After Hours

Week 12 in the NFL was already off to a winning start with the Washington Football Team's win in Dallas on Thanksgiving, and Sunday saw two more wins and one loss for the Small Road 'Dogs taking the season record to 27-19-1, an ROI of 14.3%.

As a bonus, we also had the New Orleans Saints comfortably defeating the Quarterback-less Denver Broncos, recommended at -14.5 although the line did move to -15.5 by kick-off. 

Although overall these big (two converted touchdowns) favourites aren't anything to get excited about, as is often the case, when you drill down a little, you find market inefficiencies.

Overall their record since 1991 is 72-74-2 ATS, but they have a 72.2% record when the Road team is favoured, and an 88.9% record when it is a Divisional game. 

We have a rare Wednesday NFL game this week with the re-arranged Pittsburgh Steelers v Baltimore Steelers game now scheduled for tomorrow. The opening day of the 2012 season was moved to a Wednesday for political reasons (President Obama was speaking) and since at least 1991 that is the only other instance of a Wednesday game. The Steelers play on a Monday afternoon in Week 13, and the Ravens move to Tuesday, only the third time that a Tuesday has seen an NFL game.  

Another big move for $TESLA stock last night after the markets closed, with the announcement that: 

“S&P Dow Jones Indices (“S&P DJI”) has determined it will add Tesla to the S&P 500 at its full float-adjusted market capitalization weight effective prior to the open of trading on Monday, December 21, 2020”

It had been expected that Tesla would be added in two tranches, but the decision is to do it all in one. 

Something I don't think I've written about before, I may have in which case it won't hurt to repeat it, is how much difference there is in stock returns when investing during the trading day, and when investing after hours.

Basically two strategies were compared. The Regular Trading strategy was to buy at the open and sell at the close; the After Hours strategy was to buy at the close and sell at the open. The Index used was the S&P 500, and with the market only open for 6.5 hours a day (32.5 hours a week), leaving 135.5 hours a week for After Hours, you probably wouldn't be surprised to find more than 80% of the gains happening when the markets are closed. In fact:

Had you only invested in the After Hours strategy by buying the close and selling the next open, you'd be sitting on a solid gain of 722%. Had you done the opposite, however, and only invested in the Regular Trading strategy by buying at the open and selling at the close, you'd actually be down 8.5%.

Of course it is impractical to keep selling and buying each day, so buy and hold is the best strategy.  

With November now behind us, although the month finished with a five figure loss, the month overall was a record one both in percentage (9.41%) terms and actual money. The previous monthly record of 9.3% was set in April as markets bounced off their COVID-19 lows, and the YTD number is at 19.23%, a little shy of 2019's 21.87% with one month to go. 

As mentioned previously, with some of the US Election markets not yet settled, November's numbers are in fact a little lower than they should be, but December will get the boost instead - assuming Betfair don't keep dragging settlement out until inauguration day on January 20th.