Equotion - For years people have talked about horse racing "systems" that are able to accurately predict winners.  From the people who tell you they are "plugged in" to the chatter of the yards to the people who tell you they can figure it out from current form, the number of people claiming to be able to deliver returns from racing have increased exponentially.  The internet has given them new life and a new way to recruit followers.  The only thing that links them all is that they are unable to demonstrate consistent, reliable, repeatable returns.

I read recently that 75% of race outcomes are "random and unpredictable".  Someone else was suggesting that betting on favourites provided the best chance of winning - with a 35% strike rate.  To some extent both of these viewpoints are correct.  It is fair to say that the majority of races end with a horse unloved by the betting public winning.  It is also fair to say that many races end with the favourite winning - but at such low odds that you don't earn back your stake on the favourites that lose.

At Equotion we have never suggested that you can be right every time.  What we do is use data science to increase your chances of picking the winner.  By using a unique and proprietary set of algorithms we have developed to analyse comparative form across each field of horses, ignoring traditional form and odds analysis, we are able to not only pick the most likely winning entry but also regularly select high value horses in the field.

The maths is simple - if you believe that you are looking at a two horse race (i.e. out of the field of 8 there are only 2 horses that could realistically win) and one of these is evens and the other 4/1, you back both horses.  If the evens horse wins you break even, if the 4/1 horse wins you win.  Unfortunately its never that simple in real life - but Equotion gets you pretty close to this level of understanding.

Bearing in mind that the results of each bet is binary (you either win or you don't) and that the return us usually a multiple of your stake, when you lose you lose a little and when you win you win a lot.  Logically the best way to win is to spread your pot across a large number of smaller bets, thereby maximising your potential return and minimising the inevitable losses.

Equotion works by greatly increasing your chance of picking a winner.  Furthermore, by not following the herd (thereby getting better prices on your selections) we have been able to constantly achieve somewhere close to our "target" scenario - selecting the winning horse on average 25% of the time at odds, on average, of greater than 6/1.  This is the level required to provide the kind of returns we aim to deliver to our users.

In order to deliver a profitable and repeatable system, Equotion selects one horse in every race every day.  It then looks at a number of factors (the level of probability difference between the top three horses, our accuracy at that racecourse, other tipsters etc) to "weight" your bets.  

It might appear at first that betting on between 24 and 60 horses per day is a weird thing to do - it is certainly counter intuitive to the systems operated by many gamblers - but it does two things.  Firstly it minimises the risk and secondly it allows you to hide in the noise.  By not betting significant amounts on a few horses, the bookies in house systems don't tend to see you as a threat.  Bet £1,000 on 3 horses per day and see how long you keep your account when one of them wins.  Bet £3,000 on 50 horses per day and you are more likely to make profit and the bookies are less likely to close your account.

Our stats are displayed simply and straightforwardly with an easy to follow betting guide.  

The Dashboard provides you with an at-a-glance view of the overall stats including overall returns updated in real time, a view of year on year accuracy and our racecourse accuracy levels.

The Subscription View provides you with a returns chart for the last 45 days and a view of progress today.  Clicking on the date icon allows you to view the selections and winners from any day in the past and the navigation buttons organise the data on screen to make it easier to place all of your bets, check out one race or see the results as they come in.

Finally, the user preferences view allows you to set your betting parameters and tailer the betting system to your budget and risk appetite. This produces a set of suggested bets that match your selected betting strategy.

Equotion is a great tool to empower your betting and greatly improve your returns.  The returns we show on site are based on the very most simplistic strategy - every horse, every race, regardless of odds or other factors.  By using the system as an input to your daily betting routine, you may be able to win far more than our indicated return.  Even if you want to continue to use other tools or approaches, or do your own thing with our data, betting with Equotion will be more profitable than traditional, unsupported "punting".

When we created Equotion we wanted to move horse betting away from the world of guesses, punts and stabs into the dark and into the realm of data led investing.  We believe that we have done that...have a look for yourself and see if you agree.

How To Use Equotion To Get 300% Monthly Returns From a "Turf Investment"

Executive Summary

Key Equotion Statistics:-

WIN 23.35% of our selections win the race (increases to 27% with the points optimiser)

PLACE In addition to the WIN pot, 56% of our selections are placed

TOP 3              Over 90% of races see a placed horse from our top three, many seeing 2 or all three horses win or place

RETURNS 2,682 points on a daily bet of 90 points since April

300% monthly return on capital employed

£100k per annum “net salary” from a fund of just £3,600

Equotion was developed by a group of big data experts, including an ex UK Data Scientist of the Year and a serial entrepreneur who also happened to be a racing enthusiast. The original intention was to build something that allowed us to position and explain how data analytics and predictive technology come together to open up opportunities for the way business engages with consumers.

