"Should You Feed the Market Back Into Your Own Ratings?"

Kingsley on SEN radio with racing.com. Segment courtesy of SEN x racing.com.

A question I get asked often is how much of the market you should feed back into your own analysis, especially when you are confident in your form and the market disagrees with you. A lot of successful punters talk about doing this, and I think it is a good idea. But it is worth being clear about what it actually does, because I think people misunderstand it. Feeding the market back into your ratings does not change your opinion. It smooths your opinion out and averages it. That is a different thing, and once you see it that way, the whole question gets a lot easier to answer.

What blending actually does to your prices

When people say they feed the market into their models, a lot of that comes from tote betting, where that approach has always been common. But the mechanics are simple enough wherever you apply them. You have your own price. The market has its price. You give each a weighting and you end up somewhere in between. Your horse does not disappear off your list. Your opinion is still in there. It is just being pulled back towards a more moderate number.

So you are not surrendering your view to the crowd. You are stopping your own market from being as extreme as it would otherwise be. If your form is genuinely good, your opinion still carries through. It just carries through in a softer form.

The three dollar horse that is twenty in the market

Here is the example I use. Say you rate a horse three dollars and it is twenty in the market. That is a huge gap. Depending on the weighting you apply, that horse might end up around ten in your blended market.

Now think about what that ten is telling you. It is not a three dollar chance. If it was, the market would not have it anywhere near twenty. But if your form is good, it is not a twenty either. The market has missed something, or you have found something, and either way the truth is usually not sitting at one extreme. Ten is a more realistic assessment of that horse than either of the original numbers. That is the point of the exercise. It makes your market more realistic.

Why this is not a lack of confidence

Some punters resist this because they feel like they are second-guessing themselves. I do not see it that way. Being confident in your analysis and accepting that the market knows things you do not are not in conflict. The market is a lot of money with a lot of information behind it. Your ratings are one set of eyes on the same race. Putting the two together is not weakness, it is just using more information than you had before.

And the weighting is yours to set. If you have real faith in your form, weight yourself more heavily. If you are working in a market you know less well, let the market carry more. The framework stays the same either way.

If you are rating races yourself, try blending your prices with the market and look at what changes. You will find it mostly trims your biggest disagreements, which is exactly where you want a second look.

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More from Kingsley

• "How Do You Beat a Market That's Already Been Knocked Into Shape?"
• "Is There Any Value Left in Futures Markets?"
• "Is the Whirlpool Actually Worth Betting Into?"

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