MAFL 2010 : Round 9 Results

For the third week in succession, those with the Recommended Portfolio were let down by the Saints' performance in the last game of the round. In Rounds 7 and 8 it was the Saints' ineptitude that caused the disappointment; in Round 9 that ineptitude was nowhere to be seen when Investors most needed it.

Not that the weekend's losses can be entirely attributed to the Saints' victory on Sunday evening. Collingwood, the Roos, Sydney and Carlton all did their bits too, offset only - and not completely - by Essendon, Melbourne and Adelaide victories.

This week I'm trialling a new way of presenting the various pieces of information about wagers, tips, team ratings and margin prediction. I call it the MAFL Dashboard.

In the first part of the MAFL Wagering section you can see that only one of the six Funds is currently priced above its buy-in price of $1, and you see that three Funds made money this round (Prudence, Shadow and Heuristic-Based) and the other three Funds lost money. You can also see each Fund's season long performance statistics and price history.

Below this you'll find the same information for the various portfolios. You'll see that the Recommended Portfolio dropped 1.3c this week, the MIN#002 Portfolio rose by 1.9c, and the MIN#017 Portfolio dropped 2.6c. This leaves all portfolios in varying states of unprofitability.

Next is the MAFL Tipping section, which holds all the regular information about the performance of the 13 MAFL tipsters. Short-Term Memory I and Easily Impressed I currently head our tipping competition on 52 from 72 (72%). BKB continues to struggle, scoring just four this week (the Tipping Performance - Last 5 Rounds section has this information), leaving it now six tips behind the leaders.

The column headed Return (Home) records the profit or loss that would have accrued to someone level-stake betting on the tips of the relevant tipster whenever that tipster predicted a home team victory. So far this season, following that strategy with the predictions emanating from Short-Term Memory I would have been the most lucrative, yielding a profit of 9.63 units. Adopting the same strategy with Shadow, as the Recommended Portfolio has been via Shadow's own Fund and via its control of the Heuristic Fund, has yielded a profit of 6.18 units. Incidentally, Shadow made money this weekend and so will retain control of the Heuristic Fund for at least another three rounds.

In the right-hand portion of this section there is information about the recent tipping form of each tipster, as evidenced by its accuracy in each of the last five rounds. The two tipsters currently leading the overall tipping competition also have the (equal) best performances of all tipsters across rounds 4 to 9. In these five rounds they've tipped 28 winners.

Underneath the MAFL Tipping section is the MARS Ratings section. This week, seven teams moved up or down the MARS Ratings ladder. Largest amongst these moves was the two-rung climb recorded by the Hawks based on their 60-point victory over the Blues, which earned them 5.6 ratings points. Currently, the seven highest-ranted teams are also the top seven from the competition ladder, albeit in a different order. The eighth-highest rated team is Brisbane, who sit eleventh on the competition table. Port are eighth on the ladder, but are rated twelfth.

In the chart on the right of this section you track the ratings trajectories of each team.

The final section is the Margin Predictors section and it records the performance of the five MAFL Margin Predictors. BKB still has the season's best margin predictions, whether you rank based on Mean Absolute Prediction Error or on Median Absolute Prediction Error. LAMP is now second on Mean APE while ELO is second on Median APE. The chart on the right shows each Margin Predictor's Mean APE as at the end of every round of the season.

I've not included HELP's data in the dashboard since its unspectacular performance seems unworthy of considered attention.

This week HELP correctly predicted 5 of the 8 line results and moved to a 50% win-loss record for the season. Its very high levels of confidence in all of its predictions meant that its probability scores ended up sub-naive for the second successive week.

In the next day or so I'll be posting another blog in which I'll introduce one more dashboard, this one providing information about team performances.