Puntz,

I am a programmer and have developed my own program to collect and analyse racing stats. So far I estimate I have invested about $15000 worth of my programming time in the development of the program and probably double that amount in the research and testing time that went into developing the method and parameters that the program uses - hopefully it will pay for itself soon otherwise I am going to have a very angry wife!!!

With regards to your comments the easiest way to protect the method if you were having a program developed would be to use your first suggestion and have a series of parameters that the program uses. Not only does this protect your "secret" formula but it also makes it much easier to tune the program later - you don't want to keep paying the programmer each time you want to make a minor adjustment in your algorithm.