BLOGS
John's Analytics 2018 Year In Review
Friday, 11 January 2019
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2018 ended up being a pretty good year for the John’s Analytics service with a profit of 128 units on 1079 units of turnover, which is 11.8% POT. Looking at results broken down by month:
I was actually hoping to make 200 units for the year, but the variance gods decreed that it wouldn’t happen, with a couple of dusty results in July and December. Looking at the odds advantage figures, calculated as (3rd ranked price sent – 1) / (best fixed closing – 1), you can see that we performed quite strongly with the exception of the two dud months. If I can maintain the overall advantage figure of 1.50 then we’re going to have a pretty good 2019. I must admit that I can’t remember the name of any horse I back, even the big price ones, except for Alfie Junior because my girlfriend has a dog named Alfie and he lobbed for me a couple of times in 2018 when I’d backed him at big odds, so I have to go through the spreadsheet to see what our bigger priced winners were: Long Knife at Albany in February which was $71 to $21, Strolling Vagabond over the ditch at Trentham $51 to $21, and Flirtalicious at Geraldton $41 to $21, among others. John’s Analytics is all about finding horses that are going to shorten hard in the market and we had some nice overlays, including: Tough One at Ipswich $15 to $3.80, Marathon at Scone $14 to $4.20, Wise Men Say at Wanganui $9 to $3, and Butter Toast at Moree $7.50 to $2.60. Going forward, I’ll continue to focus on selecting horses that are expected to firm nicely. However, there is an issue that I (and, I presume, others) need to keep a bit of an eye on and that is the degradation of the morning market percent over the last 12 months, which I expect is due to both consolidation of the market and the introduction of increased taxes on betting. Following is the change to the morning market percentage of the maximum price of the 6 corporate bookies that I keep records for:
It’s easy to see that there has been a dramatic increase in the market percentage over time, and it’s possible that changes to Minimum Bet Laws that are expected to come into force mid-year will increase that again. The effect will be to reduce the number of opportunities to obtain good value, which will make things a little harder. To demonstrate what that means in real terms, one of the betting methods I use had 1489 selections in January and by December was down to 712. Any analyst expects their edge to be washed away over time as the rest of the market catches up, but that’s a little dramatic. Fortunately, I have other options and am updating my main model to account for a less competitive betting landscape, so we should be right for a while yet. Thanks to all of you who contacted me via email or Twitter to ask questions, raise any concerns or seek advice. I hope you’ve found me to be responsive, informative, honest and open. Thanks, again, for being on board with John’s Analytics. Feel free to drop me a line at john@winningedgeinvestments.com or follow me on Twitter @Johns_Analytics. May 2019 bring health, happiness and good punting! Cheers - John | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
