As becareful says, it is also not just the information you are able to obtain, it is how you apply it and to what degree, also being able to assess accurately what impact on longterm results each filter has.
You really need an extensive database with as much information as possible to make it accurate.
For a simple example:
A horse (Campaign King) on "paper" won it's last three starts in the country and each race was worth say $8,000.
The next horse (Hexagonal) ran 3 lengths 5th at it's last three runs at Caulfied and each race was a listed race worth $101,000.

So you're left on face value with this in the formguide.

-555 Campaign King 59.5 4/1
-111 Hexagonal 55.5 7/1

Immediately, without further form investigation you'd have to have Hexagonal on recent form, but if you dig deeper it's obvious on race performance that Campaign King is the better bet.
This is just a very rough example, if longwinded.
It's just to show that you must go in-depth with your form analysis and to do that you need as much information as possible.
As far as access tutorials go, there is an excellent one written by Martin Brydon a U.S. University lecturer with actual examples and practical tests. If you're anything like me, reading a wad full of information just doesn't sink in quickly.
I am more technically minded, so doing practical exercises helps me to learn and see how I could readily apply it to horseracing.
If anyone wants the tutorial (which he designed for students off campus) let me know via email and I'll send the entire thing to you or if there is a lot of interest I'll put it on a website.

P.S. you'll need winzip or similar to extract the files, adobe acrobat reader or similar to view the tutorial as it's in .pdf format - and of course Microsoft Access for this tutorial.

Also if you have a tutorial which you think is quite good I'd be grateful to have a look at it as the one I have is excellent, but a few years old.



[ This Message was edited by: Equine Investor on 2002-11-12 15:40 ]