I would be absolutely shocked if Benter/his ilk were not creating their own figures, whether actually or effectively (in other words, they may be combining a number of attributes into their formula that would serve as the basis for performance figures without actually producing a figure).

Any information that is publicly available isn't often very valuable - everyone has it after all.

Take the example of NFL injury reports: unless you can get them before they're publicly available, then you just know what everyone else knows and the line moves accordingly. There's no value in having that information when everyone else has it too, you have to either get it earlier than others do, or do something with it that others can't (in this case, Benter takes the publicly available information regarding exotic will-pays, and his software tells him where the inefficiencies are, so he's doing something with publicly available information that others aren't doing, thereby creating some value).

(This is why TGs are valuable, IMO - we get to have some information that most people don't have!)

What he describes in terms of reviewing the previous performances of each horse sounds to me like making performance figures - reviewing times, weight carried, distance traveled, etc. Then they go further and include things like class/competition/jockey performance, and apply a regression to weight more recent performances more heavily (something the Sartin school believed in, in a sort of rough-and-ready way).