Circumspection and Mugs

Many readers will be familiar with the name Pyckio, and be aware that this week CEO Daniel Mateos Vazquez made the following announcement:

We’ve been making great progress in our future SPORTS BETTING HEDGE FUND. Tax and legal details are being closed. The fund will be formed in a jurisdiction that permits this kind of financial products and the fund will be approved by a national financial regulator. Our objective is to create the biggest sports betting hedge fund in the world.

We will follow a mixed strategy to find long term value bets by using the recommendations of the best tipsters for each sport and competition and strategies generated internally by Pyckio based on Big Data. The analysis of Big Data will be carried out by qualified professionals part of our team.

The long term success of the hedge fund is expected to be based on detecting market inefficiencies. Bookmakers and betting exchanges set their quotes based on bets made by their clients. We know that individual clients don’t make their decisions in a rational way and that generates quote inefficiencies that can be taken advantage of, specially by using bookmakers with low margins.

Also, even if bookers such as Pinnacle Sports do not limit bets from winners (it helps them fine-tune their quotes), operating through betting brokers remains a possibility.

The Hedge Fund will diversify by sports, competitions and markets. The intention is to build a portfolio of great analysts for each sport and competition we will be focusing on, and offer a variable remuneration depending on the actual results achieved though their picks. If picks are successful, (circumstance that will be based on several factors and in no case will be absent of risks), this remuneration might be higher than the amount received by selling individual picks to punters.

The due diligence process will be thorough. The Hedge Fund will be analyzing metrics such as market / competition liquidity (apart from the published picks), and carrying out a qualitative analysis including personal interviews in order to optimize the selection process.

Even if the hedge fund is not considering Live bets in a first phase, if you think you have a long term winning system or strategy in that market, with a good track record, you can show your interest through support@pyckio.com. Any source of alpha with the potential to increase the hedge fund’s return will be analyzed.

If you are interested, assuming any possible risk which you may be aware of, you can submit your picks at Pyckio.com. We will be watching all tipsters with positive numbers, and focusing on the ones that excel in a certain competition even if their overall numbers are not good enough to give them Tipster PRO status (Tipster PRO analyst are chosen based on their overall numbers for a certain sport, not for any specific competition).

We are confident in the future success and worldwide repercussion in the sports betting sector of this Hedge Fund, and we would be delighted to valuate your contribution in case you show an express and unsolicited interest in this project.

Daniel's previous venture was sportty.com which started out well enough in 2010, but finished with a final verified 18 months record (January 2013 to June 2014) of -50.43 points from 987 bets, a less than impressive -5.11% ROI.

As the Sports Tipsters web site writes:

Sports-Tipsters has a material interest in the company Pyckio.com, a new tipping community developed by the owner of Sportyy. To avoid a conflict of interest and accusations that Sports-Tipsters was not independent, verification was discontinued on the 15th June 2014.

Additionally, anyone considering subscribing to Sportyy should consider the following information. In August 2013 after a 2-month break, Sportyy relaunched with a new quantitative model developed through a collaboration between Sportyy's owner and 2 university Statistics and Econometrics academics. Between August 2013 and June 2014, the service showed little if any profitability from 850 picks compared to the original service, and punters should consider whether such a quantitative model is really delivering an edge.

Perhaps the new venture will be more successful, but many of the pitfalls of this ambitious plan are covered by James Butler here, with a response in the comments section by Daniel himself, both a must-read if you are at all interested in signing up.

In other news, my old friend Ian Erskine appears to be handing out leaky coffee mugs to attendees of his FTS Income betting seminars.

It's possible that Mr. Yew meant 'poring' of course, and it was just a case of 'poor' spelling, a trait that seems to be all too pervasive in the betting community.