http://www.racing-index.com/bill-harris-racing-system.html
is an excellent expose on the recent AD Associates mail shot selling the Bill Harris racing system.
After reading it, I ope you will approach all similar mail shots with equal skepticism.IT’s recounted below
Bill Harris Racing System – From AD Associates
Racing-Index has been contacted by several people regarding a mailshot they’ve received from a company called AD Associates, regarding the Bill Harris Racing System. In the mailshot it states the system made a profit of £3480 in a period of 31 days from the 1st April to 1st May 2009, proofed to Racing-Index.
One person who contacted Racing-Index said:
“I have purchased an expensive racing system called the BILL HARRIS RACING SYSTEM, sold through a company A.D.Associates. The reason I purchased the system was that the advert states that “A Profit of £3480 in only 31 days of betting” proofed to RACING-INDEX.
I trust Racing-Index, but I was dismayed to find when I looked through your web site not a trace of the afforementioned Mr. Harris. I would be very pleased if you would take the time to reply and let me know if this system was ever proofed to you, or as I suspect due to recent results, I have been conned ?”
He kindly sent through images from the literature that prompted him to buy the system.
Pretty convincing stuff! The graph certainly looks like one produced by the Racing-Index proofing system, except it doesn’t have the name of the tipster at the top and as owner of Racing-Index I’d not heard of the Bill Harris Racing System, let alone proofed the selections.
With a little bit of digging in the proofing area I’ve been able to establish the graph is actually from results proofed for Pro Punter Betting. As you can see from the graph below their performance during the period 1st April to 1st May 2009 mirrors that claimed for the Bill Harris Racing System.
You can verify this performance via the following link to the proofing area:
Pro Punter Betting from 1st April to 1st May 2009
If we look at the actual returns for Pro Punter Betting during that period we’ll see 118 points profit at SP and 204 points profit from Betfair SPs.
Bill Harris Racing System is propunterbetting.com
If you look at the disclaimer page on the Pro Punter Betting web site you’ll see the web site is actually run by AD Associates, although there is no mention of the Bill Harris Racing System on the site.
OK, so we’ve established that AD Associates did actually proof selections to Racing-Index in advance of the races and 204 points profit (or even their lower claim of 174 points) in 31 days sounds great, so is the system worth buying.
Let’s start with the following profit claim:
They say they made £3,480 from only £20 stakes.
Now if I read that I’d assume £20 stakes to mean a £20 bet on each horse, but in order to achieve the £3,480 profit you’d need to stake £20 per point advised on each horse. From the Pro Punter Betting figures above, we see their average stake is 5.52 points. That means your average stake per horse would have had to be £110.40 (quite a difference from a £20 stake).
If we look specifically at a couple of the selections:
Barafundle won at odds of 14/1 (BSP 20.0). The stake they submitted was 7.16 points, which at £20 a point you would have been expected to bet £143.20 on the selection.
Azif won at odds of 8/1 (BSP 13.5). The stake submitted was 9.2 points, which would have equated to £184.
Those 2 selections gave 238.49 points profit based on Betfair SPs, which is more than the total made during the 31 days, so you’d have made a loss of 34 points from betting the other 87 selections.
In order to have made the £3,480 profit they claim, you’d have had to stake £143.20 on a 19/1 (20.0) shot and £184 on a 12.5/1 (13.5) shot. Hardly the sort of stakes the majority of people can afford.
67% Claimed Strike Rate
They claim the system has a 67% strike rate. We can see from the Pro Punter Betting stats above that the actual strike rate (success percentage) was only 23.6%.
The strike rate is one of the most important aspects to consider when betting. The higher the strike rate the lesser the losing runs you’ll get and a bigger % of your betting bank you can afford to bet on each selection. There is a world of difference between 67% and 23.6%.
Is 1 month long enough to test a system?
All said and done, whether the results were from Pro Punter Betting or Bill Harris Racing System, the performance from 1st April to 1st May wasn’t bad. However anyone can have a good month, with a couple of outsiders making a profit, but can the system continue such performance over a longer period.
They claim to Guarantee you’ll make over £3,000 in the next 8 weeks. Well as I write (25th June) it’s been just about 8 weeks since 1st May. We’ve established the proofed results for the Bill Harris Racing System were actually those of Pro Punter Betting, so lets see how they’ve performed since that date.
Pro Punter Betting from 2nd May to 24th June 2009
Now that’s not looking so good; They continued to make a profit until around mid May, but since then the wheels have well and truly fallen off.
Loss of £4,176.80 at Betfair Prices
Loss of £5,083.60 at SP
in last 8 weeks
A loss of 208.84 points based on Betfair odds would have completely wiped out the previous profit of 204 points. To their quoted £20 stakes you’d have made a loss of £4,176.80 at BSP and a loss of £5,083.60 at SP, during the last 8 weeks.
Racing-Index in no way endorses the Bill Harris Racing System
I’d advise anyone who receives the mailshot to throw it in their recycling bin and under no circumstances send any money to AD Associates. Their mailshot is clearly designed to mislead and the proofed results they base their profit claims on have made big losses before and after the period shown in their mailshot.
Doing a quick search on the web I found the following on the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) web site regarding previous false advertising by AD Associates: http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/adjudications/Public/TF_ADJ_45253.htm
Also in his weekly email, in March 2008, Clive Keeling from What Really Wins Money had the following to say about a previous product from AD Associates.
A D Associates renege on their refund policy
Another reader has confirmed what happened to my testers last year. Willing to try out AD Associates products last year, we asked for a refund, AND WE’RE STILL WAITING. So too is the reader. It’s the usual story – a guarantee that isn’t worth the paper it’s written on
“I’ve had some thoroughly unsatisfactory dealings with them over the last few years. They sell football, greyhound and horse racing systems for which they make outrageous claims. They do not like having to refund money under their so-called guarantees for unsuccessful systems. I am currently waiting on more than £150 in refunds which I will probably never see!
They refused to answer any of my letters and they very rarely answer the phone to customers preferring instead to deal at arms length. I cannot get any answers from the principals of this outfit and I have been told by one of their staff that it takes at least 3 months for any refund to be considered after a complaint is made. Even then, they will not pay out in the majority of cases.”
If you see proofed profit claims, from any service, it is always worth checking the proofing area to verify the claim. Most services will have good runs of results and bad runs. They can make their service look good by just showing results from a period when they performed well. It is only by viewing their full results via the proofing area you get a complete picture of how good a tipster or system is.
Racing-Index does not proof any services privately, so if a proofing claim is valid, it will always be possible to verify the claim via the proofing area.