Posts Tagged open

I am really starting to like Golf as a trading medium.

I tend to carefully model sports before getting deeply involved with them. Doing that allows me to test the up and downside limits to a strategy and that in turn allows me to know what I need to do to be successful. I tend to hunt for the downside to any strategy as that allows me to frame it at which point it clearly defines the upside for me. This is why I often suggest that people trade at random. If your random losses are X and your strike rate Y then you immediately know what you need to do to profit. If you can’t get near that metric, you either need to start again or think of a new way into the market.

Golf is tricky to model. Players heading off at different times, playing on different difficulties of holes. But for anybody that has played golf, one characteristic stands out. One good shot can make a good round and one bad shot can ruin in. These characteristics can send players rocketing up or down the leader-board.

The practical upshot of this is that big outsiders can shorten quickly and short prices can lengthen quickly. This seems to throw up some really big priced winners. Last year in the Open Championship we had Cink, an 800 shot, battling Watson, a 1000 shot, in a play off. This year the unknown Oosthuizen romped home at 490!

If I would have let my bet on Oosthuizen stand I would have made a small fortune, but I just find it impossible not to approach every market without carefully planning out my approach. As a consequence there were others I backed and I also laid off some of the substantial potential on Oosthuizen. Being a relative rookie I did expect him to crumble a bit under the pressure, but Oosthuizen did a great job of playing percentage golf over the weekend and with such a gap to the other contenders it was the right thing to do. The others couldn’t have any impact without taking risk and than ultimately led to mistakes.

Overall, a good tournament. Just itching for the next one now!

Wel gedaan!