Tony,

Since you have and are comfortable with Excel that's what I would use for you.

Also, I second Ranch's recommendation on SDiU. The movie will increase your faith! It starts slow but really builds to a fantastic finish.

Also, I second Ranch's recommendation on SDiU. The movie will increase your faith! It starts slow but really builds to a fantastic finish. — Biniak

And it really is a great handicapping approach.
Just sayin'. LOL

Not sure I follow "And it really is a great handicapping approach" unless you mean S.F.T. but I am halfway through "How to Measure Anything" and I am still learning stuff. It's deep thinking?

I think I am already thinking about as deeply about horse racing as I can handle. :) But I keep digging and usually moving forward.

Not sure I follow "And it really is a great handicapping approach" unless you mean S.F.T. but I am halfway through "How to Measure Anything" and I am still learning stuff. It's deep thinking? — Biniak

I started to say, "Go buy the product" but then remembered that it isn't available any more.

Dang.

The story was that I was struggling to win. I was still winning (as I recall_) but this long-time client and professional player) calls me and says, "I see how hard it is for you and I want to help."

We did 7 sessions over (I think) 6 weeks or so and it was eye opening.

Movie was very enjoyable!!! thanks all for the recommendation. Loved it.

My favorite Dave products, his pars and Figuring Out What Wins.
Been using his pars since Tom Brohamer recommended them at a Sartin seminar in Baltimore.

For me it was P&P that blew my mind... but I use the pars almost daily.

I am hoping that soon I will be saying it is HSH as I learn to use the product!

@Biniak I read "How to Measure Anything" a few years back it is amazing what I have been able to do at work with it in terms of creating and developing KPIs and other metrics... and it has been helpful with the ponies too!

Ray,

How have you applied "HTMA" for the horses?

I used the logic (even before I had read the book) to break down certain aspects of handicapping a race, but will admit the book made me think about it more and even more finite aspects.

An example of how I did this was in how I assess favorites. I wanted to come up with a strategy of when to back or go against a favorite, which I termed strong and false favorites. I broke down the aspects of a horse I was using to gauge this assessment on... recency, win percentage, class, experience at or within 1/2 a furlong of the distance to see how each of these factors related to each favorite in my homemade-manually entered excel database.

"But wait, there's more!"

While I found modest success with strong/false (and further breaking false into false with no qualifiers, false with a qualifier - a qualifier being a horse in the field that met the metrics of a strong favorite, but wasn't the favorite). I wanted to make the criteria better... so I started to look at other aspects of the field, not just the favorite and developed a favorite likelihood factor (FLF). I ran other metrics of the field against my favorites (type of race, field size, jock, etc. - 7 in total). I found a fairly linear relation between win percentage and FLF in all categories - strong, false no qual, false with qual.

I again tweaked the process and established two other levels of "super favorites" using the same drill down and adding other factors.

Sadly, the file I had used to develop the impact values of all of those factors was on the hard drive of a laptop that died (I have since learned my lesson on backing up information), but assessing the favorite and FLF is the first thing on my "handicapping checklist".

I have used HTMA as well to break down other angles/approaches I have used, which really isn't too different that how HSH builds objects out of factors.