By George

George had a comment on the XX Draws 'prospectus' to which I typed a detailed reply only to find that the address was "noreply-comment@blogger.com" so I'll write it here instead since it's not too personal, and might be of interest to others. George wrote:

Hi. I looked at your XX Draws prospectus. Very well written. Good idea with the partial fee refund! I got a bit confused b/n your all-time projected historical and your 2011 actual historical results, but having reread it is sort of clear now. If I understand your mechanics correctly, you are using the lay side of the market and are factoring no commission. Correct me if I am wrong, please. A more conservative estimate of this well performing strategy would based on the back side of the odds (0.05 lower) and will be adjusting for commission. Adjusting your avg odds to 3.43 and assuming 5% commission on your winnings (using your 35% strike rate), I arrive at ROI of 15.8%=0.35*0.95*(3.43-1)+0.65*(-1). I am not saying that this is what should be in the prospectus, but it just helps describe the range of historical outcomes better, depending on how conservative one wants to be with the assumptions.

My reply is:

Hi George -

Thanks for your e-mail. With regard to the price I use, when I send out the e-mail a few days ahead, I put in the price from the back side simply because more often than not, this price is matched if you have your bet up for long enough. It's not a target price that you should not take less than, it is just an idea of what you should reasonably expect to get matched at. If I do not get matched at this price, then I record the price that I do actually get matched at, so all the prices you see are matched prices. There was a game about three weeks ago (Novara v Roma) where I quoted 3.65, yet the price then dropped to 3.35, but on the day of the match, 3.65 was matched minutes before kick-off. The draw price doesn't usually move that much but this was a Serie A game, so who knows what was going on! (Roma won 1-0 in the 73' in a game that had the proverbial 0-0 written all over it!)

As for commission, I don't include this simply because many people pay less than 5% commission, but you're right - I should update the prospectus to state this, and I will do so this weekend.

Sorry if the all-time v 2011 results are confusing. Basically, it's only since 2011 that I have been recording the draw price. Previous to that I recorded the match result, but I'm a cautious man and it was only after the returns looked solid after a good number of matches that I was confident that it was more than a blip in the statistics.

Thank you for your input.