RaceCom Software

[Derek2U]

Perhaps a few of you will find this interesting: I got all this from
my father who was (and is) a horse lover & player.

He told me that RaceCom was a near total fraud in software;
over charging for their worthless product. As the brains behind
that software was a J. Shepard, a engineer, who not only didn't
know anything about racing, but who also tried to fool those
who inquiried about his products with outright lies: my dad tells
me that Shepard tried to convince him that "advanced calculus"
was behing a routine in RaceCom, not knowing that my dad was
(and is) a math prof at a NJ college.

Just some gossip that some of you might find useful.

[Lefty]

PRN tried to review it yrs ago but the "computer guy" they farmed it to couldn't even get it up and running.

[Jaguar]

As anyone who bought Racecom products in the early days of their handicapping venture will bitterly tell you, their output was
horrible and unusable.

Even their first program, which was a Sartin-inspired energy expenditure disc was woefully under par as a predictive tool.

Racecom's loudly trumpeted and expensive Analog 2.0 was an utter catastrophe. I paid $900. for the product on its introduction in 1989 and was amazed that it was totally unrelated to the reality of horse handicapping. Why they released it I will never know.

At one point I became so enraged with Racecom, having spent several thousand dollars with them over the years, and never having received a usable product, that I called them up and screamed at them.

Subsequently, their mailings indicated that they had received so much negative feedback from customers that they had decided to make a serious effort to produce a worthwhile handicapping program. They also sent me a letter of apology.

In recent years they have produced the most powerful and expensive method yet conceived by the mind of man, Analog 5.0.

No one is more surprised than I am by this.

Joseph and David Shepard are brilliant programmers out of The Rochester Institute of Technology. They made their considerable fortune writing neural network financial analysis programs for Wall Street firms. They were neural network pioneers in the financial field and a book was written about them.

Handicapping was always an afterthought with Racecom, notwithstanding their denials of this when confronted.

One consideration that is a stumbling block for former, present, and potentially future customers is that the principals at Racecom are extremely arrogant- a not uncommon quality among incredibly smart programmers.