Hi DN.
Many thanks for your detailed response containing tons of valuable insights for those of us who are tuned in to your methodology to a degree.
Thanks for the tip on Excel statistical analysis, it's something I'll check out in more depth.
I've started to adopt some of your ideas on money management by looking at linking strategies - though of course, for us to do this successfully, we first need to create individual strategies (and to do that we need to understand how to "filter the crap" out our strategies lol). Regarding setting targets for individual strategies, I had two running today on UK dogs and could have comfortably taken a profit of £20 for each of them and stopped at that, though leaving them to run gave me £5 less. Interestingly had I stopped the strategies at 8pm (1-2 hours before the end of UK racing) then I'd have made an extra £20. Is market timing something you consider?
Favourites in UK horse races tend to win more in earlier races - is this a bias which is seen in AU horse races? I see that the AU and NZ races helpfully have R1, R2 etc. in the market description, so if we wanted to bet on favourites in early races it's straightforward to filter.
Also, you may have noticed that I have in my spreadsheet a view of all the favourites odds. I did this because you mentioned some time earlier that we need to look at the market structure. I thought that formatting the data like that would have made particular market structures jump out - such as F1 and F2 at very close odds, would suggest a clash of the titans and the chance of any other dog getting a look in is minimal. Again I found I was overwhelmed by the data and couldn't see the wood for the trees (if it was there in the first place!).
I totally agree with you on staking being important - from what I've seen, different staking plans are suited to the distribution of winners. One staking plan might do very well with results such as WWWWLWWLLWW, though a completely different one would be more suited to LLLLLWLLLLLWL (where the winning odds are large). What we need to avoid is applying staking to a poor strategy so that it looks good - at some point that will bite us (speaking from experience lol).
Your observations on long distance GH I remember you mentioning some time ago and it surprised me, because I was thinking of UK horse races where favourites typically win flat short distance races whereas the longer jumps introduce all sorts of uncertainty which allows outsiders to win and made the incorrect assumption that distance with dogs and horses would show similar biases.
Ah - the boxes (traps) issue...I've been caught out in the past more times than I would have liked, laying traps which were showing a low % of winners over the year to date. The issue with this is that, typically for a while I would have loads of profits, then suddenly one day everything changed and I had loads of losses which kept mounting up until I had to ditch the strategy. What appeared to be happening here was a simple "regression to mean". I looked back through previous years' trap performance and realised that the win % of each was very similar - this meant that when a particular trap was underperforming, at some point it would need to catch up with the others so that they all end up with the same win % at the end of the year. Having said that, there do seem to be some more consistent trap biases in AU 8 dog races than we're used to seeing in UK 6 dog races - I'm thinking F1 and F2 normally doing well in Traps 1 and 2.
Another filter I've considered using is the venue - though for both UK and AU dogs I've not found anything consistent. UK horses I need to look at next because we even have a saying "horses for courses" which must suggest some sort of bias! I've noticed that AU dogs venues often have unique tracks, in particular the distances - so maybe when you're looking at tight ranges of distance, you're actually looking at similar types of races at a bunch of venues?
Anyway - thanks again for all your help
![Smile :)](./images/smilies/icon_e_smile.gif)
Time for more research for me...perhaps tomorrow though as it's getting late now.