The Siren of ROI

It was quite an exciting weekend for sport, with the Tampa Bay Rays beating the Baltimore Orioles on Saturday night another win for the T-Bone System...

OK, so maybe that wasn't most people's idea of the sporting highlight of the weekend, which for me was my son making his debut in the boxing ring, and opening his career with a first round TKO after about 90 seconds. 

For most people, I suspect the highlight was either the Formula 1 British Grand Prix, Wimbledon tennis or a cricket match.

The last two were certainly dramatic, with presumably vast fortunes won and lost on the exchanges for those who like donating their money to court / pitch-siders, but for me, those sports are to be enjoyed for themselves rather than as markets to trade. I did see that Federer had traded at 1.01 but didn't even look at the cricket. An edge in cricket, tennis or motor racing, I do not have. 

With football still a few weeks away from getting interesting again, sports investing at this time of year is all about baseball, with plenty of time for research for the new American Football seasons. 

I mentioned the Aestivation System I play in a recent post, and someone suggested another improved system for this time of year, with the qualifiers that the game be an intra-league game, that the home team has more wins this season than their opponent, and are favourites playing at home.

This is certainly impressive, all-time the records are:

But one can get caught up in the race to find a glamorous ROI. Remember my 2011 post:

Those who’ve spent a lifetime maximising ROI, I guess you’ve now realised that in a punting context, those who are able to grow their bank balance more significantly are, by most people’s definition, the more successful.

So, in summary...Return on Investment for show, Rate of Bank Growth for dough. £, not %.

The key to this strategy is simply that the market undervalues favourites out of the All-Star Break, which is all I concern myself with.

The only point in eliminating perfectly solid bets for the sake of an improved ROI is if you don't have the time to place the bets required by the system and need to focus your time and energy on the big dividend generators.

Value is so hard to find though, that it'd be a waste to leave money on the table. 

One strategy I use is variable staking, so the basic system from the above example would be to back all favourites, but back the higher ROI bets with larger stakes. 

Why ignore those Away Favourites with the miserable ROI of "only" 16.7% just because the Home ones are at 21.1%?

Regarding the intra-league qualifier, very few first matches after the break are non-conference affairs, to be precise just five, so while they do have a losing record of 2-3, (1-3 at home, 1-0 away) that's a meaningless sample size.

It's not hard to find high ROIs, but typically they come at the expense of only offering a few bets. 

If you back Chicago teams playing night games against Divisional rivals as dogs when Joe West is the home plate umpire, you're looking at an ROI of 130%, but 6 games from 2007 isn't too much evidence!