Five racing beliefs,
put under pressure.
What happened when we tested some of racing's most repeated assumptions against the market that had already priced them.
Some survived. Some did not. We kept both.
Everybody watches the favourite.
Across 60,671 races with one clear favourite, it won 35% of the time and lost 65%.
That is not an indictment of favourites. It is roughly what their price implies, and the market is very good at this. The useful part is what it does to the next question: if the best horse in the race loses about two times in three, the interesting information is rarely "which one is best". It is what the race is going to ask of it.
Favourite wins 35.0% · does not win 65.0% · n = 60,671
Measured60,671 races · 95% CI 34.6% to 35.3%Most likely does not mean likely. The favourite loses about two races in three.Read the full study →
Short prices are where the value hides.
Short-priced favourites do win more often. They also cost more, by almost exactly the right amount.
We split favourites by price band and compared what each band actually did against what its price implied. The win rate climbs as the price shortens, which is what you would expect. What we could not find was a band where the horses were systematically better than the number attached to them.
The market prices favourites about as well as the outcome data can measure.
Related: Why do favourites lose?
Market already accounted for it60,671 races · five BSP bandsActual tracks what the price implied, band by band, across the whole range.Read the full study →
Follow the money.
The money is real. What it tells you that the final price does not is the part we could not make stand up.
Prices genuinely move, and favourites move roughly twice as far as the rest of the field in the last hour before the off. We recorded our own timestamped market snapshots to measure it properly rather than reconstructing it afterwards.
Then we compared horses that had shortened against horses that had drifted, at the same final price. The advantage disappeared. What looked like a signal about steamers turned out to be a fact about which price band they ended up in.
Related: How much does the market still move before the off?
No reliable effect foundMarket-movement studyMoney moving for a horse did not survive being measured against the price it moved to.Read the full study →
Good form finds good horses.
It does. The market has usually noticed too.
Strong recent form is genuinely predictive. When we held the final price constant and asked whether form still added information, most of what it was telling us had already been absorbed into the price by the time the stalls opened.
Form is right and the price is right. That is an awkward combination if you were hoping one would beat the other.
Related, on a different corpus: Do horse racing ratings work?
Market already accounted for it2,487 racesForm, measured as the top-rated runner on our morning rating, is real information. The market has already absorbed it by the off.See the evidence figure →
The draw decides it.
Sometimes it matters enormously. As a standalone edge it died under test.
Badly drawn horses do underperform in the right conditions. But when we tested the draw on its own as a way of beating the market, on held-out races it returned a clean null. We killed the idea and kept the record of killing it.
Draw still matters to us, but only in combination with pace, position and course shape. Never on its own.
Related: What is pace in horse racing?
No reliable effect foundn = 477 held-out racesDraw bias is real in the right conditions. Taken on its own as a way to beat the price, it returned a clean null on races the method had never seen. A small sample, and not a claim that the draw does not matter.Read the full study →
So what is left?
The race around the horse is where the open question now sits: can any of that structure be read before the off in a way the price has not already absorbed? Nothing here claims it can. That is what Elite Pass is built to test, race by race, against the closing price.
Related: What is race shape in horse racing?
Three of these five did not work.
Most people in racing show you the ideas that survived. We keep the ones that died, in a public record, because an idea that fails tells you where not to look next. It is also the only honest way to ask someone to trust the ones that lived.
Related: Do racing systems work?
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