At last, the World Series begins tonight. We’ve got a little college football and two weeks’ worth of election futures to go with it. Let’s get on with the show.
World Series
No change here. 32 more units on the Yankees. Interestingly, both FanGraphs Playoff Odds and the ZiPS projections (the ones which include starting pitching matchups) inched towards the Yankees after rosters were released. I don’t know what that means, but ZiPS does now have the Yankees as the series favorite. We’re hoping that’s true, because with 257.73 units left to spend, our portfolio is set to profit by 99.75 units if the Yankees win it all and lose 492.27 units if the Dodgers lift the trophy. We’re prepared to pivot to the Dodgers, and we do have a few hedging scenarios in play, since we don’t want to burn our whole portfolio. But. Our portfolio is effectively a massive bet on the Yankees at a –494 price. That’s where we stand heading into Game 1.
Pick: New York (AL) to win +117. Medium confidence. x16
Louisville @ Boston College
We did look at the Ivy League matchup here, but that line’s a little weird to us, since we’d think Yale’s the better team there by enough to make up for whatever home-field advantage Franklin Field offers Penn. We’re worried about an injury to Yale we don’t know about.
Instead, we’re going to ride with Louisville. We still think this is a pretty good team. Not great, but pretty good. The Cards’ three losses have each come by seven points and have each come against one of the 15-ish best teams in the country. We’re worried about a spiral with any team when their original goals disappear, but Jeff Brohm’s teams have generally held up pretty well in the eight-win kind of season. We’ve seen Boston College enough to take them seriously, but Louisville’s demonstrably the better team in this one.
Pick: Louisville –7 (–112). Low confidence.
2024 U.S. Presidential Election
The polls have shifted, but markets have shifted a lot more. From what the polls tell us (and remember—while polls do miss, Nate Silver’s model makes a lot of people a lot of money every election by accurately reflecting uncertainty margins), the market value’s on Harris right now with very few exceptions.
One of those exceptions is still New Hampshire, so we’re going to put a few more units on Trump there. It’s unlikely Trump wins New Hampshire, but it’s possible. More possible than 9-to-2 odds imply.
On the other side, we’re going to hit the popular vote button hard for Harris. We already had a medium amount on Trump to win the popular vote, so some of this is using that leverage, but this is also the best value we’re seeing in a market where Harris remains the betting favorite.
Together, with one mini-portfolio left, this leaves us in a boat where there are very few scenarios in which we don’t profit by at least 10%. There are some—Harris winning Georgia but losing a Rust Belt swing state would make us only a 7% profit—but aside from something really crazy happening, like Trump winning Maine, we’re in good shape.
The one exception? If Harris holds New Hampshire but loses the popular vote, we’ll lose two percent of our portfolio. This seems kind of likely—New Hampshire leans blue by a whole three points, per Silver’s model—but the actual number is small. It’s a real risk, but today’s odds gave us the choice of where to put that risk on the curve. We’re putting it in a very specific corner that’s fairly far from the median. Most likely, New Hampshire and the popular vote end up on the same side. The needle could definitely split them, but we had to take on a risk somewhere, and we might still be able to plug that hole with our last mini-portfolio next week.
Some notes, as we approach the end of this exercise:
First, I don’t think doing this with such regular frequency really helped our portfolio. I think you could build one big portfolio every month or two, or even just build a big portfolio right before the election, and still make a good amount of money, provided these markets don’t get more efficient. If we do weekly election bets in 2026, we’ll do them differently.
Second, as we’ve been saying, we’ll place another, separate, big portfolio once the World Series is over. The size of that depends on how many units we get back from the World Series. So, if you haven’t been following along, keep an eye out for that after Game 4 or 5 or 6 or 7. We were considering a third, but we want every unit available as we try to wriggle out of our Dodgers jam.
Pick: Democratic Candidate to win popular vote –175. Medium confidence. x52
Pick: Republican Candidate to win New Hampshire +450. Medium confidence. x4
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How we do this, and how we’re doing:
MLB Futures: We started the year with 750 units in this portfolio. This is something we’ve done each of the last five years. Twice, we profited by large amounts. Twice, we only narrowly profited. Once, we lost about 25% of the portfolio. We could make history this year. We heavily employ FanGraphs to make these picks.
Single-game college football bets: We’re always mediocre on these, but we’ve been awful this year. We’re 22–29 so far, down 8.86 units. We do use Movelor, our model’s rating system, to guide these, but we aren’t entirely reliant on it.
Election futures: These have been our best market historically, with a 17% overall ROI and significant profits both times we’ve done them—in 2020 and 2022. We started this year with a 1,000-unit portfolio and a plan to bet it as a series of 20 mini-portfolios, each leveraged against itself. We’re still approaching it in that manner, with mini-portfolios published once a week (we’re caught back up again). So far, we’re up 18.50 units. Those have gone back into the bets. We’re going to do a second election portfolio down the line, a standalone portfolio like we mentioned above, but this first portfolio is a continuation of the process we started back around the Fourth of July.
Overall: All-time, we’ve completed 8,081 published bets. We weight our units by confidence: 1 unit for low confidence, 2 for medium, 3 for high. Our all-time return is –2.6%, per unit. On 2,528 medium and high-confidence bets, it’s +0.9%. Obviously, this is bad, but we do expect to get back to even through the World Series and presidential election. In all honesty, we’re just going to pour enough units into inefficient election markets to wipe out our deficit.
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