Umrum,

On your point of "risking more than your prepared" I have found that once you work it out you find that the risk with the shorter priced horses is a lot lower for a given return (assuming you are getting a decent POT).

Just an illustration of what I am talking about:

Lets say we have two systems:
A favourites system with a strike rate of 60% and ave. div. of $2.00 which gives us a POT of 20%
A longshots system with a strike rate of 10% and ave. div of $12.00 which also gives a POT of 20%

(Note - I selected the above just to illustrate the point - same logic applies if you use say 20% SR and $6.00 ave div to the second system - the difference just isn't as dramatic).

Now lets say we have a betting bank of $1000, we are betting level stakes, and we want to be 99.5% confident that a run of outs will not bankrupt us.

With a 60% strike rate the longest run of outs, with 99.5% confidence level, is 6.
With a 10% strike rate the longest run of outs, with same confidence level is 29.

This means with the 60% stike rate we can set our bet size at $167
With the 10% SR then the bet size is $34.
(of course this is a bit simplistic as it only looks at a single run of outs, not worst drawdown position - in reality I would probably halve each of these figures for safety).

Now the 60% SR system is very selective so lets say we get 3 bets/week. The expected profit per week is therefore $167 * 20% * 3 = $100

To make $100 out of our longshots on average we would need to make roughly 15 bets per week (so 5 times as many) so we can already see there is more work involved.

But what about risk? The chance of a week with NO WINNERS under each system is:

favourites: 0.4 ^ 3 = 6.4% (or roughly 1 in 16 weeks)
Longshots: 0.9 ^ 15 = 20.6% (or roughly 1 in 5 weeks)

To me that clearly shows the risk is higher with the longshots - you are going to have much more variability in your results and many more "losing" weeks. Of course you will get bigger winning weeks too so I guess it depends whether you are happy to lose more often for that occassional big week or if you would rather have a very consistant steady winning income.