Editor’s Note: Since November 2018, Joe has been publishing picks here and back at All Things NIT, our former site. Overall, the results have been mixed, with an average return on investment, per pick, of –2% when weighting by confidence (1 for low, 2 for medium, 3 for high) across 7,925 published picks, not including pending futures; and an average return on investment, per pick, of +1% across 2,399 completed high and medium-confidence picks. The low confidence picks are the problem. Most of our picks are in the low confidence category.
Use these picks at your own risk. Only you are responsible for any money you lose, and you should not bet more than you can afford to lose. If you’re afraid you might have a gambling problem, seek help.
Odds for these come from the better option between Bovada and BetOnline. We used to use the Vegas Consensus, but it’s no longer consistently available in an accurate form online. We rely heavily on FanGraphs for all our MLB action. We rely heavily on Nate Silver’s presidential election model for our election futures. For college football bets, we primarily use our own model. For NFL bets, we lean on ESPN’s FPI.
Active markets today are MLB futures, election futures, and single-game college football.
The context on each market:
MLB futures – In four of the five years we’ve done these, we’ve profited, twice by large margins. We began this season with 750 units in our portfolio. We placed two medium confidence bets most weekdays throughout the regular season, as usual, then pivoted to placing a more variable number throughout the playoffs, as usual. We’re currently big fans of the Tigers, Padres, and Mets, and we do not want the Dodgers to win it all.
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 mostly weekly (this one is a week late, but we’re planning to have another on Friday to make up for it). So far, we’re up 18.50 units. Those are going back into the bets. We’re going to do a second election portfolio down the line, a standalone portfolio, and possibly a third of the same sort, but this first portfolio is a continuation of the process we started back around the Fourth of July.
Single-game college football bets – Our history here is mediocre, and we’re off to a really bad start this season, with a 13–20 record on the young year. We’re down 8.28 units heading into tonight.
NLCS
The Dodgers are on the brink, and that’s really good for our portfolio. All year, the Dodgers have been our biggest vulnerability. If the Dodgers lose, we will be almost guaranteed a profitable season. If the Dodgers come back and reach the NLCS, we’re in a dangerous spot.
This is not a hedge, though. The value is there at this price. We’re taking it rather than betting on the Guardians (the most valuable team in markets right now) because we want to raise our floor, but we’re not taking a negative-EV bet yet, and we hopefully won’t feel the need to do that down the line, either. The Dodgers’ pitching situation is thoroughly baked into the market at this point, and while the bullpen is tired, Dylan Cease is going for the Padres tonight on three days of rest, shifting the fatigue balance heavily in L.A.’s favor. Get this series back to Los Angeles and there’s a chance the Dodgers are World Series favorites again by morning. Hopefully it doesn’t happen, but this bet will help us if it does.
Ten units here don’t erase our Dodgers liability. They do lighten it, though. Here’s the new rundown, including only a team’s upside or downside in series in which they could play. So, the Phillies’ number doesn’t consider Dodgers vs. Padres or the ALCS. Also importantly, this doesn’t cover the existing 36.21-unit deficit our portfolio’s running to this point in the year.
| Team | Remaining Upside/Downside |
| Padres | 591 |
| Mets | 248 |
| Tigers | 1110 |
| Royals | 34 |
| Guardians | 26 |
| Yankees | -32 |
| Phillies | -77 |
| Dodgers | -242 |
Pick: Los Angeles to win +550. Medium confidence. x5
New Mexico State @ Jacksonville State
NMSU is not last year’s NMSU, but it’s rare for Movelor to be way off on a team this far into the season. That leads us to think the true line on this is at least on NMSU’s side of 21, with Movelor putting the spread at 16.5. As we said yesterday, we’re open to the possibility Movelor is wrong across the board. We’re following it on Tuesday and Wednesday to inform our choices from Thursday through Saturday.
Pick: New Mexico State +21.5 (–110). Low confidence.
2024 U.S. Presidential Election
Polling has, on the aggregate, been highly stable the last few weeks. We’re not seeing a lot of changes in the electoral picture, and there’s a good chance we won’t as these last few weeks progress. It’s a close race which narrowly favors Harris.
Thanks to something—maybe boredom among bettors—the markets have not been so stable. They’ve slid towards Trump. There is no reason for them to do this, but it’s what they’ve done, and that’s opened up some value on Harris in the swing states. Thankfully for us, our broader portfolio most benefits from picking up some value on Harris in the swing states. Harris winning Georgia was part of a bad scenario for us before today. 18 units later, we’re fine if that happens. Similarly, our 22 units on Harris to win Michigan help bolster us against a scenario involving a Rust Belt split.
With our last 14 units, we’re going back to Ohio, where there’s virtually free money available betting on Trump to win. You can’t quite arbitrage Ohio at the books we use for these published bets, but you can arbitrage Alaska if you want to spend the energy and transaction fees. You can get a 2% or 3% return. We’d rather just bet on things that pay us a 12% return and are 97% likely to happen.
(Our second and possibly third election portfolios are going to be more about picking off easy fruit like Ohio. We were hoping that by using the mini-portfolio approach, we could increase our all-time return from 17% to something more like 30%. That could still happen, but it’s looking unlikely. Instead, I think the move is to just maximize units invested, something we’ll do by moving our MLB futures units into elections, and accept something between 10% and 20%. Hopefully odds don’t change too much, but even with election markets more efficient than they were in 2020 and 2022, they’re still inefficient. That’s going to get us back to all-time profitability if the Tigers, Padres, and/or Mets don’t get us there first.)
Pick: Democratic Candidate to win Georgia +175. Medium confidence. x9
Pick: Democratic Candidate to win Michigan –130. Medium confidence. x11
Pick: Republican Candidate to win Ohio –850. Medium confidence. x7
