Red vs. Blue
I recently watched an episode of Horizon on BBC iPlayer. These documentaries are right up my street and I love exploring some of the more esoteric views of things. This particular episode was all about colour and how the brain interprets colour. It was really fascinating as it highlighted that a lot of the colour you see is “interpreted” by the brain and not actually “real”.
One element of this was looking at the effect of red and blue and how it affects sports performance or the interpretations of officials in sports tournaments. The results were fascinating. So with another red vs blue match on today the conclusion of this research is that I should favour red. I’ll be backing Man Utd today! Of course this is just one element of things so don’t take it too literally but the research was interesting. You can find lots of there in the Internet: –
So, back to last week and the question “If a team is priced at 2.00 how often will they go on to score first?”. I was surprised by the diversity of answers, but the actual answer is 60% (Give or take rounding, equipartition, sample size etc). I first worked out the rough percentages back in the mid 80’s for some work I was doing then. Over the course of a season, if I take a stab at the first scorer, I’m accurate to within 0.07% of the actual. But there is a lot of variability in there, which is the reason behind my “What does value look like post”. Just because you pick something, doesn’t mean it will happen. Only that it will happen X% of the time based on your stats. The interesting thing about this stat is that it is saying that if you trade the favourite rather than just back it, you get a 10% better chance of profiting.
Whatever strategy you choose, whatever filters you apply it needs to yield over a 60% strike rate to have any possibility to make money in the long term. If you starting hedging they your increase liability needs an even higher strike rate. I’ll discuss that more in future weeks.
Category: Football trading strategies
