As you’re no doubt aware, October was a less than spectacular month for the NZ service. It was not dissimilar to the poor month we experienced in April where we had numerous 2nd placings. In fact in October we recorded well over 200 units in 2nd placings, quite incredible.

After that poor month and responding to feedback received I adjusted the staking plan. My normal plan is very aggressive and is aimed at getting as big a result as possible from those runners at larger odds. I’ve been doing it for years and it has served me well but I’m used to the big downs that come along with big ups, and months like April and October, while disappointing, don’t faze me too much because I know that there’s always plenty of profits to come. However, for people used to betting the way that Dean and Gary and others do at Horse Racing Professionals it presented somewhat of a challenge, which is why I made the adjustment. Note that I still use my normal staking plan and the last 3 months have been +140, +100 and -80 so big swings but big rewards for sticking with it. Officially the service made over 100u profit between June and September, but has dropped around 60u this month. Still a good profit over the period.

2016 has seen many more horses run places and not win than expected. I keep track of the ratio of Wins:2nds:3rds to give me a guide as to where things are at compared to expectation based on the odds achieved, and April and October have been amazing in terms of how many placings there have been compared to wins. In previous years I haven’t done too much analysis on the place side of things because I’ve been trucking along nicely making 200-300 win units profit betting win only but this year has forced me to do the hard work required to see how an advantage can be gained place betting.

Over the last 4-5 months I have been working on the best way to back the selections for both the win and place. It’s worth noting that the profit typically comes in the longer odds range of 8/1+ and going forward I’ll be focusing on this part of the market for subscribers. However, runners at these prices significantly increase the expected runs of outs. At 8/1 the basic maths tells us that we should expect a maximum run of outs of 53 for every 500 win bets and therefore the way they’re staked becomes even more important.

Analysing the place side of things has been pretty interesting and has allowed me to sharpen the win side of betting, too, and that has led to a revised win/place staking plan that should ameliorate the downside when going through a poor winning trot by having something on them for the place. The new staking plan is a variation of an idea suggested by another professional punter. It was developed at the start of August and added about 20 units to our already good result for that month but then knocked a few units off what we achieved in September. April was a mild debacle for us but with the new staking plan including place betting it ends up at a much more acceptable -12 loss. Applying the plan to October achieves a +10 profit due to the ridiculous number of placings we landed. From a historical point of view it added nearly 30% to my bottom line for the period to the end of 2015. Mind you, I’m not a big believer in back-fitted results and paper trading. It’s all well and good but as I am known to say, you have to put real money on real bets to really find out what really happens in reality.

I’m now happy to roll out the new staking plan from November 1 and am also going to adjust my own betting in line with the work I’ve done.

The format of the selections will remain the same but now we’ll be backing pretty much every selection each way. There will still be runners at lower odds that will be win only but they’ll be very much the exception than the rule. In general, place units will be two times the win units so a typical selection will look like:

Stoker’s Rock (0.5w 1p)

Win units will be either 1, 0.5 or 0.25 units and place units either 2, 1 or 0.5, and that means we should be betting about 6 units per meeting, which is around 100 units per month with an aim to average 20+ units profit per month.

It’s been a bit of a rocky ride for subscribers so far in NZ. A lot of the early negative results were due to me not adjusting to the pressure of having subscribers’ expectations to manage. I’m pretty comfortable with how I go about things these days and am confident that the NZ service will continue to produce a strong profit each year.

If you have any queries or want to understand a bit more about how I go about things then feel free to drop me an email or comment via Twitter @EnzedJohn or @horseracingpros.

Cheers,

Enzed John