I'm at a bit of a cross roads. I've pretty much ruled out trading, lack of discipline for one but also I just don't think it's something I enjoy. The stress and pressure is too much for my sanity. A few months back (an apologies as I've forgotten who) introduced me to a VRR spreadsheet and the ability to price up a horse race to find value bets.
Anyway this has the progressed for me into golf (a sport I love, play and watch week in week out). I've long been scratch member of a data analysis website and since January of 2021 I'm on average making around 2 - 5% a week (some of the majors I've actually made around 10%). The way I'm doing this is waiting until the last 1 or 2 days of a tournament and laying a golfer based on whether I deem their odds to be too short, I will never lay over odds of 7.0 and my average lay odds are around 4.0.
What I'm concerned about is that because there's only 2 possible tournaments each week that I will consider laying in (PGA and DP) that what I've achieved up until now is probably just a statistical anomaly and there's going to be a period of variance/correction due as my sample size is pretty small.
Everywhere I read it effectively says that Betfair markets are so efficient that you can't possibly find value bets and the only way to make money with value bets is to find some kind of arb with a bookies.
What is people's opinions on this, I know Psychof makes a very nice living out vale bets in football in the last 10mins or so of a match which has led me to continue what I'm doing but I guess I'm just worried I'm wasting my time pursing this?
Value Betting / Efficient Markets
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jamesedwards
- Posts: 2299
- Joined: Wed Nov 21, 2018 6:16 pm
Until your sample size increases many fold your results are, indeed, at the mercy of variance.
It's impossible to guess whether your system will outlive variance without knowing how you are selecting your lays. To use two extreme examples, if you are using decades of stats to calculate a golfer with X Y and Z attributes are less likely to perform well in the final round then it's more likely to succeed compared to a system where you lay golfers with a G in their name.
I hope it continues to work for you
It's impossible to guess whether your system will outlive variance without knowing how you are selecting your lays. To use two extreme examples, if you are using decades of stats to calculate a golfer with X Y and Z attributes are less likely to perform well in the final round then it's more likely to succeed compared to a system where you lay golfers with a G in their name.
I hope it continues to work for you