July was the busiest month in RaceMetrics' history. One hundred and thirty-four separate releases went live. The System Builder opened to members on the 12th — and then grew by more than half again in the fortnight that followed.
Here is the whole month in one place.
The month in three numbers
- System Builder filters: 403 → 638
- Breakdown dimensions: 64 → 196
- Releases: 134
The System Builder launched
On 12 July the System Builder opened to RaceMetrics Pro and Proform Premium members. It back-tests a betting system over eight years of British and Irish racing, shows you where the edge actually lives, and then hands you today's qualifiers every morning.
It shipped with a full video course rather than a manual: the launch film for the overview, then short lessons on each part of it. The written reference lives at the System Builder guide, with a description for every single filter and breakdown.
Bet Finder, button for button
Proform's desktop Bet Finder has 81 one-click angles built up over twenty years. All 81 are now available in the System Builder — at-course records for trainer, jockey, trainer-and-jockey combination and sire; the full trainer situational family; Likes and Dislikes; sire form on the going and at the trip. We then went back through them family by family, checking the numbers horse-for-horse against the desktop and correcting any that did not match.
They are grouped in a Bet Finder panel inside the builder so you can start from a familiar angle and then take it further. Watch the Bet Finder angles video.
We also rewrote every button's hover text into plain English. If a tooltip ever reads like database jargon, tell us and we will fix it.
Breakdowns became a workbench
This is the part of the System Builder that answers "yes, but where does this work?" — and it went from 64 ways of slicing a system to 196.
You can now sort breakdowns by category tab, drill into any row and choose which columns you want to see, filter every table at once by minimum runs or minimum strike rate, and read the whole thing in the same colour blocks the desktop uses. The full System Results column battery came across too. Watch the breakdowns video.
Ask it in English — or let it build
Type "handicap chases at Kempton where the trainer is 20% or better in the last fortnight" into the Ask box and the System Builder writes the rules for you, checked against the filter catalogue before it runs. Watch Ask in the System Builder.
It was tightened through the month, too. The rules it writes are checked against the filter catalogue before anything runs, so it cannot invent a filter that does not exist — and it now falls back across several AI providers, so a wobble at one of them does not take the feature down.
Deeper form
A horse's last run was never going to be enough. July added the run before that, and the one before that, and — at the end of the month — the fourth run back, so you can now ask for things like a horse that has finished in the first three in every one of its last four starts.
Alongside the run-by-run history: speed figure against the class par, best speed figure in the last 90 days and whether it came from a winning run, open-age races only, last-time-out race name, Power Odds value ratios, sectional filters on the last run, and a festival filter that pulls Glorious Goodwood or the Punchestown festival out of eight years of racing in one tick — shown here on Goodwood week.
Two videos cover this ground: researching a horse's whole career and last time out and the runs before it.
Proving a system isn't just a good story
Any tool that lets you test thousands of combinations will eventually hand you a beautiful set of results that means nothing. So July put as much work into disproving systems as building them.
There is a random 50/50 split, and a Train 80% / Test 20% holdout — refine your rules on 80% of races, then see whether the untouched 20% agrees. The split is deterministic, so a race always lands in the same bucket and the test set cannot drift. Watch the data split video, and the one on robustness.
Targets let you set a goal on a saved system and track it honestly from the day you saved it. Watch the Targets video.
Systems that work while you don't
Research is only half of it. Your saved systems now run themselves in the background:
- Today's Qualifiers hub, every active system in one morning view — video
- A morning qualifiers email, if you want one
- Follow-up alerts when a non-runner or a price move changes who qualifies
- A Yesterday tab showing yesterday's qualifiers with their results
- Fifty saved systems, up from twenty
- Export a system to a file and send it to another member, who imports it and back-tests it before deciding to keep it
- Portfolio, which bets several of your systems as one bank — video
Sectionals
Pace Curves arrived: how a race was actually run, section by section, against the par for that course and distance — plus a stride fingerprint for every track. Later in the month we added overlays for horses that came widest and horses that ran well, and a comparison band for the same course and distance. Watch Pace Curves.
The Hard-Luck Finder gives you a page of horses whose finishing splits say they should have finished closer than they did, and both hard-luck and still-full-of-running became one-tick filters in the System Builder. Sectionals in the System Builder, or the full sectionals playlist.
Sectional timing is an add-on rather than part of the base subscription — here is how it works.
Away from the System Builder
New navigation. Five menus, every tool, plus a command palette on Ctrl+K (⌘K on a Mac) that jumps straight to any page. Watch the navigation video.
My Card. You can now print your custom racecard — your columns, form lines under each runner, as a colour PDF for the track (video). At the end of the month it also gained form-stat columns drawn from the System Builder's precompute, and a CSV export of your whole day (video).
Runner pills. One compact three-letter standard for runner badges across every page that lists today's runners, so a badge means the same thing wherever you meet it.
Race Workout. Track All Runners now follows the entire field, including horses that have not run again yet — not just the ones with a subsequent run on the board.
AI Race Cards gained date pills for moving between days, and the RM7 prize boxes now read the live prize fund from the database instead of a fixed figure.
Two new ways in
RaceMetrics Pro launched at £75 a month — the full toolkit including the System Builder — with a £49.99 first month.
The affiliate programme opened: 30% recurring on anyone you introduce. How it works.
The part we are proudest of
Look back over that list and a surprising amount of it started as an email from a member.
The price-rank filters came from two members in the beta. Printing My Card was a request. The sectional filters on the last run were a request. The last-time-out race name and the Power Odds value ratios were a request. The pace-curve overlays were a request. The fourth run back — the one that lets you ask for a horse placed in all of its last four — arrived by email at the end of the month and was live within hours.
If something is missing, tell us. That is genuinely how most of this got built.
