Fooled by randomness
Acknowledging the angle offered by Nicolas Taleb, where he uses this phrase to write an entire book based on the fact the odd things happen more than they academically should, I would like to point out the same can happen in a football match.
Often I see people claiming to have found some new system for trading football. You know the sort, hold a chicken in your hand, put your head out the window and place a back bet if the team is at certain odds, subject to a, b,c and d if this, then that etc. etc.
A lot of these are just nonsense however as every market, not just football, contains a ‘harmonic’ mean of likelyhood. A level at which your actions sink to the realms of pure randomness. Some of these levels are actually quite high and can produce high strike rates, but longer term they produce no profit as they are not being made on key information or at least the proponent is unable to rationalise why it should work. In short there is no edge. Where people get fooled is that a high strike rate can be normality for some strategies and this high strike rate leads, in turn, to some lenghtly winning runs. Any losing events or runs can be justified by ‘bad selections’ or just ‘bad luck’. ‘If he hadn’t hit the post’, but unfortunately he did!
Football is great for this type of thing as a number of patterns can lead to high probablilty payoff events, but not many to profit. But curiously some matches, which you can hunt for, can lead to strategies that pay off whatever happens in the match. That sounds really strange but is true. Whether you back or laid any of the match odds you could still win if you were available to trade after a goal in certain matches. This is not genuis but to be expected in these matches, it’s finding them that is the key task; not executing the trade itself.
It reminds me a great phrase I came across in the stock market.
“What’s the definition of a bull market?”…………………. Answer – “A general rise in prices that makes everyone think they are a financial genius!”
Category: Football trading strategies
