I work hard for my money. You work hard for your money. We all supply our specialized labor in some respect to earn the tender which pays for us to survive. Because it's all about surviving, after all. When we exchange our money for any good or service, we do so with a sort of trust. I buy X food at Y establishment because I trust it will nourish me -- I may even trust that it will be good. Or I go to X mechanic to get my car's oil changed because I trust it will keep my car running. Every transaction hinges on the trust that the decision will provide value, otherwise the door wouldn't budge. Now the business we work in is a gambling game. The only real thing we can trust is chaos rules, but that doesn't mean we lack trust in this business of uncertainty. Every time I make a gamble, I do so trusting the information I'm given and trusting the form I see on the program as well as what I've seen from following horses. But sometimes, the truly unpredictable occurs in racing, and most times it's only unpredictable because of the information given. Devout fans of this column will remember when I interviewed trainer Scott Betts after he had a horse drop several seconds off just a few starts. In that conversation, Betts explained equipment adjustments and shoeing changes which rationalize how a horse could improve well off its previous form. But when we just look at the past performance page, all we are given are numbers of where the horse raced and where they finished, no additional insight as to what changes could have occurred from start to start. So then how, for the uninformed and disconnected everyday bettor, can we trust the information? I, like many in the sport, watched the races from The Red Mile for the Grand Circuit meeting. It's always a fun meet because of how chaos materializes and how, for some reason, horses go faster in the second quarter than they do the first. But this meet, I noticed a trend that climaxed with a 28-1 shot I liked purely from the post parade, a 2-year-old named Volume Eight. Now this horse warmed up like a freight train, and maybe that's enough visual information to trust even though we have seen many exceptions of horses who then race as duds. Sure enough, the horse goes a monster mile off a pocket trip and the connections after the race said they pulled the shoes on the horse, an equipment change never mentioned prior to the race. The good news on that front is several of our major tracks already work to inform the bettors of this information. The Meadowlands will add it to the bottom scroll and also will include equipment changes with blinkers, murphy blinds, etc. Woodbine Mohawk Park does this too and does so with frequency, and easily delivers it to the viewing audience. This sort of transparency is paramount because, while not ALL equipment changes can explain improvement, they do serve as markers for interpretation. And the less you force the customer to purely guess, the more they will learn to understand the intricacies of a horse's lines and thus the more invested they will be to participate. ► Sign up for our FREE DRF Harness Digest Newsletter But all of this transparency only occurs on race day. I got a message from Mark Cramer before the Hambletonian asking if we keep records of horses' shoeing in North America since he's currently acquainted with the record keeping of the French trots. When I told him "No", I also thought of all the other equipment adjustments we do not list in programs. Blinkers, blinds, Kant-See-Backs, which are spelled like that for some reason -- all these pieces of tinkering which do aid in a horse's performance are left off any record we look at on a program. Hell, good luck finding when a horse was gelded, either. The biggest equipment change of all just left nowhere beyond the sights of the hyper-sharp eye. And only those who pay the $2.50 on Pathway are able to find that info. Sorry, TrackIT users. All of this comes back to trust. I have been ingrained in this game for a long time, so I know how to maneuver around the general information given to the horseplayer. But for the everyday player or those looking to break into the vocation, there's a learning curve simply from the allowance in reliability you have to give for each line on a horse's past performances. Ensuring this sort of transparency is not a cure-all solution, of course, but any sort of informing just serves to gain the trust of the consumer. We look at the success of racing in Hong Kong and have to wonder what sets their product apart. Among them is the perhaps militant transparency they give for all their customers on every horse. In return, its customers invest millions into the betting pools each race. For every race I watch over in England, I can see in the Racing Post what head gear a horse wore in what race and when in that horse's career they were gelded. Or we can look at the multi-billion-dollar market of sports betting, where no team's starting lineup ever goes unreported. Imagine the star shooting guard of a basketball team being listed all day but then not starting (beyond some unforeseen circumstance) -- that's the equivalent of not listing a shoeing change. I can spend my money on anything. I choose to spend some of it on harness racing because I have spent so many years watching it that I have some level of trust in how to interpret the information. But the well-over a billion dollars spent on racing, either betting or even in the gamble of ownership, pales to the many trillions of dollars that are put into the stock market annually. Because, in the stock market, there is an enforced trust since every company must publish its financials and records in order to legally take the public's investment. And because of that transparency, many people have trusted putting a portion of their labor's pay into a still uncertain market. Millions of Americans hold enough trust in that gamble that they will pin the budget for the twilight years of their life on things like Coca-Cola inventing a new fruit punch or IBM's first edible computer chip. The dollar, after all, is the determining factor for many on whether we can eat at night or wake up hungry, whether we have shelter or live on the street. And yet, people are still willing to spend their dollar, so long as that dollar is being given a value in return. But that value is intrinsic to trust in the transaction. We should give that level of respect to every dollar invested, from ensuring the most transparent information to the bettors in the same way vet records are available to those looking at yearlings in Harrisburg this week. Find and seal the holes where conjecture runs too free. Get the public to trust your product and they will give you their dollar.