Wednesday 8 September 2010

Laying In The Bundesliga


The storm at work has just about abated, and I finally have my life back.

I've written before about how the different football leagues I follow all have their own unique personalities, and this suspicion is borne out after looking at the numbers for last season.

The best league for backing the favourites was Serie A, where 1 unit bet on every match would have netted (assuming 5% commission) 23.89 units. This strategy would also have been profitable in Spain, but a losing idea in France, England, Scotland and Germany.

When I looked at the returns from a strategy of laying odds-on favourites, Germany was hugely profitable, with a profit of 40.6 units to a 1 risk. Two other leagues were also profitable, but only slightly, while in Spain this strategy would have lost you 27.14 units.

Thinking this might have been something of a fluke, I decided to look at how this would have played out in 2008-09 and again this would have been a profitable strategy in Germany, although not surprisingly by less than in 2009-10.

More work to do of course, but at first sight it looks a promising low-risk strategy.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

What would the total P/L be across all those Leagues?

Joep said...

I see you used 5% commission in your calculations, which is reasonable as you probably only could find the data for the betfair prices. However, placing bets at various other sites would usually result in a higher profit. I remember you once mentioned commission in relation to the FE picks, are you placing those at betfair as well? I think placing those bets on betfair will lose you a lot of the value, specially since you're often dealing with premium charges.

SimonM said...

Fascinating -- any conclusions on the reasons?
Are the markets more efficient in Italy and Spain? Less attention paid to Germany?
Or is it the nature of the football -- Bundesliga being a more open championship than Serie A or La Liga?
Whatever the reason, thanks for the blog. Real food for thought with each post.

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