The tour Matt Russell took: the System Builder as reviewed by On Course Profits
Matt Russell reviewed the System Builder for On Course Profits on 23 September 2026. He came to it cold, having heard of Proform for years but never used it, and worked through the builder the way a system builder would. This video recreates the path he took, on screen, with his two Ask sentences typed exactly as he typed them.
Two sentences, two systems
The first thing that caught his eye was the Ask box at the top left, where a system can be described in plain English. His first try was A P O'Brien's record in Group races on a Saturday. The builder drafts the rules, shows a line saying what it understood, and leaves the run to you. His verdict on that one: not a system to back blind.
His second sentence was tighter: Andrew Balding at Kempton on the all-weather with Oisin Murphy riding. One line gave him the trainer, the course, the surface and the partnership, and that is the system he carried through the rest of the review, so the video does too.
The full analysis
Run Full Analysis puts the summary up first while the rest fills in behind it: the Chi score, A/E, the return at Betfair SP and how the last twelve months compare with the years before. Below it sit the breakdowns, the same runners cut by year, going, class, headgear, stall, run style and a long list more.
The tab he singled out is RaceMetrics Ratings: our own figures for the horse, the trainer, the jockey, the owner and the pedigree as they stood on the day, each one usable as a rule. Two newer arrivals sit there as well, the AI Rating rank from the racecards and the RaceMetrics Model Price. He called these the thing that sets the builder apart from its competitors, and rightly added that they are young.
Proving it on unseen races
The part he liked most was the data split. Build on Half A, flip to Half B, races your rules have never met, and see whether the edge survives. Hold back the last twelve months. Or take the 80/20 cut, which is drawn separately from the halves, so a system that passes all of them has cleared four different slices of the same database.
The tuning tools
Goal Seek asks which single rule would improve the system and only puts forward candidates that clear a statistical bar. Auto-build builds toward a target one rule at a time, and Trim tells you which rules you could cut. Robustness shows the last twelve months against the years before, the longest winning and losing runs and the deepest drawdown at Betfair SP, at starting price and for laying. Staking replays the same bets under ten plans, with the final bank, the drawdown, the longest losing run and the chance of going bust for each.
Where the next idea comes from
His example of where micro systems come from was the Grid. Start with Class 1 races at Newbury, put trainers down the side and jockeys across the top, and every cell is one pairing's record. A minimum-runs floor keeps the noise out, and any cell that catches the eye becomes the next rule.
His conclusion was that it is an excellent system builder with stats covering almost everything you can think of, and with unique filters from our own ratings and tools. The full review is on On Course Profits. The System Builder is included with RaceMetrics Pro and Proform Premium, and the short videos he mentions are in the System Builder playlist on our YouTube channel.