Our friend at the Making Punting Pay blog posited an opinion and viewpoint at my Bet Diary door recently:
It’s interesting to hear your view regarding how difficult it is to gain an edge in the football markets. Similar thoughts have been running through my mind for a few months now, but my concern isn’t just with football, it’s all sports in general. If you look at my portfolio of tipsters then all racing services are showing a healthy profit, whilst all sports services are showing a loss. I know with the golf guys you need to show patience but i do wonder if my time, effort and money would be better spent investing in racing services only. It’s also a regular occurrence to see the racing services far exceeding the performance of the sports services within the tipster profit reports so it certainly feels as though that’s where the bigger edge lies.
You may remember that I theorized that perhaps the sports betting markets, particularly those relating to the more popular sports or televised football leagues, were becoming more efficient. There have been a number of high profile football tipping services that have previously experienced really good times, start to struggle, and with no apparent change in approach or strategy. It came to the point whereby when I was thinking about how I can raise ROI levels through 2020 I’m thinking I should concentrate more on racing and less on sports betting.
It seems that MPP is thinking along similar lines. I must admit, as someone who writes the summaries for the Tipster Profit Reports, I too have noticed the general outperformance of the racing tipsters versus their sporting counterparts.
Personally, I think that the really shrewd operators may turn more to spotting in-play opportunities in a similar way that exchange sports traders do, identifying in-play market overreactions to match events as a source of value bets. Time will only tell of course, but if this does happen I think that as punters and followers of sporting tipsters we may have to refocus a little and learn to accept that an ongoing ROI of 4-5% is in fact highly attractive as an investment proposition. This mindset change though, won’t be easy if, as both myself and MPP have noticed, the racing tipsters continue to perform at a long term ROI of 10%+.
MPP also asked why I wasn’t following Northern Monkey anymore, especially after following his lead in backing all selections win-only. The answer really is simply one of workload. As mentioned last week, 2020 is a year I intend to curb the number of bets and the time I take to place them and record their outcome. Freeing up time has become a priority. The proof of this pudding will be in the eating – can I do that and raise ROI? I guess we’ll see.
Performance for January to date…
It was nice to see Bet Alchemist drag itself into profit by hitting an 8/1 winner at Haydock at the weekend, and overall the portfolio has, for the first time in 2020, reached a black figure as opposed to a red one. Only just, mind you.
Precision Value is going along very nicely and is the month’s biggest contributor to date. Golf Insider managed to hit a couple of placed golfers to consolidate last week’s profit, but I signed up too late to get last week’s PGA Profit’s tips – first go on this one is this week.
With Racing Service 2 picking a winner on Saturday, the only service to really struggle has been Racing Intelligence. The previously toiling Racing Service 1 stuck up a 12/1 winner at Taunton at the weekend and is not far from clawing of this month’s losses back.
A decent enough start too for Scottish Football Income Booster with two wins from three.
Bet Alchemist (100pts bank): Staked 18pts, +2pts, roi 11.11%, roc 2%
Racing Service 1 (200): Staked 27pts, -1.6pts, roi -5.92%, roc -0.8%
Golf Insider (400): Staked 36.7pts, +13.9pts, roi 37.87%, roc 3.47%
PGA Profit (100): n/a
Precision Value (200): Staked 67pts, +17.041pts, roi 25.43%, roc 8.52%
Racing Intelligence (200): Staked 82.5pts, -14.625pts, roi -17.73%, roc -7.31%
SFIB (100): Staked 5pts, +1.94pts, roi 38.8%, 1.94%
Racing Service 2 (50): Staked 8pts, -3pts, roi -37.5%, roc -6%
Total ROI 1.33%, ROC 0.28%
