An Inside Look At One Of My Models

 The one thing I've never really talked about with regards to my sports betting journey is the nuts and bolts of my models, for pretty obvious reasons. I've always treated them like state secrets and it seems like just about every other sports bettor I know who models is the same way. I've been in a couple different big betting groups in one way or another, and that is one topic that is just off limits. I remember one time during a night out at Foxwoods I asked someone in my group a very basic question about what kind of data they use and it was like the most serious I've ever seen the guy in over a decade. He said something like "I can't tell you a single thing about it, ever" and that was the last time it was ever brought up. And it's understandable, of course. A good model that beats major markets can be worth millions of dollars, if not more. So obviously you'd want to keep it a secret as much as possible.

But I've been thinking, as my career in sports betting is mostly behind me (the modeling aspect at least), I don't really have anything to lose by sharing it. And it isn't super advanced whatsoever and everything in it can be found online. Oh, and by the way, the model I'll be sharing hasn't even won in like a full years worth of sample. I still refuse to believe that it's unprofitable. Just with the amount of time and work I've put into it and how soft these lines generally are, I simply refuse to believe it's a loser. But the numbers don't lie and I don't trust it enough to use it anymore. So I don't think anyone can just take this and start making money. However, there is always something to learn when you read about other people modeling. I've learned that everyone approaches modeling quite differently. They might use the same general stats and end up at the same place, but there are countless ways to model sports. 

I've always been more of the granular sort. I like cutting edge stats, I want the most recent data and I try to stay up to date on any and all lineup/injury changes (TRY being the operative word there). I'm looking for increases or decreases in velocity in a pithcers last start. A hockey player running bad with getting his shots blocked or a reciever suddenly getting a higher percentages of throws. Others take a more 'thousand feet up' approach. I remember reading "Trading Bases" by Joe Peta which was a super interesting book and a great look into his model. He was a stock guy who got hit by a car and had to spend a year or something in bed. And so he took up trying to beat baseball. He made this model that graded every team in terms of expected winning percentage just based on their runs scored and runs given up, and would place bets all season accordingly. He just updated the model as games ended. (At least this is what I remember of it. There may have been more to it but the general idea is right). He didn't know who was the starting pitcher, who was out that day, etc. And he crushed it. I just finished reading Billy Walters new book (which is great by the way and I'll talk about it more later) and he somewhat goes into his models. I'll probably make a seperate post about it and a couple other books I've read recently, but he makes power ratings for every team and bets when he has an edge over the posted line. He actually has a power rating for every PLAYER. His edge seems to come from superior info. He said something like "everyone knows who's injured, but not everyone knows HOW injured they are".

I started modeling props after reading "Attacking Las Vegas" by Justin7. He gives some really simple and easy examples for modeling NFL player props and I just took the logic from them and applied it to different things. He also taught me about the Poisson distribution in that book which is like a literal cheat code for pricing props. I first started with pen and paper and all I did really was normalize their number for the opponent. So for example, if a QB averaged 200 yards per game, I would just take 200, divide by the league average yards given up by defenses, then multiply that by what the opponent gives up. And I basically made a living doing that for a few years. Obviously it was more due to the lines being super soft, but that really is all it took for a while. Like I said before, once DFS came onto the scene, the prop party dried up, for me at least. It coincided with me getting married and more into my real job so it all worked out. 

Once I learned excel, that was like a whole different ballgame. It really is amazing the stuff you can do in excel. I made models for props in all four major sports and have multiple models for a few different sports. The one I'll be talking about today is the one I made for MLB starting pitcher strikeouts.

When I first started betting this prop, it really was as easy as taking the pitchers average K's per start, normalizing for the opponent and betting when it was way off (you can use poisson for this, kind of, but I usually wouldn't bet anything that wasn't obviously off). But as thing progressed and I moved everything into excel, I began thinking about it differently and slowly developed what I think was a pretty neat little model that won me plenty of money for years until it basically became obsolete a couple years ago.

