Portfolio management & fantasy football

They are much the same things in my book: Select the best players from the available op set = best investments from available op set Look at the upcoming fixture lists = market outlook & asset allocation Make transfers bearing in mind available cash, repricing of players & availabe number of transfers = cash inflows/outflows and liquidity of underlying investments Combine players according to player limits from one team = portfolio construction, correlations And so on. Simple. If you are good at fantasy football, you should be good at portfolio management - same mindset. It is obviously Friday today…

Except that in fantasy football no more than one team can own a particular asset. But in general I agree.

Muddahudda Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > > And so on. Simple. If you are good at fantasy > football, you should be good at portfolio > management - same mindset. I’m with you I guess, even though I personally hate fantasy football, but I don’t think you can say being good at one should make you good at the other simply based on several broad characteristics. I mean, I personally think eastern religions and meditation have a strong overlap with long distance running, and that most distance runners would probably fit in well with the eastern philosophies, but being good at meditating doesn’t mean you’ll be good at running ultras. I guess my issue is that fantasy football is a much more watered down skill set versus real alpha creating portfolio management so I think the relationship may be more one way. PM’s would be probabilistically good at FF, but not necessarily the converse.

I also agree. I have been doing fantasy football for many years and have consistently made the playoffs in my league. I think the key is to evaluate the players by the points they will generate based on postion, and stats (yards per game, touchdowns, etc). This is especially true when evaluating trades. You can’t look at the players, you have to look at the points the players generate and then compare that to the production you are already getting at that position to see if it makes sense to make the trade. I think it is definitely correlated to the same principles in investing.

How do people feel about comparisons to gambling?

I would relate it to poker. There is definitely a gambling element but when you learn how to rank players and find value you take a lot of the gambling aspect out of it. Over a long period of time you will out perform. I think the same can be said of investing. Investments are a gamble, but if you do the research and understand the environment you can minimize your risk.

LPoulin133 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > How do people feel about comparisons to gambling? Not a perfect, but still an excellent comparison - especially because of some of the psychological factors that start to come into play with both gambling and investing (loss aversion and random reinforcement both jump to mind). I think investing and any resource-allocation type games tend to attract a lot of the same types of people. Any system or game (in the ‘game theory’ sense of the word ‘game’) has a given set of constraints, a given set of resources, and a given set of options for deploying those resources. For me, I’ve always been super interested in trying to figure out how to maximize expectation in any given game. In this vein…I present “Games that have always fascinated me”: -Monopoly -Risk -Settlers of Catan (if you haven’t played this and are a board game geek, I recommend it) -Texas Hold 'em (and really any partial information type of card game, such as poker, that involves betting) -more computer games than I can possibly list, but among others the SimCity series and other “you have X resources to try and build towards a certain objective. You have Y variables you can adjust in terms of how you deploy those resources…” -And, of course, investing. I’d say that investing interests me the most…but I’ve killed a man over Monopoly. Don’t try to act like y’all don’t know Free Parking is anything other than a widely accepted house rule.

i really think so, but in a different way: you’re making custom portfolios week-to-week per match-ups. also, to stay alive you really need to keep an eye on the wire not only to add future value, but to drop weight before it blows you up. trading is another skill, but isn’t really necessary.

SMW Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I would relate it to poker. This is the most common comparison, and a fair one in my view. I’m of the belief that investing/markets are pretty much exactly the same thing as gambling/casino. With that said, I also don’t think that necessitates a pejorative connotation. Though, from a sales perspective, it’s easier if that’s not the view.

I think that the same people who believe in technical analysis are the same ones that think that having bad players at the table mess up the deck in blackjack.

How would you short a player in the fantasy League?

gamblingeconomist Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I think that the same people who believe in > technical analysis are the same ones that think > that having bad players at the table mess up the > deck in blackjack. LOL, agreed

gamblingeconomist Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I think that the same people who believe in > technical analysis are the same ones that think > that having bad players at the table mess up the > deck in blackjack. I think the people who don’t believe in TA are the same people who think that counting cards is magic.

I think the people who don’t believe in magic have never listened to “The Lovin’ Spoonful.”

Iginla2010 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > How would you short a player in the fantasy > League? Trade him to a team you’re going to play against. An example would be dealing Randy Moss to another team competing for the championship. I was one game away from 4th consecutive championship in my work league this year… Adrian Peterson killed me when he b!tched out in that game vs Chicago.

FF Ball is all about managing scarcity of player assets. This is why good RB’s should always be picked ahead WR’s. There are only a handful of solid RB’s in the league and most fantasy teams will start 2-3 per week (about 25 total starting RBs in 10 team league). WR’s can score almost as many points, but they are MUCH more volatile… Top WRs will ALWAYS emerge over the course of the year and can be picked up on the waiver wire (managing wire picks is also very important). For RB’s, even the potential backs who MIGHT have value (Donald Brown, etc) usually get picked up late in the draft. In general, there are just more valuable WRs in the league than there are RBs so WRs are not a scarce commodity. Same goes for QB’s. If you can’t get a top 5 QB, just wait until a later pick and they supplement with the waiver wire if necessary. There’s not a whole lot of points separating the #6 and #13 QB in the league (especially when you can play the matchups w/ weaker QB’s).