Sunday evening I wrote simple LookUpBot script just as the sample for Eric to show him how to use the horse form in a bot script. I did not have a time to test it as I am working on two bigger projects at a moment. The bot was really meant only for education purposes. I run it today and the results were quite promising at least for today. From 20 races there were 2 loss trades. What are your experiences with using the horse form? Just for testing the source code is on my blog.
Stefan, which charting components do you use in your app? I'm currently using ZedGraph because it mostly does the job and is free, but doesn't look quite as 'polished' as yours. Just curious!
It is Dundas chart.
Back in the 1970's there was a weekly publication called the Sporting Chronicle Handicap Book (later taken over by Raceform). I used to get it for the detailed results section, but the back pages were given over to a letters forum on betting systems. Bearing in mind that this was before computers were widely available, most of these 'systems' were fairly rudimentary in nature, but a good proportion were based on the string of form figures. I never saw one which worked then, and haven't found one since.
The basic reason is that raw form figures encode a very small amount of very low-quality information about a horse's ability - almost any other commonly available indicator is better (official handicap mark, speed figures, newspaper ratings, PostMark and especially Timeform rating).
I have seen all sorts of clever methods for manipulating form strings, but the basic rule of 'garbage in, garbage out' holds good - not only is the encoded information low-quality, but it is subsumed into the other measures anyway (OK, straight speed figures are an exception to that). This means that by the time a market forms, any information contained in the form string is fully incorporated into the price - if a manipulation of the string seems to suggest otherwise, it is because the price incorporates additional, probably higher grade, information.
This argument holds true for all the other ability measures as well, of course - just to a lesser degree.
I started this discussion because the bot implementation in this case is very easy and does not involve the market prices as qualify factor for selecting a horse as it is/was in all bespoke solutions I developed before. I run the solution for three days with different settings. The first day in the trading mode, in the second day with simply laying strategy, and tomorrow in supervision mode, I checked positions manually closing it in two cases when favorites under 2.0 were selected, all that in practice mode as I take this approach just for educational purposes. All three days were profitable. The same solution was run by three customers maybe with the same settings as with the original source code, so I am curious with what results. In the following days if I find some spare time I will try to run it with different settings and strategies: trading, dutching and laying selections.
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