Takes Allsorts

James had a comment on my last post: 

Trading firms take allsorts in The City. I've met history graduates and classicists who have worked on trading floors. They are usually Oxbridge types or they know someone who gave them a reference and a shoe in. They usually do the phone work, pushing rubbish upon high net-worth nincompoops.

High-frequency and quant trading again has no interest in economics or finance types, preferring intelligent people who can problem solve, such as maths, sciences and computing graduates.

What economics and finance graduates are actually for, I have yet to discover.

Whether the allsorts are liquorice or a hyphen got dropped I'm not sure, but I suspect it was the latter. The 'old boys' network is sadly alive and well, and in the same way that marrying your cousin doesn't bode well for the gene pool, giving positions to unqualified individuals isn't great for an employer either.

I was also puzzled by the term "shoe in", which of course should have been "shoo in". It's doubly unfortunate as to "shoehorn" something in is to squeeze it in with great difficulty, quite the opposite of the meaning James intended.

Anyway, having no degree in either economics or finance, I feel I should apply for a job as a quant immediately. Unlike some elite traders, I do actually have a qualification higher than a GCSE in Maths and Statistics (Economics too, but I'd better keep quiet about that one), as well as a career in IT (almost) behind me. I'm also, according to my Mum and possibly others, a nincompoop, although my net-worth is probably not high by James' definition. I can also write English without throwing in apostrophes, capitalisations and full-stops where they don't belong. 

Add caption

I finding reading my writing back to myself (out loud, of course) not only entertaining, but also helpful in catching. Any error's, dangling modifiers and missing Oxford commas.   

I received James's latest book in the mail this week, Betfair Trading Techniques, and I hope I'm not going to find any errors in there! I could be asking for a refund, and compensation. After ten pages, I have to say that I have no complaints so far. 

This weekend sees the NFL's Wild-Card Round, and since the current format started in the 2002 season, the small sample of 56 games have seen a tendency to go Under with a record of 32-23-1 (ROI 13.3%). Over the past six seasons, the Under record is 16-8 (ROI 30.1%).

NFL Small Road Dog Results 2016

Followers of the NFL Small Road Dog System this season will have a few quid spare (above) to play the Play-Off Version of the system which has a record of 14-9-1 (ROI 18%) since the 2002 re-organisation of the League.

If we stick to Road teams that are either small 'dogs or small favourites (small being defined as within one field goal), the ROI jumps to 34% with a record against the spread of 17-7-3. 

Be wary that these results are over 14 seasons and is a small sample size.