Valhalla beckons, will Rory roar?
Some of the stats I’ve used here have come from the excellent Golf Stats website.
The golfing world’s attention now swings, excuse the pun, to Kentucky and to two golfers in particular.
I like competitive golf tournaments where the winner is uncertain but currently, despite Rory McIlroy’s comments, we do appear to be entering a new era in golf. Tiger Woods dominated for a number of years and each tournament would start with him as a clear leader. Thanks to his general decline on and off course, Tiger no longer starts as the leader; but McIlroy will if he keeps up his current form.
For all sports people, age eventually becomes the big battle. Time is running out for Tiger as most golfers decline into their early forties. Tiger is just shy of that of that pivotal age at the moment. Age tends to affect the long game first for golfers, so courses that play longer are harder for aging golfers. Valhalla is a long course, it measures 7458 for a par of 71. That would take me a couple of days to get around! In contrast McIlroy is a spritely 25, hinting to a career of at least a decade at this level. Rory is in form as well and golf is as much a game of confidence as anything, so his form will bode well for him this week.
The interesting thing about golf is how little separates players from top to bottom, very few strokes. This presents a range of opportunities. I looked at the recent stroke averages from the top 100 players and the best was only 1.80 strokes per round better than the 100th. Golf is a game of slim margins. According to a site regularly read, McIlroy gained 1.5 strokes per round just from his ability to drive a long and accurate tee shot last week at the Bridgestone invitational. That’s a huge margin! But this is why McIlroy is so far ahead of everybody at the moment. But the slims margins that golf inherits also means that a decent round of golf can be undone by a couple of bad shots. You simply can’t afford to have many of those at this level.
Because of McIlroy’s form he is going off at a short price, for a golf tournament and therefore most of the liquidity in the market will be focused on McIlroy. So how would you trade him? The top things to look out for on Golf are how the course plays and the weather. Early or late tee times may affect the ability of players to score well, so watching the scores of groups teeing off ahead of the player you are following is a key tactic. The course will have easy and hard holes and this combined with the weather affecting groups at different times of the day will give you an insight into whether players teeing off later have an advantage or not. This gets easier later in tournament as the leaders always start later on the last two days. So you have the catching group going out first. Once you have figured out what impact that will have you can decide on whether you want to back or lay McIlroy as leader.
Because Golf is a market that is played out over four days, I tend to use the multi-market trading tool Guardian to monitor my over all position on the Golf while trading other markets. Popping that and other markets into a watch list will allow you to skip in and out of the market quickly and with ease, while not getting too distracted by what you are doing in the foreground. Guardian will also automatically cycle and update all the data from the market in the background for you. So it’s the perfect tool for trading and monitoring more than one market.
Enjoy the Golf!
Curiously, mention Valhalla to me and this is what pops into my head
Category: Golf, Trading strategies
