Hi iPunter,

The biggest piece of advice I would give you, seeing as you have a database, is think outside of the box. Play with the form factors you have the use of in your database and see what happens. Remember, if you have a horse which ticks all the boxes, good last start, good barrier etc etc, chances are so will everyone else, and as a general rule of thumb, they will win more, but the return as you mentioned above, will be less ie poor value. Thats a very simple way of looking at it, but unless you are pricing your own fields and betting overlays, you have no real idea of if that horse is value or not.

In regards to asking about what a good strike rate it, well that is a completely personal thing. YOu need to be comfortable with your SR, and be sure that when that losing run hits, you still have the confidence (and the bank) left to keep plonking the cash on, the fact is on a 25% SR, at some stage you will hit a losing run of 25+, one of the biggest factors of winning on the punt is discipline, if you hit a bad run you can't just start changing your systems and plonking the dough down on that 'sure' thing your mate down the pub told you about, you have to stick to your guns and be prepared to weather the storm! Winning is easy to cope with, losing is the hard part and where people fail.

Again in regards to POT, that entirely depends on your turnover, some of the biggest punters work off 1-2% POT's but turn over huge volumes to make there money, so its all relative. You could have a system which returns a 90% POT on a 100 bets a year, or a system that returns 2% POT on 300 bets a week, again it all depends on your punting style, myself I prefer high turnover as I love action, and have no interest in only betting 1 horse a day.

Anyway, will stop rambling now.

Cheers