Racebot is a new horse racing betting tipster service/betting bot which comes from Agora Lifestyles and Steve Clark. The service has been created by a “top data scientist” that goes by the pen name of “Rain Man”.
Introduction to Racebot by Agora
Agora Lifestyles are the kind of company that I always feel compelled to pay attention to when they release something new. The fact of the matter is that they are a professional publishing company and as such, their reach is substantially larger than any small time independent tipster.
It also means that they play the marketing game well (too well, in fact…), and Racebot is a great example of this.
“My Racebot is DESTROYING human tipsters” claims a headline. Well, it’s beaten a tipster in a small sample of a 6 week period, so Steve Clark is a bit premature there. None the less, I am curious to see whether or not Racebot can actually become the future of horse racing, or whether this is all just bluff talk.
What Does Racebot Offer?
With Racebot sounding so impressive, you may well ask (and quite reasonably), what exactly you are getting from Steve Clark. The short answer is actually, a pretty typical tipster service. Each morning, you can expect to receive selections via email with an option for a text message also being available. All that you have to have to do is follow the advice in the notification.
Selections are sent to Racebot subscribers at 11.15 am meaning that logistically, Racebot isn’t actually that different to any other tipster service on the market.
In terms of the bets themselves, Racebot is all pretty typical. Steve Clark’s software finds a decent enough range of odds, occasionally getting quite towards some longer odds. The volume of bets is manageable enough with the majority of days producing a small handful of bets.
Truth be told, despite the notion that the software behind Racebot represents some momentous leap forward in terms of betting. I just don’t really see anything here that isn’t typical of the majority of tipster services.
Staking wise, Racebot appears to have been “proofed” (what is provided can barely be considered proofing) to straightforward level stakes. Steve Clark advises staking anywhere from £10 all the way to £100 on stakes. This top number is required if you want to get close to the claimed results however. It is also worth noting that Steve Clark claims that Racebot is scalable meaning that in theory, you can make as much or little as you want.
Finally, I want to talk about the strike rate for Racebot. More specifically, I want to refer to the lack of a strike rate. The sales material makes reference to a strike rate of 80%, however that number is actually based off Steve Clark’s claim that this is the number of months that have won. In terms of the actual strike rate, there are no real claims.
It is worth noting that there is no actual proofing provided for Racebot either making it something we cannot calculate either. Instead, you simply get a vague list that claims a certain amount of profit has been made each month.
How Does Racebot Work?
If you believe the sales material for Racebot, Steve Clark is particularly well placed in order to produce the software behind it. He refers to himself in the headline as a “top data scientist”.
He also makes reference elsewhere in the sales material to working for a major UK bank where he makes millions of pounds. It is noteworthy to me that in this respect, Agora Lifestyles don’t actually say anything, preferring instead to push some unsubstantiated credentials. When you do move onto some information about the software, unfortunately, you don’t get that much more insight into Racebot.
We are for example told that the software “embraces similar technology used by Amazon, Facebook and Google to increase their profits” and that “even the CIA is all over this technology”.
What the software is then described to do is consider large quantities of data, applying more than 80 variables to it in order to find winning bets. This is 9 all a pretty S2standard algorithmic approach to betting. Steve Clark and Agora Lifestyles certainly don’t say anythi
ng to lead me to believe otherwise about Racebot.
What is the Initial Investment?
When you go to sign up for Racebot, you are offered a discount by Steve Clark and Agora Lifestyles which allows you 50% off. This is only for your first month however. Effectively, that means that somewhat reasonable comes with an introductory cost of £39.75 (plus VAT) will cost you a rather eyewatering £79.50 (plus VAT) for all subsequent months.
This number is auto renewing indefinitely which means that you will have to cancel if you don’t like the service.
Further to this, it is worth noting that the first 30 day period does come with a full money back guarantee. This means that if you find Racebot isn’t for you, you can still claim a refund on the service.
What is the Rate of Return?
In terms of the rate of return from Racebot, there are some quite substantial claims that are made. The main number that is pushed throughout the sales material is that had you been following Steve Clark’s advice, you would have made £107,518.
Although, in the theme of transparency, it is also worth pointing out, that had you joined at a certain time during those ‘total profits’, from September 2017 to January 2018, then you could initially have had a rather large loss:
Would you have carried out gambling if you had joined during those months? Month people probably wouldn’t have done, so it is all to easy to get caught up in the ‘overall’ profits, but sometimes you need to deal with the reality on a monthly basis.
This overall profit number is however based entirely on £100 stakes, a number that is unrealistic for most bettors. What this translates to is 1,075 points which is a strong amount, however it is important to keep in mind that this number is spread over 2 years (with a still strong 500 points per year).
Conclusion on the Racebot Service by Agora, and Steve Clark
Honestly, I think that it is rather difficult to ignore the results that Steve Clark and Steve Clark are claiming for Racebot.
There is definitely an argument to be made for numbers being inflated with increased stakes, however the underlying number of 500 points per year is very strong. In fact, there aren’t many services that spring to mind which will be outperforming this number. There are however a number of caveats that I have to this statement.
The sales material for Racebot talks a lot about how the service has beaten out the UK’s top human tipster over a period of 6 weeks. During this period, the software identified 12.43 points of profit or around 2 points per week.
Looking at the claimed broader results, Agora Lifestyles would have you believe that you can frequently expect this number to be bettered with 10 months in the last year making more than 10 points of profit.
What concerns me about all of this is that with no proofing provided and a small live sample size admitted to, I believe there are quite reasonable questions about whether the claimed results for Racebot are back tested. As well as this, there is also the fact that Steve Clark makes open reference to back testing being a part of the process for Racebot.
For my money, when this is combined with a premium price tag (there is no getting around that Racebot is very expensive) it paints a picture of a service that has the potential to work very well on paper. Unfortunately, I don’t believe that this represents value for money.
Whilst the cost of that first month may be in the region of reasonable, £80 per month is a huge sum and I would want to see something with more provenance than Steve Clark and Agora Lifestyles provide for Racebot.
With all of this in mind, I don’t believe that I can really bring myself to recommend this latest offering from Agora Lifestyles.
The fact of the matter is that the tipster market is a competitive one and if somebody wants me to pay £80 per month for their selections (even if those selections are supposedly the end of human tipsters), they have to be something that is demonstrably special. This doesn’t happen, and for the high costs, you could build a decent portfolio, a much more attractive proposition.