Whenever I start with a model, I always try to think of it like an alien would. Like someone who's never seen or heard of the sport before. What is it that I'm trying to do here; come up with an expected number of strikeouts for a starting pitcher. Ok, what is a strikeout, exactly. What are the events that lead up to that. What stats do I know I need. Number one, the pitchers expected K rate. Aka, the percentage chance that each at bat ends in a strikeout. I need to know for how long the pitcher is going to stay in the game. Do I use balls thrown? Innings pitched? I need to know the K rate of the opponent and the K rate of the average team. 

The biggest part of this model, the most 'artsy' I would say, is coming up with the expected K%. My first instinct would be to simply use the pitchers career or current season K% (or some combo), and that's probably ok. But I did a ton of reading about baseball analytics back then and I found out that the best predictor of strikeouts wasn't actually past strikeouts, but swinging strike percentage, which is the percent of pitches that end in the batter swinging and missing. The general logic is that getting a swing and miss is the best possible outcome for a single pitch, and the best 'message' that the hitter is overmatched. More swinging strikes=more strikeouts. 

Another good predictor of strikeouts is raw Contact %. I also found the best fit for Contact% to K% and would use a mix of those two to come up with K%. If I had the time, I'd also look at his last few starts and at pitch usage and velocity. Velocity is huge and also a really good predictor of an injury.

At a certain point, raw K% is better to use than SWS% and Contact%, but early in the season and with new pitchers, SWS% can be deadly. You'll see all kind of pitchers who are either running good or running bad with it early and it's a great stat to use. (Interesting aside: there are a few pitchers who seemed to be able to outperform their SWS% for their entire career. Aaron Nola was one of them. I always used to try to see him pitch to see what it was exactly that he was doing different but I never really could find it. It was somewhat surprising how useless called strikes were for predicting strikeouts.)

Anyway, I would get the pitchers SWS% and Contact%, but then you have to turn that into K%. I read a bunch of fangraphs articles back then, and one of them gave the average number for SWS% into K%. I'm not going to give it here but you can find it pretty easily if you wanted to. I also kept a list in excel, every time I priced a pitcher I would put in his SWS% and K% for his past 4 years and keep the list going all the time so I had my own updated number. It was always very close to the fangraphs number anyway. I did the same for Contact% (which isn't as important as SWS%).

This was the part of the model that I was always tinkering with. Some pitchers would be way out or underperforming their expected K% all year, and you'd start to wonder if it was luck or a skill. That relationship between SWS% and K% and to a lesser extent Contact% and K% was an elusive one and I don't think I ever really quite nailed it down.

But anyway, now that I had the pitchers expected K%, the rest was pretty easy, honestly. First, you need the expected K% for the average opponent. I had four separate numbers; AL vs R, AL vs L, NL vs R, and NL vs L. I would update these numbers every week at least. Then you take the opponent K% (side note: you can drill down into anything as far as you want. For example, for a while I was taking the days posted lineup and using their K% instead of taking a team stat. My thinking was this would be more accurate, obviously. But everything you do takes time. And I've always lived by Justin7's credo: do lots of props quickly. So I eventually stopped doing this). 

You normalize the pitchers K% with the opponent, and now you have the true expected K% for that pitcher for that day. (Again, we're obviously approximating here and I'm sure a true 'data scientist' would find some glaring errors in the way I do things. But they were good enough to win for a while, and again, you can spend more time and get more accurate on any number there is.) Now that you have the K%, you need to get a number for how long he's going to be in the game. Or, more accurately, how many batters he's going to face. (This was a slight mis-step for me at first. I kept trying to come up with a number for innings pitched and then even percentage of game pitched for a reason I can't explain now. Batters faced is very clearly the number you're looking for). For this, I just took the median number that he had faced that season with a mix of total batters faced per start. This had a little bit of a fudge factor to it as I would consider the opponent and his last few starts and then just adjust it manually which probably isn't great. 

So now you have the SP expected K% and the total batters he's expected to face. You multiply those and you have expected strikeouts. I did an ump adjustment as well later on.

