It will get you in the end…
There is one definable characteristic in Tennis that allows you to predict how a player will perform year on year.
It’s age….
There is also definable characteristic with most gamblers, it’s called the gamblers fallacy. Basically people back things because they either expect them to continue, or they expected a ‘trend’ to reverse. In Tennis this often leads people to consistantly back dominant players to win or back once great players expecting a ‘return to form’.
To pick up on this characteristic, to examine if value existed there, I decided to research what caused a player to either pick up form or decline. It turned out the strongest chracteristic was age. Obviously age is going to have an impact, a 40 year old won’t play the same Tennis as a fresh faced 21 year old with the world in front of him. So I had to do lots of research on each player and their individual career to work out then they peak and also the ‘career curve’ that they followed. By doing this I was able to predict peaks and declines slightly ahead of the crowd. It was complex work, but well worth it. I wrote up the results in a magazine 2/3 years ago.
Using the technique I predicted that Andy Murray would most likely break his Grand Slam duck in 2012. Why? This is because in this particular year, according to my research, he would be at the peak of his ability, both physically and in maturity terms. The actual range for peak performance can span a couple of years either side of this, but the peak is quite noticeable. From the peak its a gentle decline to retirement. This doens’t mean major honours are no longer on the way at all, just that each passing year it gets less and less likely and an upset becomes more likely. If you look at Roger Federer, he will be 32 this year; the average age for retirement on the main tour is….32. But Federer has reached exceptional heights, so he still has further to decline on a relative basis, but decline he will. Jimmy Conners and Andre Agassi went on for ages, the latter put is some good performances later on; but that tends to be exceptional.
I’m currently updating the model at the moment, but it currently forecasts a Djokovic / Murray battle for the top honours; Nadal and Federer are on a gentle slide. Most gifted Tennis players turn pro at the age of 18 so it’s easy to forecast forward from that date. Based upon early performances you can plot a path to the top of their form from there. You need to be looking at the young players of today to see the Tennis stars of the future. Heather Watson and Laura Robson are still on the early part of the curve and still have quite a few years in them yet, so there current performance level is encouraging.
I’m going a level deeper this year and looking at the junior rankings to see if I can get any insight from there. But that’s a trickier task, the transtion to the senior tour holds many challenges, not all of them to do with a Tennis racket.
Category: Tennis, Trading strategies
