MAFL 2010 : Round 2 Results

If you didn't tip the round this weekend you've only yourself to blame. All eight winners were published in the online (and probably the print) version of Melbourne's Herald Sun late on Wednesday night as one of their forecaster's considered selections.

They were Jennifer Hawkins' tips.

It was that kind of round.

Investors are entitled to think themselves lucky that Collingwood snuck home against the Dees but equally aggrieved at the barnstorming finish from the Cats that prevented a Hawks payoff at $2.50, which would have been sufficient to drag the Heuristic Fund into profitability. In all, the weekend's two losses and one win meant that Investors with the Recommended Portfolio dropped 0.42% of Total Funds, leaving them down 0.48% on the season.

If Shadow records another loss in Round 3 it will surrender control of the Heuristic-Based Fund to some other algorithm (assuming that some other algorithm has a superior return at that point, which is not the case at present).

Here are the details of this round's wagers and results:

With only five favourites grabbing the points and six teams winning that were in a superior ladder position to their opponent, it was a good round for the simpler heuristic tipsters. These tipsters tended to follow Consult the Ladder this week and so bagged six from eight:

ELO went with the favourites in all eight games and so scored only five. Chi's only underdog tip was the Dees and, although vindicated, he wasn't rewarded for his bravery. As a result he scored only four for the week.

That leaves our tipping competition with nine equal leaders, all on 12 from 16, with ELO and BKB one tip back on 11 and then Chi back another two tips on nine. Home Sweet Home trails the pack on just 7 from 16.

The blowout wins of St Kilda and the Dogs, the surprise victories of Sydney and Port, and the narrower-than-expected loss of the Dees all combined to inflate the absolute prediction errors of the margin-tipsters this weekend.

HAMP did best, recording 34.0 points per game for the round, better even than BKB, which recorded 34.4. Next best were LAMP (37.5) and ELO (37.9), with Chi (39.6) responsible for the round's worst MAPE.

Cumulatively, that leaves the situation as shown here:

On mean APE then, BKB leads narrowly from HAMP, whereas on median APE, BKB is tied with Chi. At this point, HAMP leads LAMP on mean APE, while for median APE the situation is reversed. This is, as you might recognise, the opposite of what we'd ultimately expect since LAMP is meant to be low average and HAMP is meant to be low median. Still, it's only early days.

Let's finish again this week by reviewing the performance of HELP.

In short, it wasn't a weekend for the HELP family scrapbook. Just three correct line tips and considerably worse-than-naive probability scores on all three measures.