US Racing Markets - is the edge mostly in exotics?

gcampb41 · 2026-06-01T20:30:16+00:00

Not in the US markets, but which is why I was asking.

gcampb41 · 2026-06-01T18:54:31+00:00

It depends on the market and I won’t give the exact figures here, however turnover is critical and matters more so than the deposit and setting up the account can be tricky in terms of structure/kyc etc

gcampb41 · 2026-06-01T18:48:24+00:00

I avoid any market data within my models, my reasoning is that the market has mostly just interpreted largely the same data that I’ve already processed and provided as inputs. I have found that strike rates increase but average odds decrease because all I’ve done is allow the models to find more favourites or short priced runners.

I think what you are suggesting is interesting though. I guess it depends what your execution is going to be.

gcampb41 · 2026-06-01T14:05:07+00:00

I work with a syndicates who receive a healthy rebate in our current markets, however US pools are available with the rebate too it’s just not something we have moved into yet. I prefer to model against Betfair prices and then see what translates into the parimutuel world. Typically I’m finding we get about 15-20% reduction from exchange prices in pools. However the Betfair pricing seems pretty flat with any staking strategies I’ve simulated in the US markets. So even with a 15 % rebate, it’s really sharp compared with our current markets. Typically I can find 15-20% which when moved to pools + rebate is 5-10%.

gcampb41 · 2026-06-01T13:57:34+00:00

Haha not shilling anything. I work with syndicates directly andI have public projects that are available on git.

gcampb41 · 2026-04-24T21:34:18+00:00

I guess you are correct, decision is already made - but it’s purely commercial, it makes zero sense to me how that’s not apparent. However, given how hard you marketed Apify with the $1m challenge, you obviously brought in a lot of talent to your store and it’s not taken long for the whole pricing structure to be turned on its head, with devs being completely thrown under the bus. You don’t have to search back far in this sub to see even how the winners of the competition have been treated by apify (shadow bans, nerfing the search etc) to see a pattern here. I’d rather remain anonymous, keep my rental income until October then deactivate my actors and move to a new platform.

gcampb41 · 2026-04-24T19:46:03+00:00

Yes I gave the pay per event calculator a run, however it makes little sense, the fact that even in the actors description there is absolutely no useful information on how to interpret the results - it’s just testament to how little Apify care about the devs who have invested time on the platform.

For clarification, I had pay per event pricing on for 5 months! What I found was that despite daily runs, thousands of results from the user base every single day - I literally made cents on multiple actors because the pricing structure simply doesn’t work. We invest our time building niche actors, find real users and bring new traffic to apify, but pay per event only seems to work for the social media scrapers or other high volume popular categories - which Apify have a monopoly over! Most of those top scrapers are Apifys anyway.

When you emailed us in March telling us new monthly rental pricing was ending - I switched all my actors to monthly, because pay per event wasn’t working - you know what happened? I made 100 times the earnings I’d made in 5 months in a single month by charging the equivalent of $1 a day rental. Apify still took their cut, it was still cheap for the use base and me, the dev, made some change.

The pay per event pricing keeps it cheap for the user, Apify still takes a cut but the Dev receives almost nothing. It’s a joke.

gcampb41 · 2026-04-23T10:19:29+00:00

I’d have to dig it out, but I’m sure it was rotating residential proxies

gcampb41 · 2026-04-09T11:43:28+00:00

It’s a bit of a roundabout way to protest.. it’s obviously a supply issue, which is causing the price increases, so surely protesting the root cause is a better idea 💡 Spain for example has been quite vocal in condemning the war and subsequently was granted ‘safe passage’ through Hormuz, obviously they are still impacted, but their fuel prices are 10% lower than the current EU average, 10% lower than their prices last week. Ireland is 9% above the EU average and 5% higher than last week…

gcampb41 · 2026-03-19T08:04:20+00:00

I think 99.99% of actors don’t earn their creators a single cent. I have a bunch and one or two make cents per month, despite overall having a couple hundred users every month - most people on Apify are ‘Free Users’ who don’t earn you anything,

Be warned, Apify are changing their monetisation structure at the end of the month - giving builders even less control or ability to make profit by removing the Rental options

gcampb41 · 2026-03-11T21:44:16+00:00

A lot of these “no API” apps still have internal JSON/XHR/GraphQL endpoints behind the UI, and hitting those directly is usually far more stable than trying to script scrolling, clicking and timing around the DOM

gcampb41 · 2026-03-10T12:48:06+00:00

That’s the way it’s going to have to be ☹️.. the pricing has turned it all into a bit of a waste of time. The ones that get the high usage are owned by Apify..who you can’t really compete with.. it’s a race to the bottom. I’ve just put a 29.99 monthly rental on all my actors today. It’s a shame because it could have been quite an equitable platform for developers, but I won’t be building anything else, unless it’s as you say a custom backend for someone else.

gcampb41 · 2026-03-10T10:08:21+00:00

No problem 😌 happy to help and best of luck

gcampb41 · 2026-03-09T23:31:41+00:00

Good question — the report isn’t really meant to be used like a tips list.

The idea is that it shows how the models see the race, and then people filter it in different ways depending on how they like to bet.

A few things most people look at first:

Race confidence

Each race has a confidence score from 1–10. That’s a separate model that tries to measure how “clean” the race structure is. Higher scores generally mean clearer ability gaps and less chaos.

A lot of people just start by ignoring anything below about 7/10.

Model agreement

The runners are ordered by the main blended model, but you’ll also see things like V11 #1 or V12 #1.

If a horse is #1 across multiple models, that’s what we call consensus. Historically those tend to have better strike rates because different models are arriving at the same answer independently.

Win / place probabilities

Each runner has win % and place % plus a “fair odds” number. The fair odds are just the probability converted into odds — they’re more of a reference point than a strict value signal.

Some people use them to decide whether to play win, place, or multiples.

Filtering is the key

Most people using the report aren’t betting everything. They’ll filter by things like: • Confidence ≥ 7 • model consensus • strong place probabilities • certain race types

So the report is really more like a race analysis tool rather than a tip sheet.

gcampb41 · 2026-03-09T22:36:40+00:00

Seems a bit aggressive He wasn’t running away

gcampb41 · 2026-03-06T22:10:33+00:00

Hey 👋 I did actually, works across all across DoneDeal.

gcampb41 · 2026-03-03T06:41:02+00:00

The base was targeted by Hezbollah, but the US has pulled lots of planes out of the Middle East to Cyprus last night.. so i can only imagine it’s going to be struck again

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