Morning News

Good morning...

Yesterday might have been a quiet day as far as the racing went but I managed to get loads of work done.

As a result, I am getting a bit behind with my emails (once again.)

And I want to talk to you about that.

Now, the results from yesterday were pretty Kak (that's a term from my IT days in London, before I saw the light and jacked in a perfectly good, and well paid, job to move to France to become a peasant; it sort of means sh*t!)

Interesting enough, the French common term for poo is Kaka...

But, before we get too distracted by colloquial linguistics, let's look at yesterday's results.

Yesterday's Results

Yesterday's Results, show a strike rate (for our top rated horse) of just 15%.

Now, that's a pretty bad strike rate but I'm not stressed about it as, last December, we had an average strike rate (for our top rated horse) of 23.03% and, so far, this December we are running at 29.18%.

We have good days and we have bad days.

Currently we have far more good days than bad days but...

If I could predict which day was going to be good (and which was going to be not so good), then I'd be a rich man!

Forecasts

There were no forecasts yesterday.

Tricast

There were no tricasts yesterday.

Winners

From the 21 rated races there were 8 winners (from the top 3 rated horses) - only two of those were at anything like a decent price.

Course	Time	Horse	ISP	BSP
Uttoxeter	12:20	Abigail Lynch	9.0	11.0
Uttoxeter	12:50	Top Totti	13.0	16.54

Comments...

If I can waffle (with a big smile on my face) about those days when we do well...

I ought to waffle (albeit, without the smile) about those days when we do... Kak.

So here goes...

1). Uttoexter 12:20 - We got the top three, unfortunately not in the right order.

2). Uttoxeter 12:50 - Our top rated horse won at 13.0 ISP (16.54 BSP.)

3). Utoxeter 13:50 - This race wasn't rated as I could only rate one of the 6 horses. The horse that I could rate (and, thus, our top rated runner) was Key to the West who went on to win at 5.5ISP (5.98 BSP.)

4). Fontwell 14:10 - We got the top three, unfortunately not in the right order.

5). Fontwell 15:40 - In the last race of the day our second rated horse was a non-runner. The Live Ratings promoted our 3rd aretd horse to 2nd rated and brought in Back by Midnight as the new 3rd rated horse. Back by Midnight went on to come second.

I'm not really sure what I can say about yesterday's dismal performance; I could try to come up with some excuses but I guess that the best thing to say is...

I'm sorry.

The Portfolio

There was a Banker's Bet yesterday (but not a Chancer's Bet)

Our Banker's Bet was....

AW Handicap Claimers - Season Proper - where R4 Status = 1 and where Race Type = All Weather and where the Race is a Claimer and where the Race is a Handicap Race and the Month is January or the Month is February or the Month is March or the Month is April or the Month is October or the Month is November or the Month is December

Selection = Back to ISP - Southwell - 12:00:00 - Spitfire

Races (over last year): 16 Wins: 6 Strike Rate: 37.5% ROI: 192.38% AV SP: 5.13%

Unfortunately, Spitfire didn't win.

On the Portfolio Page there is now a link to the Banker's Bet Proofing Page and, also to the Chancer's Bet proofing page.

You may subscribe to my Portfolio. To do so, you need to go to your Members Page and change option 4 on the Your Profile bit.

If you haven't subscribed, the button will say Yes - just click on it and you'll be signed up.

Any other business

And finally...

Winter Upgrades

I've written a post to detail the Winter Upgrades - you can see it here... Winter Upgrades

I am updating that post to show which upgrades have been implemented and, where possible, to indicate when I think that an upgrade may be implemented.

So, to quickly summarise yesterday's work...

UPG006 – The Members page will be redesigned to make it easier to use. I shall also paginate the part of the page that shows your systems so that it loads faster.

I have fixed the pagination problem and, thus, am marking this upgrade as complete.

UPG009 – I’m going to redesign the morning ratings email to make it easier to understand.

This has now been done but I haven't changed to the new format yet.

Please scroll down to the bottom of today's Ratings Email and take a look at what the new format email will look like - it's the section underneath the line.

It might be an idea to make a note of the number of the format of the ratings that you currently download so that you can find it in the new format email.

Tomorrow I shall swap the Ratings Email round so that the new format is shown at the top of the email and the old format is shown below the line at the bottom of the email.

I'll keep it like that for a few days and then I'll delete the old format ratings.

Of course, as always, I'll keep you informed about what I'm doing.

Dutching

I've produced a new spreadsheet and am working on it but...

It's slow work.

For once, it's not me that's being slow and stupid - it's just that I don't have enough IT computation power at my fingertips to crunch the numbers.

I'm hoping that I'll have some good news for you about this tomorrow morning.

Speed Ratings

Thank you for your feedback about the best way to approach Speed Ratings.

The initial stage of the work has been completed but I won't be doing any more work on it until the weekend.

Words of Wisdom

One member has kindly taken it upon himself to educate me in one area of horse racing and, even more kindly...

He has allowed me to publish his words of wisdom on the site.

I have just published Episode one and you can see it here... The Missing Link.

Zero inbox email policy

Now, I read something, a few weeks ago, about how to manage your email.

And I guess that most of you know that I certainly need help on that front.

All emails that come into Focus Ratings get stored on our server.

Jill & I both use desktop email clients (we use Thunderbird) to download those emails.

Jill handles all the admin stuff so, if an admin type email comes in, I just delete it.

That just leaves me with the emails that I need to handle.

As soon as I reply to an email, I delete it (after all, I've still got a copy of my reply and the original email in my sent folder.)

That way, my inbox doesn't fill up and, if you run a service based business, a full inbox can be quite scary.

However, the crux of the Zero Inbox Policy is that you don't answer emails immediately.

You choose 3 times a day to deal with emails and one of those is your primary email time.

I check my emails at 5am, at 12pm and at 6pm.

And that's all.

I do watch out for the Ratings emails (and the System Builder emails) just to make sure that they have happened but, they now seem to be happening automatically so that's a bit of a pointless exercise.

My primary email time is at 5am.

I guess that what I'm trying to say is that I've finally got my emails under control but...

If you send me an email, there's a pretty good chance that I won't reply until the early hours of the next day.

Today

Today I shall doing more work on Dutching.

I really need to get this finished before I move on to other things (such as Forecasts and Tricasts.)

I also need to write some code so that I can work out Standard Speed times for different distances over different courses over different going and class.

And that will probably have me tearing my hair out and...

From about six o'clock in the morning...

Counting the minutes (and maybe even the seconds) until Wine O'Clock!

I have just run the early test ratings and they show 32 rated races from five meetings.

In the 12:50 at Hexham our top rated horse, Ballyboker Breeze, has a confidence level of 200% and is the Trainer's only horse at the meeting. However, he has fallen twice in the last five races.

In the 15:20 at Hexham our third rated horse, Mohawk Ridge, has lousy form but is dropping in class. He has a good confidence level of 97.89%, has won twice on Heavy going (and been placed 3 times.) There's something that catches my eye about his rating.

Well, I guess it's time for breakfast for me, and then on to work...

Have a great day's racing!

Once again, if you've got anything to say about Focus Ratings, please wander over to Focus Ratings Review and have your say.

As always...

My kindest regards