Aikido Results Post 2 (5/1)

The market thinks I'm crazy but not tomorrow's newspapers

The results can be viewed here, and you can check to confirm that I’ve counted them correctly.

We now have a lot more results under our belt. As of results post 1, we’d resolves 50 wagers that didn’t push. We now have 120.

Over those first 50, Aikido was a stunning 33-17-2 for +18.7 units and a 35.94% hold.

(Reminder: In 2020, we had a final record of 78-66 for +16.9 units and an 11.72% hold.)

This past week has been a bumpier ride. We had a bad day. But mostly we still had good days.

Or at least, we had good days if you’re counting the units and not the line movement.

Our win/loss for the week was 36-34-2 for +3.8 units and a 5.4% hold. That’s in the range of something we might be able to sustain long term, and I’d be damn thrilled to do that for real over the long term.

That takes us to a (still completely insane and unsustainable) 69-51-4, +22.5 units and 18.15% hold for the year.

Then we get to the part that’s really, really not going well, which is the line movement.

Our line movement is now an average of -0.8%, or -3.83 cents. For the week it was -1% or -5.05 cents. That’s pretty close to random. Our big underdog bets seem like they’re reliably getting buried. I’ve seen that particular phenomenon in the past.

We did go to a policy of betting in the morning rather than the previous day, so the only conclusion I can reach is that Aikido’s a bad predictor of line movement on the day of the game. You still have some edge getting in early, but by the morning that edge is mostly gone.

My guess is that there’s a phenomenon where there’s a large underdog, something like -150 or better, and which mathematically should be a smaller underdog than that. The reason it’s so often larger is because sports gamblers in some sense cannot ‘do math.’ They don’t realize how random the game of baseball is, and translate the favorite’s advantages into too-high an odds of winning the game, or think of it a game that the favorite is ‘obviously’ going to win, or something like that.

Part of it is also that often there’s some additional reason the line is too high. I believe that such reasons tend to be overvalued, and it also makes sense that the day-of-game betting would value them more than the overnight betting.

Thus over the course of the day, the line often gets far more obnoxiously wrong, and our bet looks dumb. Often super dumb. I learned the last time I experimented not to pull these triggers early.

If you take away such bets we look somewhat better, but we still definitely don’t look good on such metrics.

Where do we go from here? What do you make of all this, dear readers? There aren’t that many of you despite the results, but there are still a few dozen. What’s your probability that Aikido is a winning program as implemented? What do you think is going on?