Pioneering a number of cutting edge technologies we were finding it difficult to explain how the technology worked and to provide engaging examples of successful use of these predictive algorithms.  It was then that we decided to combine one of the teams love of horse racing with the technology to bring what we were proposing to life.

Initially designed as a case study and educational tool about big data, the product has since taken on a life of its own as the accuracy of our predictions greatly exceeded all of our original expectations.  The first data run left us stunned in terms of its success rates and the technology continues to amaze in terms of its accuracy over time.

Professional gamblers say that if you can make 10% each day profit on your stake and if 20% of the horses you pick come in as winners you are doing as well as you can expect to do.  Getting to this stage means many years studying form and building networks to access the latest information from racings inner circle.

Equotion effectively short circuits all of this – we provide you form analytics without you ever needing to read The Racing Post or Timeform; we monitor the betting mechanisms for the effects of this “closed information” from within racings inner circle; finally we produce clear and simple predictions of race outcomes based upon horse, jockey, racecourse, going, weight and distance data points.

Collectively, our endeavours over the last 18 months have created what is simply the very best tipster platform on the net – out performing all other tipsters and betting systems that we are able to monitor by factors, not percentages.

What Is Equotion

Equotion is an analytics platform that looks at a field of horses running in a particular race, uses big data techniques to decide which order they should finish in, adjusts for the jockey, going, weight and distance impacts and then finally examines our previous results with both that horse and at the racecourse in question.  Continually evolving, the algorithms get consistently more accurate as time goes by.

We weight our predictions by our “confidence rating”, a betting optimiser that balances a number of factors to advise on how many points we suggest you place on each horse.

Finally we provide a betting calculator, allowing you to specify a daily bet amount, preferences on risk, return and other key contraints which then creates a betting profile for that days racing – telling you exactly how much to bet on which horses.

3x your daily stake returned as profit each month (average results)

Over the last 6 months we have returned more than 19x your daily stake overall – an average in excess of 300% return every month.  So at £2 per point you would be betting around £180 per day but would have returned £3,700 in profit in just six months…and you would still have your £180.  To cover the “worst case” we recommend you only ever bet 50% of your fund – so to cover £180 a day we suggest you start with £360.  Don’t forget that you can always build up your initial stake on system – so you could start with just £10 and accumulate your fund.

Quickpics

Every day we analyse our predictions and pick out the ten horses we feel are most likely to win – based on a variety of metrics.  These form our “Quickpics” and are published to our free of charge subscription at noon every day and also shared on social media.  Quickpics is a great introduction to the world of Equotion and provides proof of the power of our analytics.  Following recent changes to the algorithm, the success rate is extremely high and returns in the last 30 days are staggeringly good.  This tool in itself outperforms the very best most professional gamblers with years of experience expect to return month on month.

The Bigger Picture

Looking across the results from our complete race card selections over this years season shows significant gains being made consistently – and demonstrates how changes to our algorithms have created significant improvements in returns. Performance is consistent and currently returning a total year to date of 2,682 points (which on £20 per point represents £53,660 net profit on a daily betting fund averaging around £1,800).

On our suggested multiplier of a fund that is 2x your daily stake, this would represent an individual investing £3,600 into a betting fund with the Betfair Exchange that would return them £64k per annum of tax free income (this equates to an annual pre-tax salary of around £100,000 per annum).  Feel free to compare that to you’re the returns on your ISA or pension fund.

Our accuracy and consistency of returns makes this more of an investment than a gamble.  It is of course still gambling (and you should only ever bet what you can afford to lose) just like investing in the stock exchange. Equotion helps to mitigate any potential losses and whilst providing the opportunity for substantial and consistent gains.  Unlike the stock exchange, everything you make is tax free.

Betting Strategies

So how do you use the data we provide to best effect.  Simply put you follow the process. We provide a great deal of information behind our predictions, but to make the returns outlined above the key is to bet consistently, every day and make sure you follow the process to the letter.  Using Quickpics is simple – 10 bets with a prescribed number of points per bet (between 1 and 5).  Add up the number of points, divide this into your available fund for the day and you have the amount to bet on each horse.  Bet on all the horses we propose as this will provide both bet and hedge cover to balance out the odds.

The Higher Level Subscriptions

High Noon and Turf Accountant both provide you with our chosen horse for every race in the UK and Ireland every day.  Full House (as the name suggests) provides you access to the top selected horse in every race and is published to you at 10.30am.  Turf accountant opens up the possibility of additional betting strategies and greater returns by providing you our top 3 horses.

All of our stats are based on betting only on the top selected horse. This is the standard betting strategy and provides the returns outlined.  The secret to ensuring you deliver consistent returns is to wager consistent stakes.  Using your personal preferences, the system will advise how much to bet on which horse using our optimiser technology and following this in a consistent way is the very best way of delivering predictable returns.

