Research notes

What the market already knows

Favourites, form, price and money. Mostly the story of how good the market already is, and what that leaves.

• 21 Aug Big fields and what they do to a favourite More runners means more ways to be beaten. That part is true. The awkward part is that the market worked it out before we did.
• 14 Aug Everyone remembers the beaten favourite Short-priced favourites getting turned over feel like events. The wins feel like the default. That asymmetry is memory, not maths.
• 6 Aug What price control did to our best looking ideas I used to think the draw was worth money. Then we held the final price constant and watched idea after idea thin out. Hundreds of systems analysed, none validated.
• 4 Aug The market is very good, so what is left? Everything easy to see is already in the price. What remains is the awkward part: pace, position, course shape, and what a race will actually ask.
• 25 Jul Good form finds good horses, and the market knows Recent form is genuinely predictive. Hold the final price constant and most of what it was telling you has already been absorbed by the off.
• 18 Jul Follow the money, and what happened when we did Steamers really do win more often. Compare them with drifters at the same final price and the whole advantage walks out of the room.
• 9 Jul A real effect and a priced effect are different things Draw bias is real and worthless as a standalone edge, both at once. This is how almost every good racing idea dies, and most people never notice it happening.
• 30 Jun What 60,671 favourites taught me The favourite won 35% and lost 65%. The important part is that this does not make favourites bad bets, and what that leaves you looking for instead.

Reading the race

Pace, position, geometry, field size and separation. The question a race is about to ask of a horse.

• 11 Aug The horse has not changed, the conditions have A horse that ran badly last time usually did not run badly. It was asked a different question, and it answered that one honestly.
• 30 Jul What a rating tells you, and what it cannot A rating is about the horse. A price is about the race. Keeping those two apart turns out to be most of the work.
• 14 Jul Reading the race, not the horse If the best horse loses two times in three, which one is best is rarely the useful question. Here is the one we ask instead, and how we ask it.

Fragility

Behaviour, compressed favourites, conflicting signals, and the races where the right answer is No Read.

• 22 Aug We looked at 57 races and 41 got no read On one race day the read assessed 57 races, scored 16 and refused 41. Exactly one race went the whole way. Here is what refusing a race actually involves.
• 18 Aug What we still cannot see An honest inventory of our blind spots, starting with the big one. No sectional or tracking data in the pre-race picture, and what it would take to fix that.
• 7 Aug Why No Read might be the most useful thing we publish Most racing products must have an opinion on every race. Ours is allowed to say there is nothing here worth reading, and that refusal is the point.

From James

Opinion and argument from the founder. Racing, technology and the things the research cannot settle. Clearly marked as a point of view.

• 25 Aug The bookies aren't afraid of AI. They should be rubbing their hands together. AI is becoming astonishingly good at explaining why a horse might win. That may be exactly why bookmakers have very little to fear.

Building Elite Pass

The founder story, the ideas that failed, and why the record is public.

• 24 Aug What two months of testing actually taught us Three of the first five beliefs we tested did not survive. Here is what lived, what died, and what changed about the question we were asking.
• 22 Jul Why we timestamp our own prices A price you read after the race has already been contaminated by the result. So we write ours down before the off, and never touch them again.
• 4 Jul Why we publish the ideas that failed Three of the first five beliefs we tested died. Keeping the dead ones in public is the only honest way to ask anyone to trust the ones still standing.
• 26 Jun The race that changed the question A friend's horse had everything in its favour at Newmarket. The race went somewhere else entirely, and the question I left with was not about the horse.

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