The trick in business is to find a niche market. Something that most people aren’t doing. That way you get a market segment all to yourself and you can then exploit it for all it’s worth. In Racing it’s no different. People are constantly emailing us and contacting us to seek the golden grail. In doing so they usually find a winning factor that they expect will lead to riches.

Mostly, the winning factor does point to more winners but at a sadly reduced average dividend. This is the problem. We have to look for the area that most people don’t look at, and here’s one example.

Horses rising steeply in class. We recently ran a study of some 500 races and isolated those top rated selections that were racing a races where the prizemoney was at least $10,000 more than the prizemoney for their last race. The strike rate was very poor at just 15% or about one winner in six. The profit returned on these selections was, on the other hand, very, very good. You can see that informed judges would look at the strike rate and determine that the chances of a win were indeed very slight and then they would pass in favour of a horse racing closer to its true class.

On the other hand, horses where the prizemoney factor went the other way, were much more likely to win, in fact the strike rate was better than one in four. The average dividend, though, was dramatically less. A loss of worse than 20% resulted.

In the past year, Winform has rated over 8,000 races. Horses that were priced at 8/1 or better and were top rated by our computer program and assessed by our form analysts, only won slightly more than one race in twenty. It’s a punters worst nightmare with losing runs frequent and extended but here’s the bottom line.

Backing top rated horses that were at 8/1 or longer in the betting market resulted in a regular and sustained profit.

As we said earlier. We are always being approached to advise people how to make a profit. There is nothing easier than the above approach. It just takes patience. We suggest that you invest only $1 for each $100 you have available. At one stage there was a run of just 3 winners out of 84 bets, yet a profit was still made. This year (1998/99), winners prices have been as high as $71.00 for a $1 investment and last season one winner paid $141.60.