Now you just compare your number with the books number. I'm actually not sure if you can use poisson for this. The conditions for poisson are that the event has to be very rare and not have the rate change over time, which isn't really true for this. But I usually didn't need to use poisson. I'd get something like 5.323 and see 6.5 even on the under. You don't need poisson to know that's a bet.

Like I said before, this model, in all its iterations, did very well for lots of years. I guess it's similar to the rest of my models, it's certainly nothing ground breaking but I like to think it has a certain elegant simplicity. There are other things I've tinkered with on it; tried to factor in called strikes more, I tried to copy and paste an equation I got from baseball reference. Which, by the way, never works. I once tried out a 'model' that was straight from fangraphs for expected home runs. It was showing big edges but it never worked. And some guy from football outsiders tried to go tout a while ago and did terrible and was a big baby about it. For some reason, the stat guys don't always translate directly to the betting world even though everyone uses their numbers to make bets. It really is a different skill set.

Anyways, that's it for today. I have some things to talk about it so check back soon.

What Buying Picks From An Actual Winning Service Looks Like And More On NFL/Teasers

My last post was heavy on NFL teasers and my process for finding them. I think I covered it pretty extensively and I really can't stand when people post their picks and results AFTER the game has already happened. So we won't be doing that here. My results for the bets in my last post were decent but nothing special. Going into yesterday I had a ton of teasers that I started to make a post about but eventually bailed on. I just don't think it's all that interesting and there isn't a ton to learn from. The basic rules are always the same: never pay more than -110 for 6 point 2 teamers, always capture the 7 and the 3, and don't do them for college football. That is one thing I forgot. These only work for the NFL due to the fact that college kickers miss the extra point and teams do other goofy shit too often to make the 7 and 3 as valuable as they are in the NFL. Honestly, that's kind of it with teasers. They're a simple, automatic plug and play bet that have been profitable year after year. It always confused me as to why more people don't play these. I guess if you bet on the NFL and aren't at least dabbling in these, I don't know what else to say. If you are, then there isn't much more I can tell you that I haven't already. Look for rouge +1.5's and -8.5's when the market has them as a point or half point worse and, again, never pay more than -110. 

I had a very good teaser week this week and have a ton of NYG +7.5 going into tonight. So I'll hedge with some Sea -7.5 +237 as well as some Sea -1.5 -110, Sea -6.5 +175. Blah blah blah. We've been down this road. The reason for this post today is to discuss another topic I'm pretty knowledgable about on: buying picks. If I could convey just ONE overall message to my sports betting friends on here it would be this: do NOT pay for picks. Paying for picks is probably the single worst mistake you can make while betting. I truly do not understand the impulse for it either, but it is pervasive. Squares LOVE buying picks! I had a conversation once with someone online who genuinely thought that the only way to win was to buy picks and it was all about finding and riding the right guys. I cannot overstate this enough: paying for picks is the quickest possible way to lose money at sports. No one who wins sells picks and no one who sells picks wins. With ONE exception that we'll get into now.

I've talked about them before on here a few times, but there is one tout that is undeniably a winning service and has been for as long as I can remember, at least 15 years. They're called Right Angle Sports, or RAS for short. Back when I was doing this full time, I did my due diligence into them and found out that they were for sure legit. They track their plays against the closing line and only release widely available lines (a nasty little trick the 'smarter' touts try to pull. They release a play at a number that doesn't even exist. For example, say the market has Team X -7 -110 and it gets bet up to -7.5 -110 everywhere. The tout will release the play at -7 -110. Effectively going back in time. Everyone could beat sports betting with a time machine, even if it only goes back 5 minutes).

Anyway, I deduced that RAS was in fact a winning service and everything about them was very different from any other tout I've come across. The only mark against RAS was that their plays are almost impossible to get down on because the market moves so fast once they release something. There was also some rumors about them front running their clients, aka give out their plays to certain people a couple seconds before the official release. But even their harshest critics had to admit that they were legit, long-term winners.

