Showing Strategy?

So, I'm just curious. Every time I show all my horses on "cheapest", (I have auto showing), I get a lot of winnings, but no stat gains. When I choose "Highest entries", I get barely any money, but quite a few horses get stat gains.

Do any of you have a strategy employed that is making you money AND gaining you stats? In the long run, I prefer stats to money, but I'm just curious.

I'm a huge advocate for hand showing whenever possible. I have over 200 horses right now, and almost always manage to hand show them. I get stats hand over fist, and usually make a profit, too.

I choose shows so that, when all my horses are entered, each is in a show with at least five entries. I try to keep the number of horses I enter in any given show to three or less, but sometimes I have to enter more in a show to bring it up to a total of five entries. Given the choice between a more expensive show and a less expensive show, I always choose the more expensive one, because it gives a better payout.

I only use auto showing if I am too rushed to hand show, or if I see that I have enough horses in a level that, if I auto show them all in Least Entries, I will end up with all shows having at least five entries. That happens sometimes in a level with not many shows available.

It is very time consuming, but the result is a pretty reliable income (not huge, but it's something) and the ability to bring a foundation horse up to R1 or R2 by age 16, pretty consistently.

Confessor's method is the best of the bunch and is what I use and in 2 weeks it got my Morgans from Novice 1-Novice 3/4/5!

Based on Confessor's foundation stat gains, I think that's the best method! Blew all of my foundation horses away!

I just show on cheapest because of the sheer amount of horses I have, usually nets me 10-15k of profits and a couple of stats for each horse every day. There's only a couple that have nosedived/seem behind but they're either stores from before the recode, or when the recode started so didn't have all the advantages of stores now, or just appear to be really unlucky like this guy, who should be sitting on 800 stats like his partner Typhoon. He's been treated exactly the same, had similar starting stats etc, so not sure what happened with him. :c

Awesome, thank you everyone!!

I switch it up a bit...i have way too many horses to enter manually..so I alternate days between cheapest , most entries and most expensive...today was most expensive day lol

Maple - I think what made the difference between those two horses was the number of non-specialty stats. Having a high number of those really holds a horse back in showing - it's like dragging dead weight.