Stand Down

There's an old maxim that states "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" and this is the case with the Overs "discovery" mentioned in my last post.

So hold your horses if you are thinking of diving into Overs in NBA matches where, in their previous games, the "Road team went Under and the Home team went Over."

It turns out that the displayed 88.5% figure was indeed too good to be true, with the same query now returning a more modest 61-48-2 record (56%) in favour of the Unders.

The site gimmethedog which replaced the usually reliable killersports site does caution that:

So it's back to the drawing board for NBA totals, and the reason for the apparent inefficiency I was puzzled about was simply a software bug somewhere. Perhaps it is now fixed, but proceed with care if using this site is certainly good advice.

It's also unfortunate that the NHL page at this site is also not yet up and running, but beggars can't be choosers.

After a good start to the year, the markets have dipped on the release of the minutes from December's joint "Fed" (Federal Open Market Committee and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System) meeting which hinted that a rise in interest rates could come as soon as March.

It's a little odd that the minutes are not released for three weeks, but that they are concerned about inflation can perhaps be seen by the fact that the word is mentioned 75 times in the 14 pages of minutes! 

It could be a volatile year, with seven of my individual stocks declining (6) or increasing (1) by more than 2% yesterday. Thank you Pfizer. Saving lives and, for now at least, my January spreadsheet which is up by just 0.09% for the month / quarter / year to date. 

With the futures red for tomorrow, I may defer updating prices for a few days. I find I'm much keener to do this on an up day than a down day.