Flies Dropping and Bats Swinging

They're dropping like flies at the moment. Hot on the heels of the retirement of Simple Soccer Stats mentioned in my previous post, I return from my trip to read that Trader 247 is also calling it a day after ceasing trading last August:

I stopped trading last year after seeing the small profits disappear and not spending any time with the bot. My interest is in programming and as I moved from VBA to .NET and the wonders of Visual Studio, I was more interested in app development than raking over market data.

There's nothing like losing money for killing interest in blogging. On the other side of the blogging longevity coin, it's now more than eleven years since this inaugural post kicked off Green All Over. 

2,561 posts later, and it's still going relatively strong although 2018's 107 posts was a yearly low. Not all have been fascinating posts I freely admit, but the other 2,560 certainly have been (and yes, that is a joke you may have seen before as I repeat it on most anniversaries). 

Travel with work was the main reason for the decrease last year, and may restrict posting this year too, but a lifetime average of 473 hits a day, and 10k a month means that at least a few people are still reading.     

Someone emailed me a few days ago asking if I had any copies of 101Trader's blog:

Hi, someone suggested you might have stored offline a blog copy I was after. A real long shot, but do you remember @101trader a year ago, a seemingly successful overs trader. Looking at Twitter he directs people to his blog for answers that has been taken down. I don’t suppose you have or know how I can get my hands on it?

If anyone can help, let me know, but when someone takes their blog down, chances are there was something awry and the phrase "seemingly successful overs trader" is likely very well considered. It's very difficult to gain an edge in the Over / Under football markets.

We're so close to the end of the season, that I'll probably wait until it's over before looking at the Premier League Draw again, and it's the same with the NHL and NBA regular seasons which both conclude next month, but the MLB season has already started with two 'International Series' matches in Tokyo already in the books. Excluding international openers, this season's March 28th opening day is the earliest in history, and for London fans, there's a 'London Series' (Boston Red Sox / New York Yankees) at the Olympic Stadium at the end of June to look forward to.

Readers will know that I follow a couple of strategies in baseball, with the results of the T-Bone method in recent seasons below:

During the off-season, I've been looking at further improving the T-Bone, and have found some interesting opportunities.

MLB is of course two leagues, with the big difference between the National League and the American League that the latter uses the "Designated Hitter" - a player who does not play in the field, but is used to bat for the pitcher.

While I don't like to have too many qualifiers on methods, adding a filter or two and eliminating non-profitable selections can make a big difference to an ROI.

I'm also not interested in single season observations, but if I see something persisting over three of more seasons, I do take note.

Here's the basic return from the T-Bone system over the last five seasons (money line and run line bets) and below that, the same system with one simple filter applied: 

The differences are huge, especially on the Run Line bets. 246 bets saved, and the time they take to place shouldn't be underestimated, and ROI percentages into double figures. 

Baseball is a sport with definite trends showing as the season progresses. Readers will know of some early season trends (generally April and May) and other methods that are more profitable after the All-Star Break, so with such an early start to the season, there's not a lot of data for March matches. 

The profitability of backing hot favourites in recent years is another area readers will be well aware of, and here are the results month-by-month of that strategy:

April is perfect, and so is March I guess, but that number for March is from just seven matches. I tend to include the handful of March games with April and October games with September to make six full monthly regular season groupings.

Note that returns are all calculated using the US practice of risking the line to win 100 units when playing favorites, and risking 100 units to win the line when playing on underdogs.