I always find it fascinating that certain words have thier day with regards to popular use and meaning,a current example being Transparency.
Racing is no exception and every where i look recently the media appears to have revived VALUE as being the bees knees,but as with most aspects of racing this can have diffrent meaning or interpretations.
For myself i tend to judge value in the long term as apposed to with individual horses,IE if at the end of the year i have made an acceptable profit ,then i assume that i must have obtained value on balance.
But the fashion at present appears to revolve around backing the value horse(s) in a race almost regardless of thier chance on form,this is an approach i would not care to use,but some claim success.
So how do we identify a horse who is a bigger price than it should be,for those unable or unwilling to price up a race themselves the obvious answer is to compare available prices with those quoted in a betting forecast,this can be useful excepting that you have to have some understanding of the compilers objectives and thinking,is he forecasting prices based on each horses chance or on what he thinks the final SP might be because the two are not necessarily the same thing.
I would suggest a better option would be to scan the bookmakers early prices,the large firms have thier own form annalists and dare i suggest access to stable intelligence.If you pick just one of these firms who you feel may be good at this,lets for example use Ladbrookes it can be most informative when the prices are first available to note if they have taken a position concerning an individual horses chance.With the odds checkers now available on line possible value bets can be spotted with very little time or effort.
In closing i would say that i was remained of the existence of this potentially valuable aid by Godspots recent post on the 2000 guineas,where he mentioned that Ladbrookes where only going 20/1 a contender that other firms had at 50/1.