Newmarket – The July Meeting
Sandwiched in between Royal Ascot and Glorious Goodwood is the Newmarket July Meeting. This year it runs from Thursday 11th July to Saturday 13th July.
There are two Group 1 contests namely the 6f July Cup and 1 mile Falmouth Stakes, and four Group 2 contests. In addition, there are some excellent handicaps including the 7f Bunbury Cup. In this article I am going to share some general stats / trends for this meeting covering the last 10 years. To help me I have used the database from www.horseracebase.com which is one of the best sites around for gathering data such as this.
All profits and losses have been calculated to Betfair Starting Price less 5% commission.
Market Factors
– let me start by examining different position within the betting market.
I have used Betfair market rank for this to eliminate as many ‘joint’ market positions as possible. Here are the stats:
These market stats are extremely interesting.
Taking the ten years as a whole, favourites have provided poor value. Their A/E index of 0.76 is very low for favourites. Compare this with the favourite data for all races at the Newmarket July course over the last ten years where their A/E index stands at 0.93.
Digging a bit deeper though, I have found that this was down to three consecutive years from 2018 to 2020 where favourites won just 8 races from 66 (SR 12.1%) producing losses of close to 70 pence in the £. The remaining seven years have seen favourites effectively break even.
Why this pattern occurred is impossible to say, and it is difficult to be confident which way 2024 will go as far as favourites are concerned. What I did do is to check the previous ten years (2004 – 2013) and favourites performed below par then too.
Their A/E index was again poor at 0.82. Hence, taking an even longer view over 20 years, favourites at this meeting have not been great investments.
The value seems to have been horses third to sixth in the betting market, but bigger priced runners (those 7th or larger in the market) are definitely worth swerving.
Horses priced BSP 22.0 or bigger have won just 1.9% of all races losing you over 32 pence in the £.
Position Last Time Out
– let us see if the most recent run in terms of finishing position gives us any pointers:
LTO winners have produced a profit but from a very modest win strike rate and this immediately rang alarm bells as I sensed that these figures must be skewed by a large, priced winner or two.
Digging down in the results I was right as there were three LTO winners that won at huge BSP prices – 66.34, 50.0 and 40.0.
Focusing on LTO winners priced under BSP 40.0 the stats are quite poor showing losses of nearly 20 pence in the £ from a strike rate of just 13.3%.
Horses that finished sixth LTO have randomly made a profit, but again the bottom line is skewed somewhat due to winners priced BSP 48.27 and 53.36.
Overall, position LTO is not a factor that has proved that helpful for punters in the past ten years.
Last Time Out Course
– on to a different LTO metric namely the course the horse ran on their latest start.
Courses with at least 25 runners are listed below in alphabetical order:
Most runners from Ascot have come from the Royal meeting, but the stats are quite modest and worse than I had anticipated.
There is one subset of runners though from Royal Ascot worth noting and that is horses that won at the meeting last time.
They have provided 14 winners from 53 (SR 26.4%) for a small BSP profit of £6.28 (ROI +11.8%).
No large, priced winners here skewing the profits.
Newmarket (July) and Sandown have shown good profits but not surprisingly both have seen big, priced winners skewing the figures.
However, they are still two of the more successful LTO courses even having taken those winners out.
Horses running last time out at *Northern courses have performed poorly overall except if coming from York.
If you take York out of the equation and combine all other Northern courses together the stats make woeful reading:
Based on these findings one would avoid all such runners. However, their Betfair price at the Newmarket July meeting is key.
Splitting these Northern runners up by those priced 10.0 BSP or less, and those priced 10.01 or more we see the following splits:
This is very helpful.
The more fancied Northern raiders perform solidly, the less fancied ones dreadfully. It always pays to dig a bit deeper!
* Northern courses include courses in Yorkshire
Last Time Out Price
– an underused metric by punters is LTO price. I often look at LTO prices and other recent run prices for that matter.
Below I have split the LTO prices up by Industry SP as it gives cleaner groupings than BSP. Prices are shown in decimal format:
Generally, a shorter LTO price has been preferable, especially if we combine the data into 7.00 or less and 7.5 or more:
I think this metric will be a useful one to narrow down potential betting opportunities. The past stats strongly favour horses that were priced 7.00 (6/1) or less on their most recent start.
Trainers – last, but not least, here are the trainers who have saddled at least 30 runners in the past 10 years. They are listed in alphabetical order:
There seem to be a few trainers to avoid, especially Charles Hills, Hugo Palmer, and Kevin Ryan. I would also be very wary of runners from the Stoute and Varian stables.
As I have mentioned before quoting profits to BSP can be misleading due to the odd big, priced winner.
Hence here are performances of trainers with runners priced BSP 10.0 or shorter – 20 runs minimum to qualify here:
The Hannon stats are particularly eye-catching. His more fancied runners have done exceptional well.
Likewise shorter priced runners from Appleby, O’Brien, and Bin Suroor have also performed excellently. Stats from the Gosden, Haggas and Varian stables make less appealing reading.
In conclusion, I hope these stats will point you in the right direction come this excellent three-day meeting.
Of course, this type of research is reporting on the past, not the future. However, past results generally offer a good guide to future punting.
David Renham