I have been reading most of the threads in this forum and almost exclusively every system or every theory or for that matter every comment revolves around the horse, why is that so?

For a long time I have known that the 'ability' of the horse is constrained to whether or not 'they' are trying. A direct response of this thinking is that they are trying when the money goes on.

So why then isn't the amount of money wagered on a horse more important or at least just as important as the inherent ability of the horse? Why isn't more weight attributed to the correlation between losing/winning favourites and the amount that does or does not go on them?

Because humans control the horse, the ability of the horse can be zero if the jockey puts on the brakes. I am yet to know of a camp that willingly or knowingly put their hard earned on with no intention of trying to win!

It seems to me that trying to numerically quantify a horses ability via a myriad of other factors such as weight, barrier, weather and so on and so forth, it's just so much waste of time. To my mind, it would be easier to quantify a set of numbers i.e. the amounts invested that have come back to the 'camp' or gone missing...lost due to bad luck or bad judgement.

Isn't it easier to feed a dollar value (a number) into a system than some ideological value that evaluates to a horses ability against another horse? In this respect you are really measuring apples against oranges and we all know you can't really do that, despite some clever attempts at expressions :-)

A very clever punter once told me a 'track' statement that I believe is amongst the top of the immutable laws of the track i.e. "the horse doesn't know what price it is". I had to think about that for years, whilst I watched him amass his empire, and now in my old age I understand exactly what he meant.

It's all about following the money, not the horse. So I put it to you all, that focusing on the horse for the ultimate racing/wagering system is just a waste of time. You would be better served watching the money and following it, provided of course you formulated a sensible set of rules and stuck to it.

I dare say I might get flamed a bit here for suggesting the noble steed is to some degree irrelevant, but I am not saying that unreservedly, I am saying that its a very difficult thing to actually score to any degree of accuracy. Even the times a horse runs against a measured distance can't really accurately be relied on because of track conditions and the underlying assumption that a horse can repeat that 'life time best' which by definition can't be done, else it would have only been a 'life time near best' :-)

Anyway, that's something I wanted to get off my chest. I am not trying to provoke a fight, just provoke a thought or two, plus it helps clarify my mind by telling you all what I think.

Ciao
Tailwag