Sometime around 2014, I bought a half season of WNBA plays from them for something like $1200. They're marketed towards professionals as you need to be betting at least $1k a play to make the price worth it. My experience dealing with them for that WNBA half season was unremarkable. I think I won enough to show a profit even after the $1200, but I really did it as more of a fact finding mission above all else. This was a long time ago when they were still figuring out the best way to release their plays so that everyone got a chance to get it before the market moved. I remember almost always getting a half point or 5 cents of juice worse than their official release, only because the market would move so fast and so much. If they can push an NFL side around, imagine what they can do to a WNBA total. One interesting little nugget I found out doing this though was that they were for sure front running at least a little bit. Back then they did something like a countdown to the official release. And I remember sitting there waiting for the release and after a while I noticed that two books moved on what was their official plays a good 10 seconds or so before the release. Always the same books, (I can't remember which books they were but it was something like bet365. Not one of the big guys but not a Bodog or SIA either) always the same exact time and they always were the RAS plays. So someone was definitely getting the plays before the official release, most likely someone working at the books if I had to guess. Once I figured that out though, it was easier to get down on their plays. 

I never re-upped with them as I found it too much of a headache to be worth it. I also wasn't really betting big enough to justify the high cost of the service and max betting the WNBA will get you noticed and kicked out pretty quick. However, I still always get their emails and stay on top of what they're up to from a distance. Two weeks ago I got an email saying they were giving out a free NFL play (something they do a few times a year to get more customers) and I decided to check it out. This is how it went for, again, a FREE play.

They send out an alert about an hour beforehand, saying they will be giving out a free NFL play at 11:00 AM EST. Once 11:00 comes, you click on a youtube click and it's a live video of a guy in front of his computer. They give out what they call 'a set up' which is an unofficial play. You are supposed to get the play all ready to go on your end so that all you need to do is hit confirm to put the bet in. Then they wait 30 seconds or so and then say either GO or STOP. Oftentimes, they'll give out fake plays (or a couple of fake plays in a row) for the 'set up' and then say STOP and you don't bet it. This is to stop people from betting too early and moving the market. For my example, the play the released was under 19.5 in a first half NFL game which was very much widely available. They had it as a set up for probably 30 seconds and finally said GO on the video and BAM. The market moved INSTANTLY and closed way under 19.5 (and won by a good margin, too. It was a Green Bay game either week 1 or 2. I could find out if anyone is interested).

Now remember, this was a FREE play on an NFL game, no less. The sport with the biggest, most efficient market there is. I say all this to show you how valuable a winning services' plays are, how hard they are to get down on and how much effort goes into just simply the release. A huge chunk of RAS's whole thing is the method of releasing plays, something they've tinkered with for at least a decade. If the service you use won, it would be respected by the market and their releases would look something like this. All the touts I've ever seen besides RAS do absolutely nothing like this with their releases. I've seen touts release plays with no odds!! And people who have been betting for decades following it! It SHOULD be hard to get down on the number that a winning service gets out. If it's not, that means the market doesn't respect them. And if the market doesn't respect them, they're not a winner. It really is that simple.

Anyways, that's about it for this topic. I've harped on it multiple times. Looking forward, there are a few good looking teasers for this up coming week. NYG tonight is decent but I see some action coming in on SEA, pushing it from -1.5 to -2.5 (I wonder if sharps hedging their NYG teasers had any effect on the line move?) Right now Pinnacle has the Ten/Ind game lined at Ind -1 -117 which looks like a classic 'teaser defense line'. Look to see if your book has Ind +1.5 and maybe get in light on them with a teaser. Same thing with Hou/Atl, which is currently Atl -1 -110. Again, look for Hou +1.5 to tease. New Orleans is a flat +1.5 everywhere, same with the Jets. Pinnacle is putting up two MORE 'teaser defense' lines too with Car/Det and GB/LV. Pinny has Det at -10 +107 right now which is exactly what I was talking about with looking ahead for rouge teaserable lines. If you can find Det at -8.5, that's a great leg to start building up a position. Same with LV. Right now Pinnacle is at GB -1 -123 instead of putting up a flat 2.5. Lots of books have LV at +2 or +2.5 right now and that's a great one to include. Its the Monday night game too so you can put that in a lot of different small teasers and hedge with GB come Monday night if they're still alive.

