EI - You are free to disagree with Mr Magic but from a statistical point of view he is right. As he says each race is a seperate occurance and the chances of a placing after 20 losses are the same as after 20 wins - just like with tossing a coin (or betting red/black at roulette). With coin tossing the average is fixed but calculated over millions of occurrances - 20 heads or tails in a row makes no difference. With horse racing, on the other hand, the average is not necessarily fixed - your average at the moment is 56% but that does not mean that it will not change in the future to 50% or to 60% - so if you have a run of 20 losses it does not mean you "must have some wins soon to restore the average" - it could mean that your average is changing. I suspect that this point is pretty irrelevant anyway. My guess is that if one of your jockeys had 8 straight losses you would probably drop him from your list temporarily until he returned to form?

Of course with this particular system I suspect you may find that you are more likely to get sustained winning and losing streaks than the statistics would suggest purely because jockeys are people and therefore they have days when the are feeling good & confident and days when they are not so good (maybe had a fight with the wife, got a cold, hangover from night before, etc). On their good days you are probably more likely to get 4 straight winners than the odds would suggest, on their bad days more likely to get the 4 straight losers - could be an interesting statistical analysis! Of course would be hard to incorporate this into any betting system (unless you know the jockeys personally and can get an accurate "how do you feel" rating each morning) :smile:

With regards to your other point I am not saying that your system will not maintain a profit (it will if the strike rate/divs are maintained) - merely that in the long run I would expect the profit to be about 2.5% of your investments. I think I have said before that it is possible that your system does give better results if, for some reason, your strike rate/ave. div is different depending on the bet size. In this case it would be a good idea to try to work out WHY this is so - you could use it to improve your overall profits.

BTW - a small point but your profits yesterday would only sustain just over 3 "strike outs" - and you don't need 12 consecutive losses to give those strike outs, 3 seperate lots of 4 would do it) Of course you can lose money without striking out (eg. div of 1.20 on 18 unit bet give 21.6 unit divs but you have invested 27 units up to that point).