Turf Accountant does bring into play a number of other potential strategies.  By providing you with our top 3 picks, this subscription opens up the world of pool betting.  The Tote is the best known pool betting system on the market providing single race and multi-race pools.  Turf accountant also allows you to examine the differences between our top three picks and place additional bets on the 2^nd and 3^rd choices – delivering you to take additional risk for greater reward where our top pick may be a favourite, or to hedge where our top pick looks like a more risky proposition.

Pro Investor is a future product that will include anti-post betting, earlier delivery of selections and a myriad of additional statistics allowing you to make more informed choices in your betting and the deployment of more complex betting strategies. This will be the weapon of choice for high net worth professional gamblers, syndicates and Betfair Traders.

How To Bet

Choosing a Betting Partner

The key question here is really who to bet with.  The challenge with utilising tools that are consistently more accurate than an average punter is expected to be is that you quickly attract the attention of the bookies own profit management systems.  This can mean the odds offered to you vary and often means that a string of substantial winnings will result in a letter explaining that your winning profile is “inconsistent with their business model” and your account being terminated.

To combat this we suggest three strategies.

1. Use Betfair Exchange – this is a peer to peer betting platform where Betfair does not care if you win or lose as they make money either way.  The limitation here is the liquidity in this market but for £10-£20 per point betting this should be your core betting platform
2. Multiple Accounts – we recommend that in addition to your Betfair Exchange accounts you run multiple accounts with all of the online bookmakers.  We also recommend using a Racing Post Membership Subscription as a way of checking available odds and making sure you are getting best value when placing bets
3. Finally, The Tote has a role to play here – especially for their pool betting.  Exacta, Jackpot, Trifector, Quadpot and Placepot betting is the most likely to win big for you and again, there is not threat of being blocked because you are more successful than average

When betting on the Exchange you can pre-set your Bet Amounts to multiples of your point stake and also set the view limit.  We suggest you set the view limit at your middle stake point which means you only see odds where there is enough liquidity to cover your chosen stake.  Should there be better odds available at lower amounts you effectively sweep these up as you place your bet.

On The Nose or Each Way?

All of our results are based on WIN ONLY betting on the top horse we select.  Turf accountant allows you the option of placing bets on our second and third place horses and you have the option of betting Each Way with all of our subscriptions.  Our success rate in terms of PLACED HORSES is significantly higher than our WIN success rate.  The most profitable and least risk strategy is to bet on the nose on any horse that is less than 4/1 and then to cover all horses with odds at greater than 4/1 with an each way bet (if using the Exchange, best odds are achieved by betting WIN and PLACE separately. 

Where the probability difference between our first and second picks for each race is less than 1.5 and the odds on the second place horse are better than the first it is also worth considering a secondary bet and if this should also be each WIN and PLACE.

Pool Betting & Betfair Trading

If you apply some “crowd logic” to racing then it follows that the horses most likely to win based upon form will, through the course of the betting through an afternoon, move towards lower odds.  This is reflected in the fact that most horses we select shorten as we move towards race time and horses that start strongly that we do not select tend to drift.

This provides an opportunity to trade bets on the Betfair Exchange and exploit the inconsistencies in this very dysfunctional market.  Every day provides significant opportunity to place, trade and lay bets that without ever risking a penny on the horse running, can make you significant returns.  It also allows us to place scientifically derived bets onto the single and multi race pools offered by The Tote, and in terms of multipliers and accumulators.  Although these are far riskier betting strategies, they can deliver very substantial returns for our Turf Accountant subscribers.

These advanced betting strategies, when funded by a percentage of the returns earned from the other, less risky strategies outlined, can significantly  increase your returns without actually risking any of your core capital.  Each of these strategies will be covered in a separate article in the coming months.

In Summary

The launch of Equotion represents a significant challenge to the status quo of the racing marketplace.  We provide a way for individuals to deliver consistent and substantial returns from their betting activities whilst at the same time allowing our subscribers input, control and involvement to maintain interest and feed the excitement that only comes from this incredible sport.  In the future we aim to build out the solution to cover golf, football and other key sporting events and there are plans in the pipeline to develop sidebar tools for online poker.  Equotion is the start point of a significant on-line betting disruptor aiming to take a significant proportion of the recent upsurge in interest in the on-line betting marketplace.

Equotion Performance and The Future Plan

At Equotion we have been working with some of the UK's leading big data analysts and data acquisition experts to build a predictive analytics engine designed to improve an investors chances of winning at the races big at the races.

We have been constantly tuning the predictive engine, the algorithms and optimising the balance between our seven levels of analytics.  The result of this is a steady increase in performance over the last six months culminating in an exceptional score for August delivering a return of 367%.

