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I Do Like Mondays

Day of the week photographed with vintage letterpress characters.This morning I mentioned that we seem to do very well on Mondays.

Now I know that the horse doesn't know which day of the week it is...

Or do they? Is the atmosphere in the yard different on a Sunday? Do the horses pick up on that?

However, one could always ask the question: is it the horse that wins the race or is it the Trainer and Jockey?

Anyway, I have done some basic analysis to see how Mondays have treated us.

I have used data from the 8th of July 2013 up until yesterday (20th of March 2017) - that gives us a good 44 months of data which is a decent point for analysis.

I have only used the top rated horse in each race.

The prices used are BSP with a 5% commission deducted.

Basic Analysis

From the spreadsheet I did some basic analysis and found, to my surprise, that it isn't profitable to blindly back the top rated horse only on Mondays.

There are an average of 28 races a week (it's only Monday that we're looking at, after all) and we have a strike rate of 26.57% with a Loss on stakes of 9.06%

Analysis by Country

I then went on to take a look at whether this differed for Ireland and Britain.

I got the following results...

Country Races Strike Rate POI Races per Week
Irish - non handicaps 449 31.18% 7.73% 2.54
Irish - handicaps 283 18.02% -1.99% 1.66
British - non handicaps 1320 36.36% -8.16% 7.31
British - handicaps 2991 22.37% -12.65% 16.81

Now, the stand out thing is that Irish non handicaps are blindly profitable on Mondays.

There are only 5 races a fortnight and the Profit on Investment isn't wonderful (at 7.73%) but a £10 bet on every Irish non-handicap race on a Monday would give you £8.52 in profits every month (for £110 in stakes.)

I decided to take a closer look at Irish races on Mondays.

Irish Races

Across the board, if you blindly back the top rated horse (handicap and non-handicap) for Irish races on Mondays you get the following figures...

Races = 732
Races per week = 4.2
Strike Rate = 26.09%
Profit on Stakes = 3.97%

However, if you concentrate on the following race types...

Flat Apprentice - non handicap
Flat Maiden - non handicap
F lat (no description) - non handicap
NH Chase Handicap - handicap
NH Chase (no description) - non handicap
NH Flat - NH Flat - non handicap
NH Hurdles Maiden - non handicap

You get the following results...

Races = 405
Races per week = 2.12
Strike Rate = 31.18%
Profit on Stakes = 28.86%

A £10 bet on every top rated horse in the above Irish Races on Mondays would have cost you £92 in stakes and would have given you £24.72 in profits each month.

Now, I don't know if that is a potential strategy for some of you but the numbers don't lie.

Runners

I then moved on to take a look at the effect of number of runners on the results on both British and Irish races.

For all non-handicap races, if you only back the top rated horse (regardless of race type) on a Monday (British and Irish races) where the number of runners is 13 or more, you get the following results...

Races = 333
Races per week = 1.74
Strike Rate = 30.36%
Profit on Stakes = 27.58%

So, for £75 in stakes a month you would have got £20.87 in profit.

Year on Year Analysis

The final thing that I looked at was whether this was a new thing.

I did some analysis on Day of the Week back in 2013 and I didn't notice any bias for Mondays.

I did some more analysis and got the following results.

Year Races Strike Rate POI
2013 643 23.48% -13.99%
2014 1366 26.65% -6.25%
2015 1389 26.78% -3.33%
2016 1424 26.62% -4.56%
2017 221 26.62% 19.29

If you look at the strike rate you can see that it has improved.

Also, the losses have reduced.

The P&L for 2017 is sort of guessed at as, at the moment as we are missing a chunk of BSP figures since the server upgrade. I intend to get these imported this weekend. I have used an average BSP from the 4 previous years. The BSPs (for winning races) from the previous years varies slightly between 3.70 to 3.88.

Conclusion

Now, I would like to say that Focus Ratings has got better...

And, indeed, they are, to a certain extent, self learning.

But, being honest about it, Focus Ratings wouldn't just improve only on Mondays.

What I feel is that, in some way, British and Irish racing has changed over the last 5 years and Mondays have become easier to rate as a result.

I've just checked and Windsor is still doing the Monday night racing so that's not the reason.

Possibly there is more Monday AW racing (and Focus Ratings does well on the AW) becasue we've now got 2 new courses (there's no Monday racing at Dundalk.)

But, to be honest, I'm still confused as to why Mondays have become the hot day of the week.

Still, there are a few potential strategies that allow us to benefit from this, so not all is lost.

I shall be adding the strategies listed above into the Builder to help give us some more Portfolio bets.

The spreadsheet may be downloaded in Excel format from... http://focusratings.com/data/Monday.xlsx

The spreadsheet may be downloaded in OpenOffice/LibreOffice format from... http://focusratings.com/data/Monday.ods

I look forward to hearing any comments that you may have as to why Mondays are working so well for the ratings (or Vice Versa.)

As always...

My kindest regards

keith-eckstein1

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