Recent Trends vs. historical trends

[MrX]

But I'm intrigued by Muddy's and MrX's posts - unless I'm mistaken you guys seem to be referring to specific situational trends that have occurred and still occur at a reasonable frequency. Now if you put your money on historical trends, you're basically saying that the market isn't efficient - otherwise it would've corrected itself a long time ago, no?

I'm not an economist, so I'm not entirely clear on how to define a market as efficient or not efficient, but it's my strong belief that there is a lot of value available in closing lines in major markets. So, in that respect, I think the efficiency of betting markets is widely overstated. On the other hand, the betting markets do move towards efficiency. There are many approaches that would have worked wonderfully 10 years ago that are useless now. But, as new information and greater processing power becomes available, there are new approaches that wouldn't have even been possible ten years ago. I think we're still pretty far from anything approaching perfect efficiency, where closing lines would be unbeatable.

I can see how there would still be opportunity to profit off of these if the bookmakers intentionally and consistently open with significantly skewed odds that you guys are able to spot, and pound, before the self-correcting market comes in to smooth out the inefficiency. I guess that would be the key?

For years my most valuable model worked significantly better vs closing lines than opening lines. It was specifically aimed at a number of misconceptions that were held by bookmakers and the overall market alike. Lately, it would seem that the market is catching up a bit, since it performs about the same on openers as closers.

Of course I'm not talking about the kind of trends that people usually think of when you hear about trends. I think anything really easy to look up and test pretty much would get the value pounded out of it quickly.

 

[MonkeyF0cker]

Could be any number of factors I suppose that by itself would not be a telling stat without weighing others into the equation:
Strength of opponents, at home vs. on the road, injuries.

This what you are getting at? The stat itself hasn't had enough time to revert to the average because other factors would impact it in the short term?

Yes. Not only are you dealing with limited samples that are not statistically significant, but there are a number of variables that account for certain statistics to begin with.

 

[mcbaseball10]

Thanks for the input fellas.

 

[kato]

great thread...

great read...

 

[Matty]

Thank you MrX. Further proof that I should never ever bet on baseball again. Different animal.