Equotion supports a number of betting strategies and provides you with rich content and detail including popular rating mechanics and recent form.  Where we differ from the rest is that we also include three key additional statistics.  We produce a ratings card for every horse in every race - allowing us to provide a comparative score for each horse against the others running.  We then combine this with a number of statistics about external influences on each horses performance and how they are likely to respond.  Finally we provide a rating for the jockey and combine all of this to provide a probability of each horse / jockey combination winning the race.

This allows three key strategies to be played.

1. Wide spread, low risk - this is our standard strategy which involved betting on the nose on every horse we pick in every race we select.  You bet the same amount on each and every horse we select.  At a stake of £20 per bet, this equates to a betting fund of £1,250 to get you through the month.
2. Selective Strategies - this is more akin to how a professional gambler would approach things.  Using the stats, probabilities and other information we provide the user is able to be more selective about which horses he picks and how much he bets per horse.  The target here is to bet more money on fewer horses and make much larger returns
3. Optimised betting - using a series of business rules, allow the system to prioritise which horses and set what percentage of your betting fund to allocate to each bet.  This uses our optimisation technology to constantly find you the best balance between risk and reward, subject to your risk threshold

What is surprising is the results that can be achieved from these different strategies.  

Over the last 5 months we have been monitoring our standard betting strategy.  An initial deposit of £1,250 on the 1st April would today have returned you £14,927 to your bank account.  As if this wasn't impressive enough, you would also still have your £1,250 stake going into September.  We are currently working to integrate our solution into the Betfair Exchange, allowing the system to place bets on your behalf against your account.  All you have to do is ensure that there is enough in your account to cover the bets and the system does the rest.  

Throughout July I used the system to run my own selective strategy.  Betting only Monday through Friday and using the data on the system as my form guide I managed to average returns of £1,000 per week on a rolling stake of £250 and a time input of just 1 hour each day.  The system is like having a photographic memory for the relative form of every horse out there combined with the ability to crunch numbers like a card counter analyses probability through a game of blackjack.

The learnings from all of this is currently being combined with some non-linear clustering analytics of how each of our individual elements of analysis behave when horses win and when they lose.  This is starting to identify and define some really interesting rules that make the automated optimisation of betting strategies a reality in the very near future.  

The Equotion Portal is in the final stages of production.  Once complete we will be able to allow registered users to go in and use the system for themselves.  The integration with the BetFair Exchange also opens up the ability to both bet and lay based on the stats we produce - allowing the development of some very interesting bet and hedge strategies as we move forwards.

As with anything that involves machine predictions we are not claiming to be perfect.  As with any kind of investment things can go down as well as up, but overall looking at 6 months of real time running we are showing a huge improvement over any other betting strategy or system. What we do is take the hard work out of analysing form, run analytics at a level no human being could ever manage and provide an easy way to de-risk betting on horses to a level that makes it a more acceptable investment case. Just increasing an investors ability to generate returns by a few percentage points turns into significant improvements in their returns.

In the coming weeks we will be looking for investment and to build further partnerships within the gaming and racing industry - the challenge of course being that we aren't attractive to your average bookies group as we are simply too accurate!  Our plan is to extend the reach of Equotion to all sports betting and then to look at financial investment predictions, turning the power of Equotion against the stock market, predicting sustainable returns rather than the marginal gains made from micro-fluctuations in the market most other automated solutions rely on.

If this is a business that interests you please follow us @equocard and watch out for our launch announcement.  We intend to make access to the system free of charge for the first month so come along, log in and see how much you can make from this new and exciting technology. If you are looking for an incredibly exciting investment into a team with the imagination, capability and proven ability to deliver then please contact me directly - james@virtualdirection.com

Thanks for your interest so far and watch this space for further info!

James

Introducing EQUOTION

Equotion –  a combination of the word “Equation” – meaning the process of equating one thing to another…and Equo, latin for horse.  The name is extremely relevant as it absolutely defines what we do.  Using the very latest big data analytics and optimisation techniques, we equate the performance of horse + jockey combinations against others, even when they have never raced before. 

Our technology creates around half a trillion data points and our algorithms work on 7 different levels, constantly tuning and adjusting the performance statistics.  Our optimisation routines help to identify the most sensible bets to place and where to concentrate your cash.

Our system provides the user a number of key additional ratings as well as predictions of the likely finish order of any given race.  Out of an average of 35 races each day our picks generate on average 27x placed horses, 15x winning horses and 4x 1-2-3 finishes.

Our returns are the most substantial and consistent in the market – around 60% better than betting on the favourite and numbers of magnitude better than using jockey club form indicators. 

We are currently finalising our beta testing of the system and completing the web site.  We are also in the process of integrating with BetFair for automatic bet placement.

Lots more information coming soon – along with clear and easy to understand P&L’s from the last 12 months.  You can take a look and decide yourself how we compare to your current betting approaches and systems.

We will be outlining our commercial model over the coming weeks but for now please pre-register on the site and keep tuned into our twitter feed @equocard for further details.