New Year Hotch Potch - Punterprofits.com

New Year Hotch Potch

A New Year

Hotch Potch

By David Renham

To celebrate the start of 2010 I have decided to explore a variety of different angles rather than focus on one area. The first two pages look at three different trainer angles; pages 3 and 4 focus on the Racing Post Ratings. The data for the article goes back the past eight seasons. Profits are calculated to £1 level stakes; ROI stands for return on investment.

1 - National Hunt Trainers with just one runner at a specific course

When a big trainer just sends only one runner to a specific meeting it is often perceived to be a ‘positive’. Let us see which trainers actually perform well when sending just a sole runner to a course:

Trainer	Wins	Runs	Strike Rate (%)	Profit	ROI (%)
P Nicholls	114	354	32.2	+£24.04	+6.8
N Henderson	165	631	26.1	-£37.82	-6.0
G Swinbank	88	351	25.1	+£24.65	+7.0
D Pipe	62	268	23.1	+£38.51	+14.4
J Fanshawe	23	100	23.0	-£32.36	-32.4
P Hobbs	101	450	22.4	-£74.04	-16.5
J Howard Johnson	27	126	21.4	£8.36	+6.6
G Tuer	12	60	20.0	-£8.27	-13.8
R Waley-Cohen	12	61	19.7	+£15.63	+25.6
Miss H Lewis	11	56	19.6	+£24.00	+42.9
N Richards	83	423	19.6	+£2.85	+0.7
P Haslam	53	271	19.6	-£29.87	-11.0
J O'Neill	105	537	19.6	-£66.20	-12.3
T Tate	33	171	19.3	-£6.06	-3.5
Miss P Robson	27	140	19.3	+£33.50	+23.9

Paul Nicholls tops the list with a near 1 in 3 strike rate. This is a very good effort. It should be noted that when focusing on his runners that are priced 6/1 or bigger, he has produced decent profits – 12 wins from 71 (SR 16.9%) for a profit of £55.50 (ROI +78.2%). I would imagine that this has occurred due to the fact the punters follow the market closely with any Nicholls runner and hence the bigger priced runners may drift as it assumed that these horses are not fancied despite being their only runner at the meeting.

2 - National Hunt Trainers in January / February with runners having their first run of the season

Some trainers are adept at getting their runners fit after a long break / getting debutants fit first time out. Here are the trainers that have done best in terms of strike rate with runners having their seasonal debut in either January or February. ( rest of this section full member only )

3 - ‘Out of form’ National Hunt Trainers

Many punters take an interest in current trainer form. However, trainers that seem ‘out of form’ can perform better than one would think. I have looked at performances of trainers who are on a losing run of 20 or more. Here is what I found: ( rest of this section full member only )

4 - Racing Post Ratings – a study

The Racing Post is now the only horse racing National daily paper. Hence it has a bit of a monopoly and many punters I am sure follow certain tipsters in it. The Racing Post Ratings (formerly known as Postmark) are actually one of the better sets of ratings around. Let us look at the performance of all top rated National Hunt horses in the period of study:

Wins	Runs	Strike Rate (%)	Profit	ROI (%)
7549	29417	25.7	-£2274.74	-7.7

To lose less than 8 pence in every £ at SP is pretty good going. Hence, any top rated National Hunt runner from the Racing Post Ratings is worth close scrutiny. One would hope that we could find some profitable angles.

Looking at time off the track and focusing on runners returning to the track within 7 days sees the top rated runners sneak into profit:

Wins	Runs	Strike Rate (%)	Profit	ROI (%)
595	1884	31.6	+£54.59	+2.9

Not a huge profit but a profit nonetheless. This could doubtless be improved by taking early prices or Betfair.

Let us look at market position next:

Market Position	Wins	Runs	Strike Rate (%)	Profit	ROI (%)
Favourite	5058	13196	38.3	-£847.83	-6.4
2^nd Favourite	1365	5917	23.1	-£98.11	-1.7
3^rd Favourite	551	3530	15.6	-£240.31	-6.8
4^th in betting	278	2267	12.3	-£129.00	-5.7
5^th or bigger in betting	297	4507	6.6	-£959.50	-21.3

The market position in the top 4 combined with being top rated by the Racing Post Ratings has produced some very solid results. Second favourites have performed extremely well to lose less than 2 pence in the £. It looks best to ignore horses that end up 5^th in the betting or higher.

I spent the next few days ploughing through loads of different areas - going, class, race type, age, etc to see if any clear patterns emerged. Unfortunately as with lots of research it failed to find anything worth sharing. Although certain angles improved strike rates and ROIs I still found it difficult to produce meaningful profits.

However, all is not lost as I have developed 2 systems that have proved profitable. So here goes:

5 - System 1 – the out of form system

The results were thus: