Totally Out of Reach

A few comments on recent posts, which makes the task of writing a new post much easier. Working backwards, and on the most recent post, my old friend "babyduck" took a break from Chipstead pond and the White Hart to say:

Good effort, with the weight loss. I need to do the same!

Losing weight really isn't difficult, although it's not as easy as gaining it, but it's just so boring! I do find it motivating and critical to keep records but basically it simply requires self-discipline, and for one's social life to grind to a complete halt. Fortunately, when I set my mind to something, self-control isn't an issue, and so far as social life is concerned, it helps that I'm not very popular.

Diego commented about my NBA Killer Sports comment that it was "Early days, and the unavailability of Killer Sports for the NBA this season is certainly an inconvenience" writing:

I don't know what you miss about KillerSports, but at

https://s3.sportsdatabase.com/NBA/query.html

you can do basically the same queries. For example:

date, team, o:team, total@total>=230 and site=home and date>=today

By the way, thank you for the blog, I enjoy it a lot :)

This does work for selecting the matches, although I'm struggling to see how to get the game results to display. The SDQL is certainly different from the very easy to use Killer Sports version, but if there's a manual somewhere this could be a useful resource. Anyway, thanks for the lead Diego and the 'official' results so far from the NBA Overs System are now 0-0! The 234.5 mark may be a tad high. 

AT commented:

Do you not play Small College Dogs anymore? I've read most of your blog and never saw where those dropped out of the regular rotation

I stopped publishing the College Football Small Dogs when Killer Sports stopped tracking them. I like the results of my systems to be verifiable, and identifying qualifying matches (I focused on Division 1A colleges) went from a few seconds to, well, much longer. With, I believe, 254 colleges in Division One football, it's no small task doing this manually and I like an easy life.

Referring to the NBA totals, Annis asked: 

So what was last year’s average total

The table below shows the total used for backing Overs since we noted that the points being scored were steadily increasing:

If the question is asking what was the average total points per game last season, the answer is 224.2, i.e. ten fewer points than the 234.2 we are looking for this season. 

And I think that is it for comments, but there was an interesting Tweet that @statsbet looped me into.

I do like things like this, so thank you Statsbet. The Tweet was this:

Aside from the missing apostrophe, the last sentence is absolutely correct. I'm pretty sure no sane person would ever have their entire retirement savings fully invested in stocks, because as this example shows, that's a recipe for disaster. A couple of bad years early on, and you're out looking for a janitorial position to boost your income! 

A lot of this was actually covered recently in my Diving Into Retirement post where the conclusion was that even a 4% withdrawal from an S&P 500 Index Fund would have resulted in running out of money on 13 occasions since the Index's inception, so 5% would be bordering on reckless. 

The story of DFA (Dimensional Fund Advisors) is covered in the "Trillions" book mentioned in my last post. Chapter 9, "New Dimensions" if you're interested.