In a recent article I compared the Early Morning Odds of horses (EMO) with their Opening Show odds (OS) and their final Industry Starting Price (SP) for UK Flat racing, writes Dave Renham. In this piece I will revisit the idea but the focus now is on UK National Hunt racing. Data has been taken from 1st January 2021 to 30th September 2024. How similar will the patterns be? Let’s take a look...

Strike rates by market movement profile

To begin with let's make the process easier by using abbreviations for the different price movements. So, for horses that shorten in price I will use the abbreviation ‘S’; for horses that remain the same price I will use ‘R’; for those that drift in price (lengthen) I will use the abbreviation ‘D’.

There are nine possible combinations in terms of price movement within these two timeframes (EMO to OS, and OS to SP). Below is a graph showing the percentage of runners for each price movement combination.

 

 

As you would expect the bar chart is similar to that which we saw when analysing flat data. The D/D group made up roughly a quarter of all runners and is comfortably the most likely pattern to be seen of the nine.

Performance Metrics by market movement profile

Now that we know how likely each combination is to occur we can examine the combinations in more detail by breaking down their performance in terms of strike rate, profitability, ROI% and A/E indices:

 

 

Two of the three combinations where a drift occurred between EMO and SP, D/D and R/D, produced by far the worst figures across all the metrics (SR%, ROI% and A/E indices). In fact, both combos would have lost you significant money if betting to BSP. The D/D group would have lost you 13p in the £, the R/D group lost a whopping 22p in the £. To put this into perspective if you simply backed all NH runners in every race over this time frame you would have lost just under 6p in the £ betting to Betfair SP.

Shorten / Shorten (S/S) Runners

The best figures came from the horses that shortened in price in both time frames – the S/S group. It makes sense to explore the S/S group in more detail given they have produced the best overall performance. I want to start by breaking the S/S results down by National Hunt Race Type. I will look at A/E indices first:

 

 

As can be seen the figures for chases and hurdles are virtually identical, but there is a steep drop off down to the A/E index for NH Flat races (also called bumpers). On to the Return on Investment percentages (ROI%) now to see what they show. The ROI%s are based onto Industry Starting Price returns:

 

 

There is positive correlation between the A/E indices and the ROI% figures at SP, with losses far greater for NH Flat runners who have the S/S profile. This is reflected at Betfair SP, too, with chase and hurdle qualifiers losing 4p in the £, NH Flat qualifiers more than 11p from every pound. Why this is the case is probably because NH Flat races tend to be made up of relatively unexposed horses. Hence, some horses will be supported in the betting based on what they might have shown away from the racetrack. Others will be backed solely due the trainer or the owner rather than the form or inherent ability of the individual horse in question. Hence punters and bookmakers are not always able to base their opinion on cold hard facts in these bumper races.

Sticking with the S/S group let me share how well these runners have performed in terms of Class of Race. Here are the full splits (there were only a handful of Class 6 events, hence they have been lumped together with the Class 5 stats):

 

 

The figures suggest that the S/S group has performed less well at either end of the class spectrum. Qualifiers from both Classes 2 and 3 made blind profits to BSP which is perhaps no surprise given their high A/E indices.

If we focus on the Class 1 races and look at the subset of Grade 1 to Grade 3 races the figures for the S/S group are poor – 66 wins from 511 qualifiers (SR 12.9%) for a loss to SP of £155.56 (ROI –30.4%). The A/E index stands at a lowly 0.75 and even to BSP losses were steep at £137.59 (ROI –26.9%). Horses that are constantly backed through the day, and then again late on, do not look the safest betting propositions in these Graded contests.

My next port of call was to look at the A/E indices of the S/S group of runners in terms of what odds they were priced up first in the morning – their ‘EMO’. Here is a graphical representation of those data:

 

 

Essentially this data is telling us that the for the S/S group the shorter the price the better in terms of ‘value’. The 17.0 to 23.0 and the 26.0+ groups are slightly out of kilter, but overall, it looks like horses priced 4.5 (7/2) or shorter early doors are the ones to focus on. Indeed, backing all horses from this shorter price EMO subset (1.01–4.5) would have lost you only 1p for every £1 staked to BSP.

