Our MLB futures portfolio took another hit last night with the Yankees falling further behind, but not all is lost there. At least not yet. Thankfully, we had a winning day on college football. Getting into today…
World Series
The market really seems to think the Yankees will win Game 3, heavily favoring them in the return home tomorrow night. We’re a little skeptical of the degree to which they’re favored, but we hope the market’s right, given we are in for a world of hurt if the Dodgers win this series.
We do see value today in some form on the Dodgers, and it’s thanks to the market viewing Game 3 as such a lopsided affair. We aren’t betting the Dodgers to win Game 3 itself—if we bet that and lost it, we’d have an even worse balance of potential outcomes, with the Yankees still trailing but a bunch of our units down the drain—but we’re going to put a few units (12) down on the Dodgers to win this in four or five games. It’s narrow value, but it’s value. In the event the Yankees do send this back to LA, there’s a 50% chance they’ll do it by evening the series after Game 4, something which would open up more options for us in the way of hedging leverage.
We’ll run more numbers tonight and place another bet tomorrow before Game 3 actually happens. Overall? We still just want the Yankees to win the series. If we lose these twelve units in the process, we’ll be very happy to lose them.
With 229.73 units still available to bet, our outcomes given what has been bet now look like this:
| Winner | Final Portfolio Net |
| Yankees | 118.95 |
| Dodgers in 4 or 5 | -490.27 |
| Dodgers in 6 or 7 | -520.27 |
Pick: Under 5.5 Games +150. Medium confidence. x6
Dallas @ San Francisco
We’re sticking with what’s worked for us this season, and what’s worked has been FPI. The 49ers’ massive collection of injuries doesn’t entirely show up in FPI, but it’s there more than people might realize. The Niners haven’t exactly had a healthy season, and at this point, most of those systems are heavily based on season-to-date stats. We hate this pick. The Cowboys are sneakily 3–3. The Niners have so many guys hurt. But we’ve hated a lot of our NFL picks this year, and they’ve won more often than not.
Pick: San Francisco –5.5 (–110). Low confidence.
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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 NFL bets: We got smoked on these all year last year, to the point where I think we might’ve even stopped placing them. This year, though, we’re 13–10 so far, up 2.00 units. We tend to lean on FPI to make these picks.
Overall: All-time, we’ve completed 8,088 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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