The Lab: June Performance Update

This article was first published on the 17th June, 2018 for Football Advisor Portfolio members.

The Lab: June Performance Update

Over the last couple of days, we have shared with you some important updates on the Football Advisor Portfolio and individual services.

1. Our spotlight look at FA Racing,

FA Racing has been in tremendous form in recent months, and we shared how members are increasing profits by up to 36% by doing one simple thing.

2. Yesterday was our full, mid-month, review of the Portfolio services.

Again it was full of useful insights into how the different portfolios have been performing. The FULL Portfolio is again on track for a profitable month in June, as it closes in on 200 units profit from the last 11 months. Well worth a read as well if you missed it.

Today we are sharing with you the third and last part of our mid month review as shift the spotlight to…THE LAB

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The Lab – a quick recap

As a quick reminder / overview – The Lab is a free offering for all FULL portfolio members. It includes, at any one time, 6-8 new betting strategies in live trials. They are models and strategies that we are in the final stages of testing of their validity and long term profitability. (You can read a more detailed guide to The Lab here)

In summery, anything in The Lab are strategies that we already have very high hopes for. We have been developing and testing these for a long time, and this final process is really about rubber stamping things and providing live proofing data.

The best bit though, is anything that survives The Lab is added to our Portfolios, for free, the next time we update our betting portfolio's with revised betting bank and staking data, which is usually once or twice a year.

In The Lab, you can currently find a Horse Racing Lay Model, three Horse Racing Win Models, an each-way double model for Horse Racing and a Football Doubles model.

Today we will take a closer look at how each of these are performing.

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The Lab – Performance Update

Firstly, you can see the full record of results for all of The Lab services here. If you want access to The Lab, you can register for FULL portfolio membership here (remember to use Coupon Code: FA3MTHFP)

– FA Racing Lays Model 3

So far we have recorded 351 lays with a profit return, after commission, of 52.81 units. We feel this is an impressive return considering the average lay odds have been a shade under 4/1 (5.00).

Perhaps even more impressive is the strike rate coming in at 79.9%. This model is showing huge promise and it won't be much longer before this is added to FA Racing Lays, providing 3 profitable lay models for members.

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– Head to Head

This is, perhaps, our most promising model out of all the ones in The Lab right now. From just 428 bets it has delivered an incredible 235 units profit to Betfair SP, at an ROI of 54.8%

On the 4th June, it landed a whopping 125/1 winner to Betfair SP.

To a degree, this result has obviously inflated the returns that we have seen so far. However, even if we remove that one selection from the results, we are still seeing a 25.6% ROI 109.66 units profit.

With average odds of 15.29 and a 21.5% strike, it is really showing a clear and valuable edge. We're looking forward to seeing how the results look once we have further increased the total number of bets

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– VDW Top Rated

This is a model we have developed, partly in conjunction with the famous Van Der Whiel ratings model. The results thus far have again been impressive with 49.75 units returned over 525 bets, with an ROI of 9.48%

Definitely another model to keep a close eye on in the coming weeks and months.

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– Daily Doubles

This is based on generating two sets of doubles which we can place into an each way double.

When we looked at this the last time in May, it was showing a slight loss betting these as singles but the each way doubles were showing a decent 10 unit profit since the beginning of April. However, in the last month, that has switched with the singles showing an 18.68 unit profit, while the e/w doubles are down 25 units.

This is one of the newer models so we are still building up sufficient data. So it's still a little early to make a call on the best route with this model and the sample size is relatively small – one or two doubles come in over the next couple of weeks and it will look entirely different.

There is one more angle here which we have not full explored yet, and that is looking at e/w treble and e/w four fold across the two sets. In Column T of the report, you'll see that this actually lands on a fairly regular basis. For next month we'll look to do the P&L calculations on this to see what it tells us.

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– Football Doubles

This is on hold over the summer but it showed some real early promise in the final months of last season, generating 25 units profit across the last 3 months from about 50 bets. As with the Daily Doubles above, it also shows potential for looking at trebles and four folds.

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– VDW High Odds

I've saved this one for last as I want to talk about this one in more detail. As with the VDW Top Rated model mentioned above, it focuses on the Van Der Wheil model, with the core focus on price and value. We use this model to identify value bets on horses with strong ratings that the market has perhaps ignored. It has an average of 7.66 early price and average Betfair SP of 9.77.

I knew from the beginning that this model would need refining as it can generate up to 20 selections per day. Publicly in The Lab we have simply published all possible selections based on the top level criteria. However, from the outset I have also been recording some secondary ratings which I use in other models, which I know are good win chance indicators to see if these would help us when it came to adding some additional criteria to refine the model and reduce the volume of selections – and I am really glad we did.

On the full model we have seen over 1,500 selections and it's currently sitting 80 units down. We've some real swings in profit and it regularly jumps from a negative return like we have now, to a positive return by a similar amount across just a few weeks.

Not very sustainable as a model in it's own right but what if we could add some filters to reduce the selections and get closer to just the winning selections.

If we apply the two criteria mentioned above to the results, it reduces our selections from 1,500+ to 292 selections. So we are going to need to run this for a while longer to have a big enough sample size of the filtered selections to ensure we are avoiding win bias.

(I should clarify here that we have not applied this criteria to back fit the results, we started this with the expectation that this criteria would improve results and our early hypothesis is proving to be correct so far)

Of those 292 selections, we have seen 50 winners (17.1% strike rate), which is good to see and means these returns are not being influenced by just one or two big wins. (Another 71 were placed)

Average BSP is 9.55 which is pretty much inline with the overall BSP that we have seen, which is another positive.

Profit-wise we are seeing 176.4 points profit from just 292 bets, which is quite incredible. If we can maintain that (or even half that ratio) we will be delighted but it does further reinforce, I believe, the need to run this model for a little while longer yet – we'd ideally have four times as many results before we really think about betting into these.

What I feel would be the best, logical, next step from here is that we now start segregate the selections as we post them in The Lab. In the first section we'll include the ‘filter' selections and then underneath we will include the ‘remaining qualifiers'. This way we are still providing all the ‘possibles' while retaining data integrity and coverage until we have a substantial enough amount of data to make more concrete observations.

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All in all, a very positive month in The Lab and we have a number of strategies showing real promise. We're very excited by, at least, a couple of these and we all can't wait until we have more data to share with you on each of them.

If you want to access and following along with The Lab, you can join our Full Portfolio here(Remember to use Coupon Code at the checkout:FA3MTHFP )

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This article was first published on the 17th June, 2018 for Football Advisor Portfolio members.