play, any tennis I am following — and I remove yesterday’s. A market you have finished with should come off the list immediately so the panel only ever shows live, relevant trades. The cleaner you keep it, the faster it makes you.

Organising by Sport and Session

The best My Markets setups group markets so your eye finds them instantly. Keep all the races together, all the football together, all the tennis together, in the order they go off or kick off. Then your panel reads top-to-bottom like a timeline of your day: the next race, the next race after that, the football starting at three, the tennis you will pick up in the evening.

If you trade multiple sports in a session, ordering by start time across sports can be even more powerful — the next thing to happen is always at the top. The principle is the same one good traders apply everywhere: reduce the decisions you have to make in the heat of the moment. A panel ordered by time means you never have to think about what is coming next; it is already at the top of the list. Pair this with the broader pre-match workflow and the timeline becomes your session plan.

The Next-Races View for Racing

For horse and greyhound trading, the next-races functionality is the killer feature. Racing runs to a relentless schedule — a race every few minutes across multiple meetings — and the next-races view surfaces the upcoming races automatically so you are never hunting for the 3.42 while it is about to go in-play. Pinning your meetings and using the next-off ordering means you flow from race to race without touching the menu.

This matters enormously for pre-race scalping, where the tradeable window is the few minutes before the off and you may be working two or three meetings at once. Miss the window because you were navigating and the trade is gone. A racing-oriented My Markets, ordered by next-off, is what lets you actually work a busy afternoon card without chaos. Read how to interpret what you see in reading a Betfair market.

The Settings That Save Seconds

Beyond My Markets itself, a few account and display settings compound the speed gain. Set your default stakes so you are not typing amounts under time pressure. Configure your preferred odds display and whether you see the full market depth. Turn on the bet-confirmation setting that matches your style — confirmation on for safety while learning, off for speed once you trust your clicks (with the obvious risk that a misclick is instant).

The principle is to make every routine action a single click with no decisions attached. Pre-set stakes, sensible defaults, and a clean My Markets together mean that when a price moves, the only thing you are deciding is whether to trade — not how much, not where, not which screen. Every setting you configure in advance is one fewer thing to fumble when it counts. This is the same logic that makes dedicated trading software faster than the website, brought into the website itself.

My Markets vs Trading Software

Honest framing: My Markets makes the Betfair website usable for trading, but it is not a substitute for dedicated software. A ladder tool like Bet Angel or Geeks Toy gives you one-click laddered entry, automated stop-losses, and far faster greening than the website can. If you trade seriously and often, you will eventually want software.

But My Markets matters even then, for three reasons: it is free and built in, so it is where everyone starts; it is the right tool for casual or occasional trading where software is overkill; and even software users keep the website handy for quick checks, rules, and markets the software does not surface cleanly. Learn My Markets first — it teaches you what a fast setup feels like, which makes you a better judge of whether software is worth it for you. Compare the upgrade paths in our software roundup.

From the Desk: My Saturday Layout

My Markets on Mobile

My Markets syncs to the Betfair Exchange app, so the list you build on desktop is there on your phone too. For traders that is genuinely useful — you can pin your markets at the desk in the morning and check or manage positions on mobile if you step away. The mobile interface is slower for active trading, but for monitoring pinned markets and greening out of a position while away from the screen, it does the job.

The caveat is the same as always: mobile is for monitoring and simple management, not for the fast, high-frequency trading the desktop and software handle. Use the synced My Markets to keep an eye on things, not to try to scalp from a train. The broader trade-offs are covered in the app review and the features pillar.

My Markets as a Discipline Tool

Beyond speed, the most underrated benefit of a well-kept My Markets is what it stops you doing. The biggest leak in most traders’ results is not bad execution on planned trades — it is unplanned trades, the markets you wander into out of boredom and trade without research because they happened to be in front of you. A clean My Markets that contains only the markets you decided to trade during your prep is a physical barrier against that impulse. If a market is not on the list, the small friction of having to go and find it is often enough to make you ask whether you should be trading it at all.

I treat the panel as the visible version of my trading plan. When I finish my weekend prep, the output is a curated My Markets: these races, these matches, in this order, and nothing else. During the session, the rule is simple — if it is not on the list, I do not trade it without going back and justifying why. That single constraint has saved me more money than any clever feature, because it converts a vague intention to “stay disciplined” into a concrete list I either follow or visibly break. The interface becomes accountability. A messy panel full of everything is the opposite: it invites the wandering that quietly drains accounts. Curate ruthlessly, and the tool does some of your self-control for you.

Multi-Market Monitoring Without the Chaos

The hardest part of trading several markets at once is not the trading itself — it is not losing track of what is happening across them. A well-ordered My Markets is the backbone of multi-market monitoring: with the next race at the top, the football kicking off below it, and the tennis parked at the bottom, you have a single glanceable column that tells you the state of your whole session. When a football match goes in-play and a price starts moving, you see it in the panel and switch to it in one click, without losing your place in the racing above.

The trap to avoid is trying to actively trade too many markets simultaneously. My Markets makes it possible to have a dozen markets one click away, but that does not mean you should be working all twelve at once — split attention is how you miss the move in the market that mattered and force a bad trade in one that did not. I use the panel to monitor many markets and to trade only one or two at a time, switching deliberately as opportunities arise rather than frantically. The list is there so the next opportunity is always to hand; the discipline is to let most of them pass and act only on the ones that fit your plan. Used that way, My Markets gives you the reach of a multi-screen setup with the focus of a single market.

Related Reading

Stay in the cluster: features pillar, exchange app review, reading the graphs. Workflow, software & guides: scalping, best software, read a market.

The Bottom Line on My Markets

My Markets is the cheapest, fastest upgrade available to any Betfair trader, and it costs nothing but a few minutes of curation before each session. Build it from your prep, order it by start time, keep it to the markets you have actually decided to trade, and clear it down when you are done. Pair it with pre-set stakes and sensible display defaults so that when a price moves the only decision left is whether to act. It will not give you an edge that the market does not — no interface can — but it removes the friction and the wandering that quietly cost disciplined traders money. Master this free, built-in tool first; it teaches you what a fast, focused setup feels like, and that makes you a far better judge of whether dedicated software is worth paying for later.

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