Greetings forum members.... another "new bloke" is scrawling his maiden post here...

I've been mowing thru the Propun website for a few months now and also the Horse Racing forum here in the last week or so, obviously a lot of interesting stuff to take on board for the punter with half a clue looking to get a little bit more serious with it all.

One of the major topics that seems to continually gets drilled into the information here is the concept of "value". It appears this is (apart from a solid selection method) the absolute key to making or losing money in the long-term.

My question is, how do you frame your own market in the first place to assess whether your fancy actually represents value? I can only assume that punters who do this have their own ratings system, and will then derive a market from this.

I'm not sure if I'm missing the point to it, but in simplistic terms, let's say you're ratings have Horse A on 71, Horse B on 68, Horce C 67, etc etc.... mathematically how do you frame a market around this? Is there a particular statistical distribution or otherwise to do it effectively?

Or if you dont really use ratings, is there a standard method for calculating it in a different manner (not sure how this is possible exactly, gut feel perhaps?!?)

I'm sure from what I've seen in the forum thus far that someone will lead me on the path to righteousness!

... and Happy New Year punters!