Saturday, October 11, 2008

Very Quick Update

When someone asks a good question in the comments on an old post, I'm never sure whether they'll see my response if I address it there. Winston asked whether I'm going to have trouble with my study of how lousy horse names impact auction prices, because most two year olds sold at auction are unnamed. The answer is a resounding 'yes'! I hadn't realized how few are named prior to the auctions, so it will take quite a while to find enough that have lousy names for any kind of study. I probably won't bother.

I've mentioned baseball and fantasy baseball a few times, mostly as an excuse when I don't post for a while. My inspiration for starting Thoroughmetrics was the statistical research that's been done in baseball over the past 25 years or so. As an example of how strong the predictive value of that analysis can be, I just won a car by coming in first in a fantasy baseball competition with over 14,000 contestants. While the details are different, I'm using the basic statistical techniques in my analysis of horse racing, and I expect to find similarly valuable results.

I'm also going to have agree with Winston's assessment that Blood-Ex failed before it ever launched. Their website hasn't been updated since the end of June.

2 comments:

Wind Gatherer said...

It's a shame about Blood-Ex.

The concept was a good one and I think that there might be a time, not too far off, when it will be backed appropriately.

Need to get the big breeders on board.

Alex said...

Winston - Assuming that the reason they folded wasn't major software flaws, it might be worth it for someone to track down the owners and buy the software from them ultra-cheap. If they're really not using it anyway, they might sell it for a few bucks plus a royalty on any future profits from it. Maybe I'll see if I can contact them...I exchanged one or two emails with their marketing guy.