October Summary

I am starting the long drive back to Blighty this afternoon so will have to keep this relatively brief - all the kids stuff to pack and house to tidy etc. Another losing month but not on the same scale, three services producing a profit, although one of those, Laurent Marty, did so from a very small sample. Two services pretty much broke even and two repeated their poor first month. The turnover for the month was £27k, down £1k from September, although that included August in it as well, with an overall loss of just over £800.

October
Rank	Tipster	Staked (pts)	P/L	ROI	ROC
1	Laurent Marty	14	7.8	55%	15%
2	Football Elite	17	3.3	20%	7%
3	Football Investor	95	6.1	6%	6%
4	Narrow Victories	21	-0.2	-1%	0%
5	Summer of Football	17	-0.3	-2%	-1%
6	Skeeve	18	-8.7	-48%	-9%
7	The Football Analyst	130	-21.7	-17%	-22%

Overall, Summer of Football maintains its lead from Narrow Victories, and bar the introduction of Laurent Marty, all the places remain the same. Probably the most worrying number is the ROC for TFA, with over 50% of the bank gone, but more of that in the Confidence Ratings. Total turnover is now £55k with nearly £3.4k lost at a -6% ROI, or about 8% of the bank in total

Overall
Rank		Tipster	Staked (pts)		P/L		ROI	ROC
1		Summer of Football	56		13.1		23%	26%
2		Narrow Victories	69		7.9		12%	16%
3		Laurent Marty	14		7.8		55%	15%
4		Football Investor	111		-2.2		-2%	-2%
5		Football Elite	28		-1.6		-6%	-3%
6		Skeeve	66		-26.1		-40%	-26%
7		The Football Analyst	275		-57		-21%	-57%

Sporting Value Confidence Rating (last months rating in brackets)

Laurent Marty – 3 (n/a)

Pretty well covered in the last blog post, a very strong start, but just a start.

Football Elite – 3 (3)

A profitable month, but not quite enough to push the service into profit overall. Hannover, I feel they are Matt’s standard bearer, twice failed to win at home although France seem to be leading the way this season.

Still happy to take on Vulnerable Home Favourites with Narrow Victories, while Football League bets (not official bets) have got off to an impressive start.

Football Investor – 3.5 (3.5)

Great start to the month and strong finish, terrible middle, although nearly all the profit can be put down to three big priced European matches in the last week: Reims at 6.92, Almeria at 8.04 and Getafe at 7.34. FI is also now fitting the remit of providing turnover to match TFA, although quite a lot of correlation in selections, especially in League 1 and 2. So far really pleased with the addition of 0.5pt bets on Top Flight Euro selections, over 4.00 and looking into whether it is worth adding Football Investor selections that are also over 4.00.    

Narrow Victories – 3 (3)

Break-even month summed up by the last week, 5 out of 6 at the weekend and 1 out of 4 midweek. Not often that you see a side score 3 and still lose by more than 1 or 2 goals, thanks Real Madrid. Still susceptible to amateurish moments, especially when I succumb to narratives such as Atletico Madrid being big scorers after losing a bet 4-0, and then realise they are still winning by 1-2 goals, and only place a bet in the match they win 5-0! That said I did back them last night away at Granada, and they got the job done.

Turnover was down this month, which I put down to the International break and the Champions League taking up a lot of the elite league’s time. Both these events could well be NV territories, but still in watching brief mode.

Summer of Football – 3.5 (3.5)

A poor start to the month was rectified to produce a solid, if a little flat break-even month. No problems with getting the bets on or the prices.

Skeeve – 2.5 (2.5)

Another poor month, especially in terms of ROI. ROC lower as it seems Skeeve is cutting bets to get through to the magical second half of the season. He had suggested that the service could become a January to May only service, admittedly at a lower price, and while this is obviously where the profit is, it slims the service down even more and relies on an incredible ROI to win the day.

While there has been a suggestion of holding fire until January I will continue to follow the bets that are recommended, although not with the greatest confidence for the next couple of months.

The Football Analyst – 3.5 (4)

The only downgrade this month, but faith is certainly not lost. Graeme made an incredible start to the month and the deficit of September was halved but October did not keep giving.

I mentioned in an earlier blog piece that I was cutting back my stakings on multiple selections to a maximum of 4 and this really helped the bottom line. My obvious fear was that it would slow down the recovery as the strongest selections would win with less money on them, but the opposite is true as I have saved over £1300 this month. If the full amounts had been bet, my bank would be close to 75% gone, and this week’s £2200 staked would be the full bank in play.

