Re: Good job on the ROTW (472 Views)
Date: December 07, 2004 04:54PM
CTC,
I like to seperate the horses into contenders and non-contenders and then rank the contenders in order of preference.
I give the non-contenders a percentage as a group that is dependent on how many contenders there are, how many non-contenders there are, and how dreadful they actually are relative to the contenders.
Then I assign percentages to the contenders that reflect their order of preference and the margins between them.
Then I tinker with the numbers until it equals 100% and reflects my feelings.
I prefer betting the horses high on the list if there are mutiple similar overlays because they have a higher probability of winning (avoids losing streaks) and because when you are assigning low probabilities it's easier to screw up big time.
If I assign a horse 25% and he's really 20% I'm not going to screw up much as long as I require a decent margin of safety in the odds before betting. (say 9-2 or 5-1)
If I assign a horse 8% and he's really 5% (an easy mistake to make) I would wind up betting on underlays from time to time even if I had a bit of a margin of safety. So with these longer shots I require a bigger margin of safety.
I often pass races even when a horse is an overlay on my line because it isn't "enough of an overlay" to give me the required margin of safety. This tends to keep my ROIC very high, but it requires a lot of patience. I pass many races.