How long is a piece of string

[jamesg46]

Getting right into it, do we spend too much effort looking for hope?

Digging through data to find what exactly. If we don't know what we are looking for is that not the same as hoping to find something.

Peter's recent football video sent my thought process completely west, my assumptions were that to be successful long term, you need to find some niche, a little edge hidden away in the corner of a dark place that nobody knows about.

I recently read through a forum post (I have no intention to mock anyone) where there was a comment about football being too difficult to trade because of the vast amount of variables... the weather, 22 players, the officials, the atmosphere and the list could go on and on and on.

So while digging through data looking at all the different variables can chuck up some very interesting things, is it all just not factored in to the long term.

In the short term Harry kane being injured will impact that game & Jose being fired will change the way Utd play and too little or too much rain could affect the speed of the ball (I just made that up) but is this not all just part of the long term numbers, such as the avg goals is 2.6, the home advantage is worth 0.4 so why are we looking at every short term variable in an effort to be long term profitable? Or am I missing the point?

I've read somewhere that you cant make money from the EPL because the markets are too efficient... isn't that the great part? The thing the market says will happen, will happen with a great deal of efficiency over the long term.

I'm not trying to knock anyone or knocking collecting data, we wouldn't know a great deal without it... I'm just wondering if we get lost in it?

[MobiusGrey]

Strong possibility, my first assumption of trying to trade football to a profitable scale was wrong, when watching a game live and trading manually it's easy to get lost, since switching over to trading fully automated on the correct score none of my original assumptions hold water, makes no difference as to the weather, 22 players influencing a game etc, the odds decrease with time decay on the current score, a goal is scored the odds decrease again. The past few weeks I've not watched a single game live and have a slight increase in my profit column.

It's easy to become emotive when watching/trading a football match, this then leads to post match analysis paralysis. Please ignore my original post, it was incorrect.

[jamesg46]

Decent way of explaining myself through picture.

[spreadbetting]

Just because markets appear efficient long term doesn't mean they're efficient short term. Like any betting to be successful you need to be getting value, all traders do is sell on the value for a quick turnaround. In fast flowing markets people will overreact or be too slow to react to events and value will be available on one side of the book. You just need to be able to spot it or quick enough to get it. The perfect scenario for traders is when an efficient market is behaving inefficiently.

[Jukebox]

I take heart from the fact that every week the sports channels have shock results to discuss.

[Kai]

I recently read through a forum post (I have no intention to mock anyone) where there was a comment about football being too difficult to trade because of the vast amount of variables... the weather, 22 players, the officials, the atmosphere and the list could go on and on and on.

I'm not trying to knock anyone or knocking collecting data, we wouldn't know a great deal without it... I'm just wondering if we get lost in it?

To be fair to MobiusGrey his post was in the context of automation, that's a completely different game to manual trading. To answer your question in short then yes, I think people often get lost in the data, sometimes due to ignorance (they simply don't know where else to look) and other times due to habit. It's pure logic in my opinion, if the prices themselves are mostly based on data then why expect that you're going to extract massive edges from this data? Always seemed a bit naive to me, it would be fantastic if it was as easy as that, then every man and his dog could do a bit of data mining and then trade everything without actually needing to develop any genuine trading skills.

[MemphisFlash]

A piece of string is twice the distance from the centre to the end. Everyone knows that.