So why the faith, you may ask? Well negatives first, this is the first time my portfolio has lost two months in a row, and these two months would be two of the worst 3 on record. But 17 months out of the 64 (26%) on record have produced a profit of over 50 points, 41% had over 40 points and 50% over 30. All the Novembers on record are profitable with an average return of over 58 points. Admittedly this is with full 11 point staking when necessary, but I think this policy of restricting has already paid its way.

As a way of comparison, September 2011 was the previous worst on record, and averages 35 points profit for the month, while October has 2 losing months and an average of 34 points made.

Of course there is a chance that the ratings have lost their edge, but for now I am carrying on, almost all-in, but not quite!

Other options

I have mentioned that I am trialling two other services, Football Form Labs and Keith Elliott Golf. As I have not decided which way I am going to play them I am not including them in the official portfolio so far. To be honest the small profit on FFL is cancelling out the small loss on KE so far, so not much to report.

Right I need to get on my way, and find convenient stops on the way back to England to place all the Friday and Saturday bets. Good luck all this weekend.

Europe acting like the Middle East

I was reminded of the famous letter to the Financial Times about the sitation in the Middle East, when going through all the European selections from various tipsters (including my own selections):

Sir, Iran is backing Assad. Gulf states are against Assad!

Assad is against Muslim Brotherhood.

Muslim Brotherhood and Obama are against General Sisi.

But Gulf states are pro-Sisi! Which means they are against Muslim Brotherhood!

Iran is pro-Hamas, but Hamas is backing Muslim Brotherhood!

Obama is backing Muslim Brotherhood, yet Hamas is against the U.S.!

Gulf states are pro-U.S. But Turkey is with Gulf states against Assad; yet Turkey is pro-Muslim Brotherhood against General Sisi. And General Sisi is being backed by the Gulf states!

Welcome to the Middle East and have a nice day.

KN Al-Sabah,
London EC4, U.K.

I have previously mentioned that my Narrow Victories selections were clashing with Matt of Football Elite’s Vulnerable Home Favourites. This is not that much of a surprise as we are both looking for a level of underperformance from a favourite. Well this week, there were clashes all over the place.

Best to leave me out of the equation first, but the big clash was over the Levante – Espanol fixture where both FE and The Football Analyst were for the home favourite and Football Investor was taking them on. I am glad to say the most productive result won through here with Levante cruising to victory.

The other clashes were for Narrow Victories and I am ashamed to say I bowed down to the pressure this week! Both FI and FE were backing Reims to get something against Marseille, but Marseille are one of my strong NV mainstays with an unrivalled tight home record last season. I am usually OK taking on a VHF selection but combined with a Top Flight Euro from Stewboss, that was too much. And a good job too as Reims won 3-2, despite a Marseille comeback from 2-1 down in the last few minutes.

FI also had Osasuna to beat Seville, who are, again, an incredible NV side. In hindsight I should have looked into this more as the £40 stake on Osasuna should not have put me off a £100 bet for NV, and it was only taking on one tipster (although a main selection rather than a trial add-on)!

On a more positive note, there was quite a strong correlation of opinion among TFA, FE and FI this week. If you had backed all the selections that had at least 2 nominations (well 2 exactly, there were no all 3 choices), you would have backed 6 teams and won 5 of the bets. A profit of 9.24 points at an ROI of 154%!

Welcome to portfolio investing and have a nice day.

This weekend has been a very productive one, which was a relief after the last couple of rounds. I won’t go into too much detail of the previous weeks as we are nearly at month end and I will write a summary then.

What I will say is that this was the first weekend when all football tipsters made a profit at the same time. FE made the least with a £12 return and FI topped the pile at £488. NV and Summer of Football both made over £400 as well. Overall a profit of £1343 was achieved at 22% ROI.

This was particularly pleasing because at 4.35 on Saturday it looked like TFA and FI were about to drop a grand each and finally a few late goals went their (and my) way!

This blog has been a little quiet over the last fortnight, predominately as I was making a few tentative changes to my portfolio. No, no-one has been chucked out yet but there have been two tentative additions, to go with the continuing trial of Football Form Labs.

Rowan, over at TPI, mentioned that he was finding it relatively easy to get on at Pinnacle with his rugby bets. Rather than try GT Tips again, like Rowan, I have restarted my BetAdvisor subscription for Laurent Marty.

