Welcome to yet another slightly delayed Newletter.
A couple of things for this issue, mostly to do with the bot, but there are are a couple of portfolios highlighted here which could easily be used by those who are using the ratings manually.
This issue was prompted because an update to the UK Horse Racing bot was released last night.
Due to a security update on the host server, from where the data is housed, there has had to be a new version of the Bot built with the correct security settings.
It is definite that version 81 won't work. Version 82 may work, though it may not work for much longer, so everyone is advised to upgrade to version 83/
To download the latest version of the UK Horse Racing Bot please use the following link within your Internet Explorer browser,
http://www.ie-software.com/downloads/UKHR/Setup-UKHR.msi.
It is imperative that Internet Explorer is used to download this update. Using browsers such as Chrome or Firefox will only result in errors and only a half installed package.
This is one of my favourite little portfolios which just ticks away with a decent strike rate and has been known to pull out a decent priced winner every now and then.
Over the past 140 days this little portfolio has produced 112 points profit with a strike rate of 22% with 33 wins from 152 runs. So, there's just about one run a day.
The selection process is nice and simple; just find any horses which are marked Tom Jones-2 in the ratings or from the Members' Area. The only filtering here in my Tom Jones-2 portfolio is that I don't back these odds on.
This one has a nice strike rate so that I can dare have a little more on this one than the others.
Over the past 300 days these have had 156 runners, so one every second day on average. Of these there's been 61 winners giving a strike rate of 39%, a profit of 42 pts and an ROI of 27%.
These tick over ever so gently and these are well worth having in every set of portfolios. The manual selection systems are simple; and UKHR-1 selection horse within Great Britain (i.e. not Ireland) and no flat racing. I have the maximum price of these set at 6.8 for the smoothness of the profit curve.
This one has a slightly lower strike rate of 10%, so the graph is a little lumpier. But with a current ROI of 48% after 42 days with 20 winners from 202 runners giving a profit of 97 points, one can live with that.
The manual rules for these are straightforward. Any TrForm underscored horse, which has no other underscores, in Flat Handicaps or Chase Handicaps and not within Ireland.
The profit for these are, as I have mentioned 97 points. However, this afternoon we have had another good priced winner which isn't included in these results; this was Western Pride who nicely won the 5.40 Worcester backed by our members at 95 and 100.
A recent web page showing of all my logs and portfolio charts (13th August, 2010) have been uploaded here: http://www.ukhorseracing.co.uk/UKHRBot/SampleCharts/BotGraphs.html.
The actual spreadsheet showing the full logs can be downloaded from http://www.ukhorseracing.co.uk/UKHRBot/UKHR_Log_2010_08_14__070023__EXPORT.zip
Please do download this Excel spreadsheet (the format is Excel 97 onwards) and have a look around at the various portfolios employed.
Bot users who wish to have these portfolios may download http://www.ukhorseracing.co.uk/UKHRBot/mksPortfolios20100814.zip. Non bot users are more than welcome to ask for the rules of any of these portfolios which may take their fancy.
Whilst I am more than happy to give any member the rules for any portfolio that I have I am going to make life easier for everyone by writing a small application which will take any portfolio XML file and then it will make a human readable set of rules for each portfolio within that file.
I expect work to start on this over the next few days and, providing that nothing gets in the way, then this should be ready for use shortly. If nothing else this will be more than useful for those who don't have the bot who wish to see what is being selected. And, of course, it will be useful for bot users to keep a track of what's in their portfolios and in their chums'.
This version of the bot logger, version 1.13, is the latest version of the Excel spreadsheet which logs the bot's peformance.
There are two versions of this spreadsheet, an Excel 97 version and the latest format for Excel 2007 and onwards.
The whole idea of this tool is to gather the logs from all the bots automatically. No more going around copy and pasting stuff from the bots' CSV files into a spreadsheet - this tool does it all.
The Summary Page
The Summary Page is where the various parameters for the logging spreadsheet are set and where one fires off one of three actions via the buttons and, finally, has a summary overview of each of the bots.
In the above example, there are nine bots. They are called ODIN, HERMES, HELBLINDI and so on and we can see their overall performance.
In the grey section the name of the bot is important because there has to be a worksheet tag of the same name, where the data for that bot is placed. Additionally there has to be a path to where the bot's daily files are dumped.
Further information on setting up the spreadsheet can be found here on the download page, http://www.ukhorseracing.co.uk/UKHRBot/UKHorseRacingBot6Downloads.asp.
The Days Ago section describes how many points each bot won or lost in the three last days.
To the right are some parameters which are to be set. The P/L ranges are for the portfolio reports and at the moment anything making more than 25 points in a 'period' is indicated with a green 'light'. Anything losing more than 25 points in the same 'period' is indicated with a pink coloured 'light'. Stuff which falls in the middle is marked with a blue 'light'. The colours and the value of these ranges can be changed here but the colours have been chosen for those with colour blindness issues.
