This paper develops strategies for operating Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) on the Secondary Balancing Power (SBP) market in Germany. Various control reserve market scenarios with participating BESS were simulated for the years 2016 and 2017. Within the simulation, the submitted bids of the SBP auction as a well as the BESS operation strategy have been optimized with regard to maximizing the economic revenues. The simulation makes use of an SBP power price prediction based on a SARIMA model and implements a battery model for lithium-ion batteries providing the aging status and an incremental cost breakdown for a specific operation strategy. With current battery and electricity market prices, the simulation reveals that it is not economically beneficial to provide SBP with a standalone battery. This is mainly due to the high requirements for SBP with respect to the power-to-energy ratio and operation strategy. The simulation further implies that a BESS operating in a pool is possibly economically viable as the restrictions for the power-to-energy ratio do not apply. The value of BESS in a pool is subject to the pool’s precise configuration which prohibits a general statement regarding financial viability.