walkermac, some of the ones i'll be taking a look at more closely soon include:

Steel Prince
Southern France
Constantinople
Il Paradiso
Ispolini
Raymond Tusk

They appear to be the ones that meet my early criteria the best, not sure if you've got any initial thoughts on those 6 runners. I'm thinking i'll start getting some futures bets on soon and make use of some odds boosts where I can as well. From memory usually a horse or two performs well in one of the leadup races and people get overly excited and sometimes crunch those odds in and they generally fall flat in the big race.

I also noticed there seems to be a lot of horses this year that have run in the melbourne cup previously, which rarely end up winning it a second time around.