December monthly summary

A day later than ideal, but below is the monthly report for December.

Firstly the headline figures:

43 Selections (plus a couple of other bets)
54 pts staked
10 pts loss (so a ROI of –18.5%)

The number of bets and points staked is about where I would have expected them to be – allowing for the adjustment I made late in November, to include more marginal bets.
However, the points profit (or more accurately, loss !) is obviously not where I would like it to have been.

Looking at the results in more detail:
10 of the 43 selections finished first or second – which is not far off the 25% I target. However – and crucially – only 2 of those 10 were actually winners. This had a significant impact of the profitability of the month.
A further 6 selections finished third or fourth – which means that 16 if the 43 selections finished in the frame.
At 37%, this is fair – but below the 50% strike rate I aim for.
The average odds of selections were just below 13/1 – which about where I would expect it to be.
However, a 37% strike rate at average odds of 13/1 isn’t as impressive as the 46% strike rate at odds of 15/1, which was achieved in November.
This is the second indicator that the tips in December weren’t quite as good as those in November (the first was obviously the P&L for the month)

The ratio of price taken against Betfair Starting Price – adjusted for stake – is very interesting.
For December, this was 13.36, which compares very favourably with the 10.6 recorded for November.
Therefore, if during December you had just backed every tip at the advised price and layed off your potential profit on BF at BSP, you would have made 13.36 points !!
This suggests that December was of similar quality to November (adjusting for the number of tips) – contradicting the previous measure a little.

With only 2 winners, it is difficult to say categorically whether the staking was right in December.
However, there were 14 bets of 1.5pt or more and they yielded 1 winner and 6 placed horses (so 50%) – suggesting they remained the strongest bets. They also included Otage De Brion, who has unlucky not to be at least placed.

In summary then, whilst the month was clearly not as strong as November, it wasn’t really a disaster.
The reduction in strike rate is concerning – as was the number of horses pulled up (though this can be high at this time of year).
The Betfair Starting price comparison however, suggests that the tips were still pretty good.
Weighing everything up however, I think it would be fair to say that the quality of tips was probably down by around 25% compared to November. That said, I don’t think it deserved a loss on the month - but that is ofcourse what happened.
One possible reason for the reduction in quality, could have been the build up to Christmas. I have to juggle my betting (and now blogging !) with a variety of other things and needless to say, December is a very busy month ! As a consequence, I have less time available to spend studying the form – and that may have manifested itself in the results.
My original intention was to wait until Christmas was over before I started the blog – but I was ready to go in November and therefore decided to take the risk.

Anyway, Christmas is now out of the way – and the new month has started on a positive note.
Hopefully I will be able to continue in that vein for the next few weeks and really start to build a platform for Cheltenham !!
TVB.