New Blogs And Compliments

Being CEO of a multi-billion dollar global betting empire is hard work at the best of times, but October is certainly 'peak season' for the enterprise. 

Football, and American Football (both College and NFL) are in full swing, Baseball has its play-offs culminating in the World Series, while both the NBA and NHL begin their long seasons.

Add in the US Presidential Election and the Brexit situation and you can tell that the lights have been burning long into the night and at weekends at Cassini Towers HQ.

Regarding the NHL, and it appears that the countdown delay on in-play bets in this league have been reduced, at least for now, to 5 seconds (from the 8 seconds last season). I'm not sure this will help liquidity though. 

There was quite a deluge of comments (to steal James' expression) on my last post regarding blogging and a couple of brave souls put their names forward for blog roll consideration.

First up was Tobias B:

Hi Cassini, I have been following your blog for some years now - the best of its kind! You have actually inspired me to start my own blog, which I did a couple of years ago but just recently moved it to a new location at www.machinebetting.com . I write about my bot betting activities (soccer) on Betfair from mathemathical, technical, data and performance view. If you find it worth being on your bloglist I would realy appriciate it, you are one (of two...) on mine. Keep up the good work! / Tobias

It's always pleasing to read comments like this. This blog always tries to maintain a positive attitude, with a little humour thrown in, but at the same time there's a lot of nonsense out there which deserves to be called out. 

This blog started out as a way of recording my progress, and if you read it from the start you'll not only learn a lot, but see that I learned a lot too. That it has inspired others to start a blog is nice, but hopefully more have been inspired that with a patient, disciplined, logical approach, it is possible to make steady profits from betting.

Unfortunately I don't believe that everyone can be successful at this - paraphrasing the Trader Feed blog, the necessary traits are:

1) Classical intelligence (IQ - the ability to be able to understand odds and probabilities and have a logical thought process)

2) Emotional intelligence (to be able to know their emotions and manage their risk taking)

3) Social intelligence (in poker terms, the ability to read the players around the table, but in trading terms, I see this as an awareness of how others might be reacting (or over-reacting) to information.

Anyway, back on topic and a quick perusal of Tobias' blog suggests that it is well worth reading, although of more interest to bot orientated traders than to manual ones given that a lot of the content is very technical.

Tobias is from Sweden, and uses the Swedish Krona, so some of the numbers look huge if you're unaware of this, but he's clearly knowledgeable on his subject. Check it out here and I'll be adding it to my blog roll.

The second nomination was from Peter, aka Nenko Gachev who wrote:

Hi Cassini,

thanks for all the great posts you are giving us here. Since you ask for blog recommendations, I will appreciate if you have a look at my betting blog churchofbetting.com. I have not posted in a few weeks but have put on some material in the last couple of months. You might find the articles for home and away value in certain football leagues interesting. Also in the

Recommended section there are other blogs that I like, most of which you are certainly aware of, but perhaps there too you might find something new.

Cheers,
Peter

Two compliments in one day! I'm not sure that's ever happened before. Another reader who finds at least some of my posts useful. Church of Betting is a relatively new blog making its debut in May this year, and at just 15 posts, has yet to show longevity. By way of comparison, yours truly made its debut in March 2008, closing in on 2,200 posts and currently averaging around 450 hits a day. 

Early days then, but Peter's blog is similar to mine in that he has posts on subjects such as value, tipster shenanigans, goal stats and models, so I'll add it to the blog roll and see where he goes with it. 

However, given that most people reading this post are sound-minded enough to have dismissed religions as primitive, silly and totally illogical, I'm not sure the "Church" name will help draw readers. 

James sent me a message on the reference to day-trading in my last post:

In your latest post you neglected to mention that 'buy and hold' outperforms day-trading by some distance. An index tracking fund would net someone a good return but no where near as exciting as throwing your money away on day-trading. Obviously, you were too excited about the prospect of today's game against the thugs to mention the fallacy of day-trading in your post.

Did I really need to mention this again? Readers should be well aware of my thoughts on this topic - from September 2014 my financial investment advice was this:

Start as early as you can, invest 10% or more of everything you earn in stock index funds, and forget about it. You won’t go far wrong.

And back in 2011, I wrote that:

What I actually wrote was that day-trading from your living room trying to beat insiders just isn't viable, and the evidence supports that statement.

I'm confident this blog is full of even earlier references to the folly of believing that day-trading or active investing can beat investing in index tracking funds over the long term. It may not be exciting as James says, but you can go to Las Vegas for excitement, and pay for that thrill with a little spending money. 

Slightly off topic here, seems to be happening a lot today, but I have a vague recollection of reading an article pointing out how much a daily cup of coffee was costing you from your retirement wealth. The article was along the lines that, (for example you are age 20, retiring at age 60), a £2 a day coffee habit costing you £730 a year today (excluding leap years), would accrue to a sum (assuming the 20 year FTSE average of ~5%), that would amount to over £5,000 in retirement. That's an expensive cup of coffee. Of course it's not that simple, inflation takes a toll and it would be a sad life if you didn't enjoy the occasional luxury, but if you lose £100 on an ill-conceived bet, that's £100 that you could have invested in your future.

Finally, while no one has commented on it, some of you may have noticed that I've recently changed the font on my posts, as I think it is sharper and easier to read. Long-term, I'll see if I can have someone update all previous 2,200 posts to this format, but that's a task that will take a while. I'm also correcting a few typos, missed or misplaced apostrophes, as I find them since my son tells me I have more than a few.