Archive for category Psychology
Performance anxiety – Why players lose form
Posted by Peter Webb in Football / Soccer, General, Psychology on February 19th, 2012
Lovely piece on psychology in the weekend FT. It examines why players of a sport often inexplicably lose their form. I’ve been studying this specifically in a few sports to come up with predictors of decline. My research was sparked by the collapse in form David Duval after he won the British Open golf and I started to dig around deeper and deeper for events that can lead to a decline. I’ve found it useful in Golf and Tennis which are individual sports but less useful in teams sports, where team dynamics and the ability to not play or substitute can diminish it’s potency.
It has been a really interesting area of research, but this sort of analysis gets little coverage or chat. I have also found it applies to people participating in the markets themselves. It’s curious how you can show two people a very clear strategy and yet while one person executes flawlessly, the other just can’t do it. But witnessing that allows me to understand why and suggest corrective action. Curiously, it still sometimes means that people still can’t do it. The reason, performance anxiety. I guess they wouldn’t make good Chelsea strikers!
Read the article here: -
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e7c80640-5788-11e1-869b-00144feabdc0.html
On average.. The essense of value
Posted by Peter Webb in Football / Soccer, Psychology, Trading strategies on February 6th, 2012
Let’s start by proposing something simple. If you back or lay something it’s impossible to be right 100% of the time. I think most people will realise that it’s impossible to win every bet you ever placed. Therefore you have to accept that you will place losing bets. If you place losing bets you need your winning bets to cover your losses, that’s the only way to make money in the long term.
To get your an overall profit you need your wins, on average, to exceed your losses. There is the key word, on average.
It’s so easy to look foolish when tipping something up but every tipster knows they can’t win all the time and the recipient of tips should be aware of that also. But if there is logic and method behind the tip then it’s not impossible for you to end up overall on a long sequence of bets or positions in the market. It’s just that you have look at it from a broad viewpoint and that is why I use the term ‘on average’ so often.
If you want a case in point just look at this weekend. Two matches ended 0-0 in the sample I took at the weekend. One had, on average, a good chance of ending 0-0. This was the match between Birmingham and Southampton, which was played in appalling conditions and neither team took many risks and played safe. In contrast you had Middlesbrough vs Crystal palace where shots were flying in left right and centre but somehow none went in. There was a goal line clearance, a terrible miss and a penalty that wasn’t given but turned into a free kick just outside the box.
The second match shouldn’t have ended up 0-0, but it did. However we can console overself that, on average, it wont. Certainly it wont end up 0-0 more often than the first match. But this is only something that will play out over time. As long as you stake with that in mind and expect that you can only work in the realm of ‘on average’ you will do fine. ‘On average’ is the essense of value.
How to win at rock, paper, scissors
Posted by Peter Webb in Psychology on January 25th, 2012
I posted this on the forum some time ago.
It’s actually a good analogy for the sort of though process you need to go through when trying to out-think others and one that I think is equally applicable in any market. Sometimes people don’t choose the most logical progression in a sequence of events. Even then is seems that people peoples decisions are often forced by an ‘invisible hand’. Anyhow, an interesting article I think: -
http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/win-rock-paper-scissors-215511514.html