The 'Hot List' section isn't implemented yet so no further reference will be made to it here. For analysis on low priced horses a figure is given which determines which aer low priced horses, here we've said that 15.0, or lower, is deemed to be a low priced horse.
In the same manner, evening races are considered here to be those which go off at 17:59 or later. In other words, the six o'clock race is an evening race.
The "History Interval" is that 'period' which has been referred to earlier. When the 'lights' are assigned a colour, depending on their profitablily, this is the interval (in days) which is considered. So, if a portfolio makes over 25 points in the last 30 days then we would give it a green 'light'.
Lastly, the "Min Port Graphs" tells the spreadsheet how many races a portfolio has to have before a graph is made. Here we have decided on 50 being the minimum.
There are three buttons on the front of this spreadsheet, the first is the 'Update' button. This is the one which gathers the data from the bots, assembles the data and then inserts it into the log file in the correct sheet. Then all the relevant calculations are made for the various sheets, such as, for example, the sheet which only considers handicaps and then finally all the bots graphs are made and a page opens in a browser with a summary of each bot.
A Summary Graph of one of the Bots, in this case Odin over 303 days.
The "Safe Export" button simply strips all the staking and bet profit/loss information (at least only those concerned with actual monetary values) and saves the spreadsheet under a different name. This is so that one can pass the spreadsheet around and still no-one will have any idea of what sort of stakes you are using.
The last button, "Portfolio Graphs", produces a graph for each portfolio in each bot as long as there's more than the minimum number of runs for that portfolio. Then they are all displayed in a page within the user's browser. This step runs a number of times; first the full overview of each portfolio in chart format, then each one in handicaps, stakes, each of the five race types and then one for racing within BG and one racing in Ireland.
This is a good way in order to see which portfolio is performing well, where it's performing the best and where things aren't working at all.
This sheet quite simply displays an overview of every portfolio within each bot.
Listing a summary of every portfolio in each bot.
This Portfolios sheet simply gives an overview of every portfolio. The first column tells us the name of the bot where it lives, the next five columns are the profitability 'lights' which tell us how that portfolio are performed, in a crude manner, over the last five intervals with the latest being to the right.
Then in the block to the right, columns I to M, show the overall result of the portfolio in terms of runs, wins, profit/loss, strike rate and ROI and it comes with its own profitability light, in column H.
The next block is the same information but only for those bets which got on with 'value price'. This will give the user an idea whether it's best to go for value prices or for all prices. The third block along is the opposite; this tells us how it would have got on if we only looked at low priced selections for that portfolio. The low price is defined, as you may recall, on the Summary sheet.
The next two blocks, only one is partially visible, gives us the information for daytime racing and evening racing. Again, we've defined 6pm onwards for the evening watershed.
Then there's a pile of sheets where all this is repeated again for the same portfolios; but looking in Handicaps, Stakes, Flat, Hurdle and so on.
For each of the bots there's a sheet where the data is inserted and analysed by the 'Update' button.
Part of the logged data for one bot, in this case for Hera.
These sheets are where the data is automatically updated and where the calculations come from. The user also has the ability to filter on the fields in order to do his or her own analysis.
The reason why this tool was developed was simply because I found it hard to cope with the logging system that I had which was manual and painful to do each day. So, I started off with a simple spreadsheet which gathered data and then, as time went on, bits of funcionality were added.
The proof of the pudding? I simply can't live without this and various members have described it as indispensible and this tool has certainly helped me get better profits.
If you are using the bot then, please, use this tool.
This spreadsheet is continually being updated. So if you have any suggestions as to how it could be improved then please contact me.
This was announced in a previous newsletter, but it's worth repeating.
This is a small application which we are continually developing but it's a simple way to keep track of one's account levels during the day.
It is especially useful for those who use any bots, be it the UK Horse Racing bot or any other automatic betting application. For example, if one has a number of bots running on different machines then one could run this application on one's main machine and then see how they are doing throughout the day without getting up and running from computer to computer. For example, I have nine computers here at The Sheep Shed all running the UK Horse Racing bot, and I now can keep track of what's going on without having to leave my seat.
Another feature of this application is that it can send eMails at pre-programmed intervals to any eMail address. This is particularly useful for those with mobile phones are who are away at the workplace and wish to get regular eMail updates. This application is also useful for those who have eMail facilities at work and don't mind receiving such updates there.
Lastly, the Betfair Accounts application dumps the end of day totals to a .csv file so that a daily log of the account totals are maintained.
This application is free to use for anyone running a Windows computer. It will be continually improved and updated. The current version is 0.14. Further details can be found here, http://www.ukhorseracing.co.uk/tools/BFAccounts.asp.
I would like to point out that the only communication from this application is with the Betfair exchanges and no data is sent anywhere else.
That's all for now for this newsletter. So, until the next time, see you in the short queue.
Yours sincerely,
The UK Horse Racing Team
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