Price movement by trainer

I want now to examine some trainer data, starting with horses that shortened in price from EMO to OS, i.e. the S/S, S/R and S/D groups. To begin with I would like to share some trainers with percentage of runners split for each of these groups. These are the handlers with the highest percentage of runners that match the S/S profile, listed along with the S/R and S/D percentages also:

 

 

Melanie Rowley tops the list with nearly 49% of her runners that shortened between EMO and OS continuing to shorten from OS to SP. To give some context the average percentage of runners’ figure for ALL trainers for the S/S profile is 35%. However, in Rowley's case, it did not lead to a profitable outcome; in fact, quite the opposite – one would have lost 44p in the £ backing all her S/S runners to SP; and it was still a 40p in the £ loss to BSP.

Profitable S/S trainers

There were, however, six trainers in the list who did make a profit to SP with these well-backed runners. The six were Henry Daly, Ben Pauling, David Pipe, Sandy Thomson, Tim Vaughan and Mark Walford. Below is a table containing all trainers who made blind profits with their S/S group of runners, listed alphabetically:

 

 

If only we could have predicted which of their horses were going to have the S/S pattern, then we could have backed them at their Early Price and made even more impressive profits. Nevertheless, none of the trainers in the above list had winners at huge prices that skewed their bottom lines so they look a group who know when they've got a live one.

A dozen trainers made a blind profit including one of the most powerful stables in the country, that of Paul Nicholls. When the Ditcheat yard's horses have shortened from EMO to OS and again from OS to SP, they have produced an outstanding strike rate of over 35% and returned more 8p in the £ profit. What is interesting is that only 28% of the Nicholls runners that shortened in price between EMO and OS then continued to shorten to SP, whereas 48% of them drifted in that final period. It is also interesting that this subset of runners (the S/D group) also performed well with 123 going on to win from 401 runners (SR 30.7%) for an SP profit of £25.57 (ROI +6.4%). To BSP this improves to +£62.65 (ROI +15.6%).

Overall, you could have made a healthy profit to BSP by simply backing ALL Nicholls runners that had shortened in price from EMO to OS.

D/D Trainers

It is time now to briefly look at some D/D data for trainers. I want to focus on horses that had Early Morning Odds of 10.00 (9/1) or shorter to avoid skewed results due to big–priced winners. Obviously, the strike rates of trainers with horses that drift from EMO to OS and then continue to drift to SP are not going to be that impressive. Below is a table of the top 15 trainers with the D/D profile in terms of strike rate:

 

 

No surprise that only three trainers have made a profit to SP, but that figure rises to nine at BSP. Of the trainers in that table, Paul Nicholls has seen significant losses with his D/D runners. They look worth swerving.

At the other end of the scale here are the trainers with the lowest strike rates from their D/D runners with their EMO 10.00 (9/1) or shorter:

 

 

It would make sense with this group of trainers to, unless you are a layer, ignore their horses if they have drifted from EMO to OS and are starting to drift again from their OS price as we near the ‘off’.

For the record horses priced up early at 10.00 (9/1) or bigger that show the D/D profile have won just 1.6% of their races (228 wins from 14220 qualifiers) for losses to SP of £6949 (ROI –48.5%). Losses are obviously less steep when looking at BSP returns but losses are still over 21% (21p in the £).

Finally, let me share one significant stat from the most influential NH owner, JP McManus. When his runners are popular in the market and show the S/S profile they have secured a 29% strike rate and returns of 6p in the £ to SP. His runners showing the D/D profile, however, perform poorly hitting a strike rate of 8.7% with SP losses of 30p in the £.

Market Movement is an integral part of the betting picture and I hope this article has provided some useful pointers for the National Hunt season which is just about to click into top gear.

- DR