That's more like it

After a rather poor start to the football season, it was great to have not just a good weekend, but a fantastic one. The Football Analyst and Football Investor led the way with both services gaining over £1000 each. FI’s profit makes it the third service now into profit, joining Summer of Football and Narrow Victories. SoF and Skeeve lost a little ground, and Skeeve is now at the lowest ROI rate of all, at -34%.

Clashes

Football Elite and Narrow Victories edged forwards this week, but I am getting slightly alarmed at the number of clashes between the two. FE had Norwich (+0.5) and I, as NV, had Chelsea to win by 1 or 2 goals. Matt also went for Everton against Manchester City as a Vulnerable Home Favourite, whereas I again preferred a narrow victory for City.

On Friday, I also had a clash with TFA choosing Accrington Stanley and FI went for Dagenham & Redbridge on a DNB basis. Having already placed the TFA bet, no bet was not an option, so I stuck to the directive and backed both. Obviously it was a relief that it was not a draw, the only losing option.

With regards to the clashes with FE and NV, I have to say I backed my judgement and, for the time being, this is working out well. Matt and I have played the same matches on 4 occasions (although this is the first time it has been a main selection), and so far the count is NV 3, FE 0 and both lose 1. Now I don’t think it will carry on this way, and imagine it will even out over time. I certainly would back my selections over VHFs but, each time, it will be a hard decision to keep taking on main selections.

Risk Aversion

Having given Graeme from TFA a 4 in my Confidence ratings, mainly for the work that he puts into his service, and particularly in creating my portfolio, I was rather surprised to find myself making adjustments. Now before anyone takes this as a criticism of TFA, it was mainly instigated from a piece of analysis that Graeme shared in his monthly review. He included a statistical analysis by a subscriber called Tage, which suggested lowering stakes to minimise risk.

One of the strengths of TFA is the large number of successful systems, I currently back 11 win only systems and 2 draw ones. Now this can result in stakes of 11 points on 1 bet. Out of a bank of 100, this is over 9% of the bankroll on one selection. Now I know the system was created with an incredibly large sample and is unlikely to bust the bank, but certainly the chance is much higher, especially if the bets have odds that are regularly over evens.

Tage suggested just selecting as bets those with 4 or less systems and ignoring those of 5 and over. While his research backed this up, it was with different systems to what I play, but I got me straight onto Excel. So I have decided to limit my stakes to a maximum of just four. Rather than ignoring those with 5 or more, I will just limit myself to 4 points (or 4 ½ points on aways) per bet.

I have already tested the effects on last year’s equivalent portfolio and it does bring down the ROC from 247% to 143%, but ROI is up to 20.4% from 16.3%. It brings the max draw down, although not significantly enough to change bank size but I think I will be more comfortable with the bet sizes.

In a way it answers all the slight concerns I had in my review. Not only does it reduce risk in the TFA portfolio, I feel it will also address the balance of the whole portfolio. In fact I turned over almost identical amounts on FI as TFA last week.

So how did it work out? Well to be honest when I placed the bets I imagined I was giving all those systems a great boost as they would all win handsomely and I would be regretting the additional £1000 that I could have won if I had more balls! In the end only one of the three won, costing me just £32 – (£280 saved on Plymouth and Blackburn and £312 ‘lost’ on Southend).

I imagine the next 11 point home bet could be nail biting, but I do feel this is an improvement, certainly for my psyche. Dani at Sportyy.com stated in one of his Tipster School articles that:

“Financial market investors are willing to win less if their portfolios risk is lower.  That is, they pay (opportunity cost) for taking a lower risk.”

I would like to think this is what I am doing, but I am open to constructive criticism!

The Week Ahead

The Interlull is on us again and while TFA, FI and Skeeve will continue playing in the lower leagues and SoF could have some angles in Brazil, it will certainly be a quiet time for me at Narrow Victories. I have considered looking into the International matches as I can see quite a few slim margins, but will probably use the time to add a few more top leagues to the blog. I have also come up with a better way of playing the bet through a form of a Venn-style Asian combination. More of that over on the sister site in the next couple of weeks.