Best Wimbledon trading ever?
This has been a great Wimbledon so far. Lots of seeds faltering and some outright fails in the mix already. The biggest coming last night when the second seed, Nadal, spectacularly crashed out despite starting at decimal odds of 1.01. It could be my imagination but it’s difficult to remember so many opportunities to turn over such short odds when trading, even for a small number of ticks.
It prompted me to look back at previous Wimbledon tournaments to see what ‘shocks’ had occurred before. By shocks I mean low ranking players exiting the tournament early. From round one to the final, the average rank of the losing player is 113,95,68,38,64,35 and 13. But in terms of the lowest ranked player exiting at each point, over time there have been a lot of ‘low exits’.
2003 saw Agassi exit in round one, Davydenko in 2008 (ranked 4). Round two has frequently seen scalps taken, I can see six players ranked 5 or higher bowing out in ten years of data; round three is similar. It then dips off in round four onwards but, as expected in seeded tournaments, the semis and finals are dominated by competitive matches. So some big guns have to lose at that point.
In all, it looks like short odds get turned over quite frequently at Wimbledon. Fairly consistently and more than I expected. But that’s one of the reasons that Tennis is such a great trading sport. The scoring system lends itself well to unexpected results.
Category: Tennis