Laurent has been a Secret Betting Club hall of famer, was highlighted in Joseph Buchdahl’s ‘How to find a Black Cat in a coal hole’ as one of two tipsters with a proven edge. He also made quite a lot of profit for me up until I stopped last October. At that time LM was probably at the top of his tipping game and the subscription charges were well over £100 per month. I was finding it impossible to get bets on in any amount at or near the price or points spread.

Since then things have cooled a little after a poor run and the fees have come down, indicating to me less people are following him. In the last couple of months his results look like they are returning to a profitable level and it was time to unpause my subscription.

So far, the results have been spectacular, 13 bets, £1350 staked, and a profit of £798 at 59% ROI. Obviously this can’t continue but there has only been one selection I have turned down due to not being able to get the odds and that was my fault as I was walking the walls of Carcassonne castle with my kids when the tip came through!

Given the price of subscription, results need to be very strong, but I have until the 8^th of March to decide if it can be a permanent member of the portfolio.

The other new addition is again a former member of the portfolio but I intend to find out if I can play it in a different way. I used to follow Keith Elliott’s Golf service and had some fantastic wins but overall the figures were not convincing once you processed the data and worked out bank sizes etc.

What particularly hurt the P/L statistics were the big wins as they usually triggered a family led spending spree, and these returns were needed to make the books balance. Interestingly, big horse wins did not have the same effect, maybe because they did not involve 4 days of following, usually culminating in a tense Sunday night drama, that everyone picked up on.

Being a member of SBC, Keith Elliott was almost a guilty secret of mine, due to the fact that there was no external proofing and they did not publish their results. My link to the service was through Keith’s Golf Form books, which were published many years ago and were a great insight to sports betting in general.

I knew this service has amazing wins but also long barren runs and due to the number of bets and different style bets my account keeping were never the most analysable. So when Matthew Walton, who runs Keith’s service put his other one up for proofing with SBC (issue 84), I thought it was time to look again.

I emailed them and they sent me full results for the last 4 years and I got to work.  Firstly I looked at their straight, as advised results, then win only (as most bets are EW) and then place only.

Given the headlines are garnered through big priced winners it was quite a shock to see that the bulk of the profits were from the place part of the bets. The obvious solution is to just play the place part of the bet, but prices are harder to obtain. I will trial to see how close I get to the quarter odds part of the EW bet and keep you updated with my progress.

Finally, the family and I are on half-term holiday at moment just outside Girona in Spain. While the weather was lovely when we arrived I get the feeling we are at the tail end of the great storms as now windy and a bit cooler. But it is still lovely and crowd-free and the kids are just about still swimming in the pool, so I can get some peace and write this!

Rather than just sharing my circumstances I thought I would detail my betting experience while abroad. Taking the ferry from Portsmouth to St Malo overnight was an interesting experience and probably the first time in a long time that I was without data for a considerable time. Fortunately I did not have any bets to follow on that Wednesday night, bar the start of two golf tournaments in Asia. It was actually quite nice not to be surgically attached to the iPhone just In case something came through.

France is mostly betting friendly, although Betfair only works on the BetMate app, not the Betfair app or website. The other way round is a VPN, which is also very handy for watching SkyGo and iPlayer when you have Wifi. In terms of data on the go I have taken up Orange’s £3 a day for 100MB, which so far has covered all non-Wifi eventualities.

Spain is a different story with Betfair, William Hill, Sporting Bet, Betfred and many others not working, and for some reason a VPN doesn’t help either. Fortunately Bet365 and Pinnacle still work so if I am out I can still usually get some type of bet on quickly.

Here I have had to resort to logging into my computer at home via Logmein and placing the bets this way. It is a bit more fiddly but does the trick. I was a tad worried that the big storm would shut down the electricity/broadband at home and I wouldn’t have access, but that didn’t happen and it is still up and running. If it had gone down, like it did in summer when I think the cat feeder thought she was being helpful and turned off the power, I would have hired a VPS for the month to carry on.

The Week ahead

Should be a relatively quiet week with only a few TFA/FI selections and a couple of NV ones as well. Following on from earlier FI has put up big outsider bets on a couple of my tentative selections, so I will leave those alone. I do fancy Barca, Juve and Real Madrid to win by 1 or 2 goal margins so have backed those already.

In terms of Narrow Victories, I intend to update this week with a French Ligue 1 profile, so keep your eyes peeled for that and obviously the end of month summary soon for all the members of this portfolio.

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.