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NetCapper |
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Track Tracts Keep an Accurate Set of
Records (Editor's Note: This is an excerpt from Steve Fierro's new book, The Four Quarters of Horse Investing, now available in the NetCapper Store.) Once again I must ask a couple of ridiculous questions. Can any business operate profitably without a set of books? Can a business continually make money without a set of books? ABSOLUTELY NOT! Then why do horseplayers that play serious money on a regular basis think they can? The answer is simple: they aren�t serious players, they just think they are. What they really are is someone who is spending (wasting is a better term) too much time and money trying to pick winners. Here�s a little homework for you to do next time you go to wherever you have chosen to play. Look around and monitor all the players you feel are regulars. You know where they sit. They are there almost every day. You have seen them for months. Then when the races are over, take a look at how many of them have abandoned their past performances and wagering tickets, just tossing them away. They are already working on tomorrow�s races and will spend hours and hours scouring the past performances. They will learn nothing from what transpired today. They will not record their wagers. They will not know which races they did well in and why. They won�t even know how much they won or lost. Throwing away your past performances and parimutuel tickets is like a store owner tossing out the daily sales records and receipts. You have no way, once they are gone, of reproducing the who, what, where, when, why, and how things happened that day. (Remember, I am talking about regular players, not the once-a-month recreational player.) Let�s hope they never stop playing. The reason you can be a winning player and profit in racing is because you will do what others are not willing to do. We will always be outnumbered and that is a good thing. You must develop the necessary tactics that will support this strategy. You must create a set of books that reflect what you need to know to help increase your bottom line profit from your horse investments. Here are the bottom-line questions your records should reflect: 1. How did I do today,
this week, this month, this year? These are very basic questions. The good news is that this is really simple to do. We live in a day and age where we have options. Your choices can range from a simple set of books to very involved computer programs that make the process easy. Record-keeping is essential because it represents 25% of your business and also paints a picture. Your records will show straight out whether you are a winning or losing player. I mentioned earlier, this is a big reason many players don�t do it. The most important factor is that this strategy guides your future. Knowing where you have been will dictate where it is you need to go. The past few years my profits have increased solely from my betting records. I have tweaked the other three quarters, but this area is where I have always come back to make the critical changes necessary to maintain and increase profits. NC Copyright �2002 Steve Fierro. All rights reserved. |