Click Bait

The hits keep coming. G, possibly not his full name, wrote:

Have to say the recent blog posts regarding the world class sports traders (Sir's Webb & Berry) have made for cracking reading but I do worry that you may be "due a visit" soon.

I do wonder why you have them on your blog roll though & I find the temptation to click on their links often too hard to resist.

Only yesterday I was seduced (nay-hypnotised) by Sir Caan's WOM headline and the next thing I know WOM makes perfect sense, my ebook was delivered in the blink of an eye and I'm awake at 2:00AM trading the AUS open- it's so easy. All this court-siding nonsense of which you speak I never even noticed. Unfortunately I don't think I'm allowed to forward on the ebook to you but not to worry I plan on delivering an online tennis trading masterclass before Wimbledon starts- it'll be called Sultan2  Anyway keep up the great blog- it's better than ever and I've been following for a good few years.

The standard of witty comments, albeit with their serious points, appears to be reaching new highs these days. Incidentally, a more professionally written post on WOM is here. 

G raises a good point about my having the blogs of Messrs Caan and Webb included on my blogroll, and while it's something I've thought about doing previously but gone no further, it's probably hypocritical of me to keep them there. 

Their presence implies approval, not to mention that both blogs are unusual in that neither one reciprocates and links to other blogs as is typical. One can only wonder why that might be. Surely the opinions of others are not something that world class traders should be concerned about?

Anyway, a great comment, and the kind words are appreciated. "Better than ever!" Did you see that James? 

James probably has, and here is a comment he posted which I had missed, replying to Tennis Trader's statement:

so in your belief all inplay sports betting is dead then

in a far more eloquent way than I could muster, as might be expected from a best-selling author. James writes:

A sensible trader is a logical trader.

When attacking a trading problem the first thing I think about is market structure; how the exchange, bet type and actors on the exchange behave, so that I can search for edge.

If there are actors who have time advantage over me and are consistently first to market then I am not going to consider fundamental trading in-play because court-siders are getting the fundamentals afore me.

However, if there are a significant number of misinformed and misguided traders who suck it in from the vendors then I might consider a contrarian technical approach that takes advantage of mug punter overreactions.

The perfect market is one where all actors have perfect information and can act on it instantaneously. The result of that is nobody profits apart from the exchange. As far as court-siding is concerned that particular market is considered to be perfect by sensible traders who are not courtside. It is a matter of court-siders competing amongst themselves for mug money until such time that mug punters become better informed, stop trading in-play and the paradox of skill wipes out profitability for court-siders.

In other areas, it is a matter of hoping that enough mug punters armed with simplistic vendor strategies are available to compensate your activities.

You must always assume that the best traders are not stupid and the more of them there are then the less profit there is to share amongst them, which is the nature of a zero-sum (actually, slightly negative-sum) game.

Sports trading differs from financial trading in that sports traders cannot create money from nowhere (How financial traders create money is another story). Sports trading always relies on the misinformed being willing to give away their money to the informed.

I think I might have phrased that last sentence slightly differently, perhaps - Long-term profitable sports trading relies on the willingness of the less-informed to compete with the better informed. 

The less-informed shouldn't be aware that they are less-informed, else they are not sensible. Who are they?

The less-informed may be gambling for entertainment, and couldn't care less about losing money.

The less-informed may have a gambling problem.  

The less-informed may be new to sports trading, and blissfully unaware that the game is unfair because they haven't done their research. They've hit on a couple of blogs that make winning seem so easy and dived right in, hopefully with cash they can afford to lose. A sensible trader will learn and stop. 

Or they may suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect:

If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent. The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.

Via email, I had a cheeky reply from Andy to my question:

Would you bet on the colour of the next car to pass your front door against someone positioned 300 yards up the road?

Andy: Surely that's a yes every time? If however they were positioned 300 yards down the road it would be a different matter...............for me anyway...

There's always one.