Heartless

I had the thought on Thursday morning that anti-Russian, more specifically anti-Putin, sentiment might be a factor in the markets for the League Cup Final with casual punters showing their outrage by throwing their money behind Liverpool as a proxy for Ukraine against "aggressor" Chelsea, owned of course by Roman Abramovich, a close ally of Putin's. 

Whether or not this was part of the reason that Chelsea and the Draw drifted during the 72 hours before kick-off is impossible to say for sure, but it's an example of how there is sometimes an edge to be gained from unlikely places. 

The average prices via Odds Portal went from 2.32 to 2.19 for Liverpool, 3.21 to 3.37 for the Draw, and 3.4 to 3.57 for Chelsea. 

As I wrote in my last post, the Draw is where the value exists in Finals with no club having a fair win probability greater than 0.5, and the Draw opened at 3.16 on Pinnacle, drifting to 3.39 by game time, but as is usually the case, a much more tempting 3.6 was available on Betfair which seemed very generous given the history of this fixture and domestic finals in general.

A perfect draw ensued, taking the ROI on Draws in all 18 League Cup Finals since 2005 to 50%. Of the five Finals with no odds-on favourite, four have finished level but that's too few matches for the ROI to be meaningful.

Of the 18 finals, ten have been all-Big-6 matchups with, yes you guessed it, six results being Draws with the favourite winning the other four. 

With no selections in the EPL for the second consecutive weekend - the Brentford v Newcastle United game slipped out of contention - at least one reader made some money from Draws this weekend, and hopefully quite a few more of you.  

I've previously written about how the second half of the season isn't as lucrative as the first, and with 256 games played, we're entering into the time of year (particularly weeks 26-31) when the system really struggles:

I'm travelling again for work this week, so there will be no month-end updates, or any updates for that matter for a while. As things stand, February could go either way with the major index Futures currently down around 2% and the Cassini portfolio clinging on to a small monthly gain, a position I didn't expect to be in when the attack on Ukraine began, but the stock market is heartless, as the linked-to article explains.