There are still a couple of matches to play before Week 3 of the NFL season is complete, but so far it's been a winning one.
Monday 23 September 2024
Moving Lines
Friday 20 September 2024
Winners and September Baseball
It was almost a perfect night for the Sacred Manuscript yesterday with the Thursday Night NFL game (New York Jets v New England Patriots) a comfortable winner, and all three MLB selections were winners too.
Thursday 19 September 2024
Stateside
As some of you know, it's been an interesting few weeks, with my father-in-law being rushed to hospital for emergency surgery, blood transfusions and all that good stuff, but he's on the mend now.
Wednesday 4 September 2024
NFL 2024 - An Unusual Start
The 2024 NFL season kicks-off tomorrow (Thursday 5th September) and it looks very much like we'll have two systems in play, one spread and one total.
São Paulo, Brazil is the venue, and it's officially a Home game for the Philadelphia Eagles who play the Green Bay Packers. I'm also aware that one subscriber from Brazil, Victor, will be present at the game which coincidentally is the same match-up for the last NFL game I saw live when my son was living in Philadelphia. Unfortunately we will be on opposite sides when it comes to who we will be supporting.
Of the six previous Friday games, four were Christmas games, and last year there was a Thanksgiving Friday game, so this is the first non-holiday Friday game other than a 2005 game between the Miami Dolphins and Kansas City Chiefs which was moved forward a couple of days to avoid running into Hurricane Wilma.
Tuesday 3 September 2024
August Wrap, Draws All Over
Another month in the books, with August seeing the return of football in Europe after an off-season break that seems to get shorter each year.
...but I find it hard to see the logic of backing draws in say the Premier League but not also the Championship, or La Liga 2 but not La Liga 1.
I fully agree. In a perfect world, the rationale for a Draw System in a top league should apply across other similar tier leagues as well as further down the league even if results weaken, as suggested in the examples above, but this wasn't the case when I last looked at other leagues in some detail maybe five or more years ago.
Back then, I put it down to each league and division having it's own characteristics, and with other priorities in life, left it at that. In hindsight, this might have been a mistake.
The first versions of the Sacred Manuscript contained the EPL Draw System, but then it was mentioned to me about this time two years ago that Spain's Segunda División showed similar results, and with a slightly different set of parameters, I verified this and added it to the Sacred Manuscript. It has been up by 26.46 units since then.
More recently, our old friend Dr Tsouts mentioned similar findings in the Greek Super League while very recently, in the past few days to be precise, another subscriber told me that he used the idea, again with the parameters modified, with success in La Liga and the Chinese Super League.
My knowledge of Chinese football was non-existent, that of Greek football not much more, but data is data so I took a look and as a result the Greek and Chinese Leagues with the appropriate selection criteria are now added to the Sacred Manuscript - and before anyone complains about not receiving their update with the latter, the league is on a break for a couple of weeks so I'll be combining it with a few other updates - and am now turning my attention to La Liga.
I'm not giving too much away here, since it's been discussed on the blog previously, but in the EPL, in games between two closely matched teams, e.g. within 10% of each other, the Draw represents value.
Since 2001, right up to this past weekend, there have been 640 such matches, 199 winners and a profit of 38.87 units or an ROI of 6.1%.
The term "within 10%" actually means any match within a range of +10% (a positive number for matches where the Home team is the favourite) to -10% (a negative number for matches where the Away team is favourite).
The mid-point here happens to be zero, and in a perfect market this is perhaps where you would expect it to be, but all markets are different.
I think I've mentioned here before that results did vary depending on whether we were on the plus or minus side, but I clearly drifted off to another idea and never followed up.
It summary, it appears that the basic rationale for the "close" idea carries over from the EPL to at least some of these other leagues, but there is a difference in both what "close" actually means, and in where the mid-point for the range should be.
Of course if zero doesn't fall within the optimal range, I'd need an alternative term.
With my new employment status, or lack thereof, and thus a little more free time, I plan to revisit these other big leagues and see if the Championship and La Liga are viable leagues too.
La Liga certainly seems to be. Here are the preliminary results:
Obviously the 2024-25 numbers aren't anything to get excited about yet, and the 5 years and 10 years totals exclude them, but these are solid results.
On a monthly basis, the profits do dry up a little in the first quarter of the calendar year, but overall they look pretty consistent.
I'm pretty sure that subscribers can expect another update with this league included, and possibly others,
The Draw isn't everyone's cup of tea, which is why there is value to be found.
The Sacred Manuscript is now up to 100 pages, and with new systems added at the suggestion of subscribers now making it more than 50 long-term profitable systems, is now ridiculously underpriced.
We now have systems for the College Basketball end of season Tournaments, an NFL System based on Bye weeks, NBA Systems based on travel and Time Zones, as well as the previously mentioned Greek Super League and Chinese Super League Draw systems. And soon, La Liga and who knows what other leagues from around the globe.