Making the most of international breaks - back testing data/hypothesis
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Hey, I hope you're all well.
During the int break and since the end of the summer leagues, I made use of my time by testing hypothesis I have come across over the course of last year. Some of these were found on youtube, on the BTC forum and in other places too. The idea was to see if any of those would have had a positive impact on the strat(s) I trade. Just for a bit of context, I trade the O1.5 market using and set and forget approach and also trade the FHG and the SHG markets. This is 1 strategy and the selections are the same, those markets are just interlinked and relevant to my overall strat,if that makes sense.
While I did not expect to find anything magical, I still hoped to find a little something of interest, so I went on and manually backtested a few things. For this test, I've only used 350 matches , this is because I have manually searched for and inputted the data, which has been very dry and time consuming.
The first thing I wanted to know was if selections with teams that have scored over 2.5 goals (Overall % and average per team) were more likely to end with score lines over 1.5 goals as well as with a FH or SH goals. What I discovered was that trading selections based on their O2.5 goals average and %, high or low, would not have improve my strategy(ies). It would have actually brought my ROI and profit down. Even if combined with one, all or several of the base criterion I use fro my strat.
The next thing I wanted to test was TTM's magic number - for those not familiar with it, it is a formula created by TTM that takes the teams' offence and defence ratings and divides it by the number of teams in the relevant league. Again, the magic number did not improve my base strategy or any of the more refined versions of it and would have brought both ROI and profit down. I tried to combine the magic number with other stats but could not find any relevance to my strat.
The last thing I wanted to test TTM's offence and defence ratings number - a number which is the result of subtracting the teams offence and defence ratings - the larger the number, the bigger the advantage of one team's offence over the other teams' defence. This was what I was most interested in, but again, the results show that both my ROI and profit would have been impacted should have I used this bit of data.
Finally, I toyed with the new and old data to see if there was any combos of criterion that could make my strat better, but I did not find anything.
Conclusions:
1/ I used a quite small selection sample for these tests, maybe too small. I'll keep tracking for a bit longer to see if anythings stands out later on.
2/ While I would have liked to find something of interest, what I have potentially found is what I don't need to bother with, which is extremely valuable.
3/ Those bits of data don't seem to work for my strats/approach but may well work for other people, the key is to test things and avoid taking information shared for face value.
Dunno if this will be of interest to anyone, but hey, maybe Ryan will take comfort in reading about his online arch enemy's data not working
Nick
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@Alex-Rendell Thanks for this, I'll have a look. Yes, I agree, there isn't a magic stat or strategy and it is all about taking good value - bottom line.
Regarding my post, it was just me being curious, there hasn't been a lot of football to trade recently so I've decided to do some testing. I personally like the idea of knowing as much as possible about the markets I trade. With markets changing all the time, I personally see testing as a good way to stay on top of my trading and to keep biases, opinions and assumptions at bay - all about data.
Thanks for your feedback, as I said I'll have a look at FTS, the name rings a bell.
Nick
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@Nick-Segura fair play to you for taking the time out to delve deep into your strategies - I don't know if I'd have had the mental power to get through all that data!
One thing I've personally learnt over the past 10-12 months is that the simplest approaches are often the way forward - you (or anyone for that matter) should check out "FTS Income" on YouTube or the "FTS Betslip" podcast. I hasten to add that they aren't a rival company to BTC, as the product they offer is substantially different and the price is far higher too (I don't pay for any of their services and solely use the freely available videos and audio that they provide).
Ian (the face of FTS) offers some amazing mindset material and his approach to gambling/trading is largely focused on betting on certain markets within certain odds ranges, based on what the historical data tells you is most profitable in the long-run. It's a simple yet effective approach and one that I think more people would benefit from; hours of researching, delving, tweaking and altering betting strategies to find that one golden egg are usually a waste of time, when the simplest of techniques can often be the most lucrative.
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Big thanks of sharing your test process and thinking. Really great!
