I've been reading a book called "Watching Racehorses - a guide to betting on behaviour" by Geoffrey Hutson. This fella throws the form book pretty well completely out of the window and just looks at the horses to see how they are behaving in the birdcage, in the ring, in the yard and on the way to the start in order to decide who to bet on.
Your first thought might be that he must be a crank (or not) but he has done a very scientific study, crunched the numbers with a statistics program in a computer, etc, etc, and come up with some very interesting results.
He has about 60 points that he looks for in the horse from whether it is pawing the ground, the angle of it's head, if it's ears are flicking, etc, and other points such as if the horse needs two strappers, if the horse has a dump or walks sideways.
Early in his study he found that he couldn't really predict winners by his method but he had measurable success in picking losers. Basically, if the horse hasn't got it's mind on the job or looks to be carrying an injury or has had too much racing and ins't keen to run again, it ain't going to win.
I can't do it justice here but a few of the major pointers are bandages are bad - horses win much less often carrying bandages, a crossover noseband is bad. Kicking, weaving, fighting the bit, etc, all bad signs, arriving late and overweight jockey are statistically bad also.

The book is well written with digressions into such things as the dangers involved when men vaccuum in the nude, the detection of horses who are performing clitoral winking (very bad sign - she just hasn't got her mind on racing) among some very helpful hints for those of us who go to the track.
His most successful races are 2YO fillies races, mares races and restricted races so that would give a lot of us a bet in races we usually avoid.

Give it a read, it's a whole new perspective.

KV