Jump Trainers to Follow Early in the Year

Here we are on the first day of January 2025 and I thought it would be good to highlight a few Jumps Trainers for you that have performed well at the start of the year, during the months of January and February.

Using the system builder, it is simple to do this for any set of trainers or jockeys as well as race type. By adding the range of months, we can see where it may be worth casting an eye around this time.

I have taken all results going back to 2018 and have divided the results up into chase races and hurdle races. It is surprising how many top jumps trainers, do far better in one code than the other.

Chase races

So starting with chase races, we have three simple rules to get our first over view.

All images cab be clicked to enlarge them if needed.

By adding 'Trainer Name' to the result breakdowns, we can get a full list of every trainer that has a runner in the UK, in January and/or February, along with their overrall stats.

The top of this list you can see below, which I have sorted by the number of runners for each Trainer, has about 700 names. To manipulate this into a list worth looking at, I then copied and pasted the top names, that had at least 50 bets and pasted that into excel.

From here I sorted the list again by strike rate and removed any of the very obvious trainers. Generally those that have had hundreds of runners, such as Paul Nicholls, Venetia Williams, Nicky Henderson etc, as I wanted to find a few names that may be a little under the radar, so as to give us something a little more interesting to look at.

Taking these aside, it gives us 18 trainers that could be worth following and you can see the list below.

Whilst there are some trainers that have made a loss over the years - and of course you can ignore any that you want to - they do all give an average overall strike rate of 19%, plus profits and decent ROI%.

Looking at the top of the list, Laura Morgan is possible a name a lot of people haven't heard of but she has a 30% strike rate in January and February. Others are perhaps more well known but if you want to follow the best chase trainers in the fisrt two months of the year, you could do worse than checking out these here.

I did do a final check by changing the date to 2024 and removing the months rule, just to check that all trainers on the list are still in training, or have had a few runners recently.

Get the runners yourself using the system builder.

If you are a subscriber to Inform Racing, you can get the declarations for these trainers each day by using the system builder and the rules I have copied below. 

For the list of trainers, these must be comma separated, so you can copy the names below and paste them into the system builder for the rule, Trainer Name >> In >>  L J Morgan, Anthony Honeyball, Brian Ellison, Henry Daly, Christian Williams, James Ewart, Kerry Lee, Sam England, Chris Gordon, Stuart Coltherd, Sandy Thomson, Sue Smith, Jamie Snowden, Tim Vaughan, Tom Lacey, Neil Mulholland, Jeremy Scott, Richard Hobson,

Hurdle races

I did the same as above for hurdle races and ended up with just 11 trainers on my list. However the overrall stats are very good for this small group. 

Unfortunately, last year, 2024 was the only losing year in seven for these trainers and their hurdle runners during January and February. Hopefully this means that they will all bounce back again in 2025.

If you want to copy this list of trainers and follow them this year, then use the same rules as above, making sure that you change race type from CHS to HDL along the with the comma separated list below.

Harry Derham, Anthony Honeyball, Lucy Wadham, Kerry Lee, Harry Fry, Stuart Edmunds, Sue Smith, Oliver Greenall & Josh Guerriero, Chris Gordon, Emma Lavelle, S R B Crawford,

Other things you can try.

You could add a rule that only shows handicap or non handicap races and see if that makes a difference. You could also look into maybe the top 5 from each list in more detail and see if race distance changes things, or even certain jockeys.

All of which and much more can be used on the Inform Racing system builder.