This should be a fascinating thread and it will be interesting to view your shortlists for each race that you analyse, as the approach is similar to that which I deploy, albeit I don’t tend to do much until the 5 day entries have been published.
I hope you have plenty of time on your hands, as you may recall that during my time as an OLBG blogger, I produced trends based articles for all of the Grade 1 events, which seemed to take forever, as the figures often changed after each horse ran in it’s prep race.
With regards to your use of trends, I hope you don’t mind me suggesting that it may be beneficial to use data from just the last 10 years, as I have found that using less data tends to improve the likelihood that the trends will identify the winner. The reason being that horse racing is by it’s very nature a dynamic sport, so changes to the sourcing of National Hunt horses, the racing calendar including the festival races and training methods can all impact on the profile of likely winners.
I also found that only shortlisting horses that met all the trends significantly reduced the chance of including the eventual winner, as it was more normal for the victor to have met the majority of the trends, albeit no all of them.
Using your stats for the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle, the mathematical chance of the winner meeting all the trends is just 48.5%, which means that there is more chance of not including the winner in your shortlist than having it in there.
To improve the chance of having the eventual winner in my shortlist, I used to score all of the last 10 winners against the trends and then make a judgement on what should be considered as the minimum score for candidates this year, which is rather time consuming.
However, I have also had some success discarding from the shortlist all horses that failed any of the trends, but adding back any horse that has been tipped as ante post selections by any of the professional pundits who write for the Racing Post, Racing and Football Outlook, Weekender, or Timeform, on the basis that these guys have plenty of experience of analysing races and therefore should know what they are doing – it is part of their job!!
As for target races, I would start with the Championship races where the ante post betting suggests that it is not a one horse event, so the Gold Cup, Ryanair Chase and Stayers’ Hurdle would be prime candidates.
The open handicaps are also worth analysing, but entry volumes are usually so large that it is often better to wait until the 5 day entry stage – perhaps I am just getting lazy in my old age!!
Good luck and I will try to join in when time permits.
Congratulations, you have certainly hit a rich vein of form with your outsiders in the Extra Place market with Bet365.
Long may this continue, albeit I feel that I must warn you that the Bookmaker in question is notoriously quick at restricting/closing down winning punters, especially when regular profits are being made through one of their special markets.
Not only have I fallen foul of their risk adverse strategy to get rid of successful punters, but a number of my friends and family have also been heavily restricted and/or closed down despite only making modest profits.
