Trainer Jock Combination

A powerful metric with positive return on investment (ROI) when trainer and jockey combination is strong

Will be blogging next week on the Trainer Jockey Rating (TJR) in whole but customer alerted me to multiple horses that were winning at big odds with positive TJ combinations.  Now I was already using these combinations within the TJR at significant weighting but there were still horses slipping through that could have been flagged.

So I wanted to create a trainer jockey (tj) screen that had significant sample size with positive ROI.  Here is what I came up with.  One of these two scenarios had to exist:

365-day T/J combo:  Starts 25+;  Wins 4+;  ROI >=  +1.25  OR 

Meet T/J combo:   Starts 12+;  Wins 2+;  ROI >= +2.00

Now screening for horses that meet either of these thresholds.  

So first of all we have a large sample size with positive ROI.  And 101 of the horses that met our sample were previously X (toss) horses with 23% ROI.  Additionally, these screens work but as horses go beyond those screens the results get better.

Yesterday in Race 7 at Saratoga, #7 Cosmic Candy Girl met this threshold.  Horse won and paid $55.62

So going forward every horse that meets either of these two trainer/jockey combination screens will get a "tj" flag inside the form cycle (FC) column.  We'll continue to double check that these screens are set appropriately as we get more data of course.  Every one of those will also get a minimum grade of "C" and will be listed as no worse than a back-up horse in the handicap report bottom line.  Powerful!