Boycott Day Two and Europa League

The NHL, and better late than never, did finally decide to join the protests against racial injustice in the US.

The NHL drew criticism for not joining the NBA, WNBA, MLS and some MLB teams in suspending competitions or practices on Wednesday, before the player-led Hockey Diversity Alliance asked the NHL to push pause on games Thursday.

Play-off games were postponed last night and tonight while seven MLB games were also called off, as were all the NBA play-off games and WNBA games, but some semblance of normality may return tonight.

The spare time has not been totally wasted, as I've been working through some data from the Europa League, a competition I've never been too interested in before, at least not until it reaches the final stages. Matches between the likes of FK Anzi Makhackala and Metalist Kharkiv don't really set my pulse racing but I'm interested in seeing if some of the trends from the Champions League in the earlier knock-out stages are visible here too, but still a bit more work to do. I'm on track to finish it before the Round-of-32 in February, although Xmas being less than four months away is a reminder of how fast this strange year is going.

In my first post of 2018 I wrote that the better place for investing was the US:

In more traditional financial markets, once again the main US benchmark index outperformed the UK's FTSE100. Only 4 times in the last 24 years has the FTSE prevailed, and the disaster that is Brexit means the US and Overseas markets are where most of my investments will again be in 2018.

With the FTSE 100 closing below 6,000 last night, here's a comparison of two indexes since the 2008 crash:

The two have never before (at least since 1992) been so disparate and hopefully some of you at least diversified to include US funds in your portfolios. The FTSE 250 is up 184% since 2008, much better than the narrower FTSE 100 and its 35% gain, but still lower than the S&P 500's 286%. 

An index is comprised of stocks in various sectors, and as with sports investing, when you look below the surface, you find differences.

In the same way that, for example, backing the favourite in every Champions League knock-out stage game is profitable (ROI 6.9%), certain categories of matches are more profitable than others.

With indexes, even with the recent overall strength, sectors such as banking, energy and transportation are under-performing. Opportunities? I think so. I'm already invested in Lloyds Banking Group (a little prematurely perhaps) and watching others.