www.ukhorseracing.co.uk / www.weakfavourites.co.uk
Yet again, a slight delay with the monthly newsletter. It's been a year since the last one and, this time, I will refrain from the usual promises that this will be more frequent though it has become very regular.
There's been a lot of developments since the last newsletter and a lot more things are in the pipeline which are either almost completed or are almost started. As usual our To-Do List is longer than Santa's list so some of these things will take time.
Anyway, let's go through a few things.
To celebrate the Festival this year we are again running a free to enter tipping competition.
The competition, and details, can be found at http://www.ukhorseracing.co.uk/CheltenhamFestival2007/default.asp.
There is a small prize again for the winner and if there is a decent turnout then the place positions will be rewarded with other small prizes.
The rules are fairly simple, before the first race of each day we each post our selections onto the site for that day's meeting. At the end of the day Mark, who has kindly volunteered to be the adjudicator, will work out the scores and then post them up. It's as simple as that.
Because we produce the ratings it will be bad form if I don't go and select the top rated in each race for my own entries. I haven't won yet but neither have I made a loss in any of these competitions and have come close to winning some of the last few competitions. This time I do wish to win as I do want to keep the prize here this time.
To register one goes to the link above and create an account name. This data is held on a separate database to any of our of data and there is no cross-reference to it whatsoever. So even if you subscribe to one of the services you will still need to register for the compeition. And as usual we don't do anything with the data entered; we don't look at it, we don't sell it - all we do is just let it lay fallow.
Which, perhaps, is a good time to explain our eMail policy.
We never give out any information regarding any of the accounts or eMail addresses registered with us. We don't give away eMail addresses, we don't sell them and we don't swap them with anyone. And we don't ever mail out on behalf of anyone else or for their products. Believe me, we've been asked many times to sell on our address list and each time each request has politely, but firmly, being refused.
So, what I am saying that your details will be kept in the strictest of confidence.
Our new laying system, LOST, is being manually posted daily on the Weak Favourites site and is one which is creating much interest and it is now the central laying system of my betting portfolio.
The initial figures of what it would have returned to SP last year can be seen on the Weak Favourite's Products Page. Using the figures from last year it would have created 278 points to SP in the last 13 months.
These figures aren't ours by the way; they are from a technically savvy subscriber, Holmes, going back through our archive ratings since February 2006 and calculating this for himself.
Even if one couldn't get to lay at SP but had to lay at 20% over SP and with a 5% commission charge the profit would have been a healthy 80 points. But quite often it's easy to lay these horses at less than SP.
If last year's figures are anything to go by then we can expect these to take off in the next month. The automatic upload of these selections is the next thing on my work list and should be completed sometime this week so that it goes onto the Weak Favourite site automatically each evening.
Another system which has developed a recent strong interest is the MarkPor-2 backs.
These are specifically designed to be a high strike rate (alas a low price) system which according to back figures is promising.
An independent back test (from 22nd January, 2006) with our archive ratings show the following:
Win: 89 / 283 selections for +77.8 points profit
Strike Rate of 31.4%
ROI: 27%
With figures such as that and a half decent staking system it's not a surprise why this system is eagerly anticipated. Again this is posted manually daily however it will be coded up this week to go onto the UK Horse Racing site automatically each evening.
We daily put out a list of horses which look interesting because they have strong positive figures in a high proportion of fields and contain no negative numbers.
The idea of this list was to make this a starting point for further analysis. And it turns out that someone has.
Further details can be seen in our Systems Pages. Needless to say that this has also gone into people's portfolios as well.
Due to an horrendous database failure last year in which we lost lots of results data we decided to bite the bullet and rework the results code.
Now every system which we write and upload automatically is saved in a results database on the web servers. This new code, which took us longer to write than anticipated, now means that when we develop something new we don't have to worry about coding the results it's all done as a part of the daily data flow.
The advantage of this can be seen in our new Results pages on the UK Horse Racing and Weak Favourites sites. They aren't completed yet as we have to do a little more work on them over the next week or two.
However if one looks at these pages one can see that the offer filtering opportunities for experimentation.
These pages are not yet complete as there's more work to be done. For example we all know that the prices on the exchanges are better than SP, more so at the higher end of the market. So there is going to be a multiplier in there so that one can say add, say 10% to the SP, to get an idea of the result.
This is not going to be an exact science but it will be useful for those who want to know what happens if one backs or lays at, say, 20% more than SP.
The results pages should be up and running in the next few days when, no doubt, someone will think of other ideas for the results pages.
As you may know we have two web sites, UK Horse Racing and Weak Favourites. We are in the process of migrating them from one web host to another. We've already migrated Weak Favourites to a reputable host in the South East of England and we are planning to move the UK Horse Racing site this summer elsewhere.
The reason for the migration was that our current host had become unreliable and it was decided that moving at least one site would be a good idea so that we could at least get some of the information out.
We've also bought some server space over in Canada where the ratings archives will be stored. This, as you can imagine, is going to take a lot of disk space (and a lot of bandwidth moving it all across) but then we then should be able to make the archive ratings available for all to examine.
The plan is for sometime this year for both sites to merge together so that one account subscription covers the Weak Favourites and the UK Horse Racing selections.
More news on this later on.
That's all for now for this newsletter. We do hope to have another one coming out again shortly. But I do hope that this gives you a little idea of what we're doing behind the scenes. In the meantime, I have some more code to fix I seemed to have improved something last night which stopped one of the pages on the site displaying though, thankfully, the XML is still available for download.
So until the next time, see you in the short queue.
Yours sincerely,
The UK Horse Racing Team
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