The System Builder's Breakdowns tab has a section called RaceMetrics Ratings — 21 ways of slicing a system by our own figures, taken as they stood at the time of each race. It covers horses, trainers, jockeys, sires, dams, damsires and owners, plus the combined connection rating, future form and Collateral Score.
Most of those ratings appear twice: once as a rank and once as a range. They look almost identical in the list, and they answer completely different questions.
Rank versus range
Rank asks: was this the best sire in today's race? Range asks: is this a good sire, full stop — measured against every other sire, not just the handful he happens to be up against this afternoon.
Across 430,845 runners since January 2023, with no filters applied at all, the top-rated sire in a race wins 14.2 per cent of the time. Second-rated wins 14.0 per cent, third 13.1, fifth 11.4, sixth 10.4. A decline, but a gentle one, and it runs out of road quickly.
Split the same runners by the sire's actual rating instead and the spread is far wider: 6.8 per cent under 1400, 9.4 per cent from 1400 to 1474, 10.6 up to 1524, 12.8 up to 1599, and 16.6 per cent at 1600 and above.
That gap is the point. The top-rated sire in a weak race and the top-rated sire in a strong one look identical in the rank column. They are not the same horse to back. The range sees the difference; the rank cannot.
Collateral Score
Collateral Score measures how the horses a runner has beaten have gone on to perform. It is the only rating on the tab that goes negative, and that is the useful part: positive means the rivals it beat went on to win races, negative means they went on to lose.
The bands run 4.0 per cent at the bottom, then 6.6, 9.9, 13.3 and 14.3 near the top — before flattening off to 13.6 in the very top band rather than carrying on up. About one runner in five carries no score at all, because they have not met enough shared opponents, and those sit in their own row rather than being quietly dropped.
What the A/E column is telling you
Now the honest part. Across the top six sire ranks the A/E runs 0.95 to 1.02. Across all five sire-rating bands it runs 0.97 to 1.06. Across all seven Collateral bands, 0.98 to 1.02. Flat, in other words — the market has already priced these ratings in.
(Read the rank tables with the run counts in view. That table has 39 bands and the deep tail is a handful of runners apiece, so its A/E swings wildly on nothing at all. The bands that carry real numbers are the ones worth reading.)
Which is exactly what a breakdown is for. It is not there to hand you a bet — it is there to show you the shape of your system, so you can tell the difference between a rule that is doing work and one that just sounds clever.
The five value-band breakdowns — sire, damsire, dam, owner and Collateral Score — went in after a customer wrote in to ask for them. The System Builder is part of Proform Premium.
