October: Texas, UMPO, Cricket, Indexes and Health

The 2023 baseball season came to an end earlier this week with yet another underdog win for the Texas Rangers who clinched their first ever World Series on the road in Arizona.

On Opening Day Texas was 50-1 to be champions, and their win is the biggest upset since 2003 when the Florida Marlins won after starting the season at 75-1. 

If you've been following along with the UMPO System, you would be quite happy with the results this season.  

36 bets, 24 wins, and a 17.96u profit while the sub-category HUMPO System had four wins from five bets, and a profit of 3.69u. 

ROI percentages from a single year where the number of selections is fewer than 40 are meaningless, but they are available for each season here if anyone wants to see them.

The final numbers for this season and the 19 seasons for which we have data are:

With the number of selections also low for any given week or weekend, I've decided that my system updates would be more meaningful, if not necessarily more interesting, if they were published on a monthly basis. For infrequent tournaments like World Cups, and playoffs, I'll make exceptions, but for most competitions that take several months to complete, I think once a month is more than enough. 

For October the results for some of the systems I mention were as follows:

European Football clearly isn't doing very well so far this season, and with the baseball and Rugby World Cup now over, how November plays out will be largely dependent on how the daily NHL and NBA systems perform although American Football will be contributing. 

I've also been dabbling with the Cricket World Cup where favourites appear to offer value, but not the very hot favourites. 

The above table shows favourites in six bands, from strongest to the weakest left to right, and the trend is clear. Cricket isn't a sport that I've spent much time on before, but I'm always looking for markets that might be inefficient and was inspired by this article by Paul Krisnamurty who speaks a lot of sense on political events also and is worth a follow on Twitter. I mean X.  

Overall, October was a poor month. The FTSE100 was down, as were the major US indexes, and Tesla lost almost 20% which didn't help. Of the 153 months since I started tracking, October ranked 141st in real terms, although a slightly better 131st in percentage terms. The saddest part of it is that my net worth is lower now than it was two years ago, and I'm still working, never mind that I've not yet started drawing on my retirement savings!

The three main problems people face when they retire are apparently "financial insecurity, health issues and social isolation" and October was at least a good month for the second of those categories. 

As I mentioned previously, I usually try to do Sober October, and this one was 100% successful, with the consequent weight loss of 17.8lbs, the second best ever behind the Sober October of 2021. I'm now back to the 50th percentile for my height and need to stop drinking. 

The number of days when I have alcohol is more closely correlated to weight loss than the amount of alcohol, not surprisingly a pattern strengthened by counting calories in and exercising, and on that front I set records for both steps (17,652 per day) and miles walked / run (8.63 per day). 

The winter months in blue are clearly much better for my health than the yellow summer months. Good luck in November.