Check back soon, I'll have a crypto and stocks post coming and I'll try to do more frequent, smaller posts like this during the NFL season. Bye for now!

NFL Betting Primer, A Look At My Process And Bets For Week 2 And Crypto Update

Well hello again. Another long time in between posts. The main reason being I actually had my first child a month ago. So I'm officially a Dad which is pretty sweet. The other reason being that I have an idea for a post that would be fairly shocking. It has absolutely nothing to do with sports or investing and would be pretty out there. I'm not sure if I want to post it or not, honestly. A few too many 'in real life' people know about this blog but we'll see.

Before I get into what I want to talk about today, I have some other good news. BlockFi released client Wallet funds! If you've been following along with me, you know that I got caught up in the BlockFi debacle and had pretty close to half my entire crypto holdings on there. Finally, after over a year, they let people withdraw funds from their Wallet accounts. They say it'll take a while, up to 3 months, and I haven't actually received the funds into my own wallet yet so we are not 100% in the clear here yet. But assuming it all goes through, this is of course terrific news for me, everyone who had a BlockFi account and for the crypto industry in general. I'll have a complete crypto update soon, but it puts my average BTC price from $48k all the way down to $22k, which is awesome. ETH goes from $5k to $1600 and LINK goes from $10 to $8. I still have some tied up in my Interest Account on there but luckily not too much. It looks like we'll be getting some of that back too. I'm hearing 50%. Again, I'll have a complete update on all my positions soon, but this is a very nice development. (By the way, if the BlockFi thing didn't happen, my average BTC price would be about $18k. I started buying in 2021 when the price was close to $40k. So that is pretty damn good and it shows I definitely have skill in this as a trader. That's almost 3 full years of sample size, too.) But like I said, check back soon and I'll have a much more complete update on everything crypto.

Let us get into the reason for the season though. NFL has begun! A happy time in all sports bettors lives. I'm going to show my bets for this upcoming week so far as well as my thought process. If you're here for crypto stuff, this probably won't bet your favorite post and you might want to check out the next one. However, if you're here for that sweet sports betting content, buddy, buckle in, because we are going for a ride.

For the past few years, my prop action has pretty much shriveled up. I've gone into why but basically I finally ran out of super soft places to bet at, plus I don't have the time or will that it takes to dedicate to it if you want to beat props full time. But what I have been doing for NFL is playing Wong teasers and picking off off-market lines (plus team totals but I don't usually do those until right before game time so I doubt I'll show them here).

The general rule of thumb with Wong teasers is that you want to be betting into an efficient market, so the standard advice is to put them in as close to game time as possible. However, I like to start putting them in early in the week but being VERY selective and using a little bit of handicapping. Plus, having access to a multitude of accounts is huge too. So here's a look at what I have going on this week, why I bet the ones I did and what to look for when you're doing these.

Real quick refresher on Wong teasers: Wong teasers are teasers where you 'capture' enough winning probability that you make them profitable. The big thing here is to move through key numbers, aka the 3 and 7. You want to tease favorites of -7.5 to -8.5 down to -1.5 and -2.5. You go through, or 'capture' the 7 and 3. You can do the same thing with underdogs of +1.5 to +2.5, teasing them up to 7.5, 8 or 8.5. There's endless information out there about these and I did a pretty in depth look at them in a post a while ago. They're a simple, plug and play bet you can make that has been profitable every year since they came around and it always shocks me that more people don't play these. I know people that have been betting on the NFL for more than two decades that have never heard of them. In the digital age, I honestly don't even know how that's even possible, but a lot of things about a lot of sports bettors shock me.

So what I like to do is only play Wongs when they're absolutely perfect. I look at early lines and try to find a rouge line that falls into Wong range. For instance, a game that the market has as a PK or -1, I'll look for someone that has -1.5 and pounce hard on the underdog. Same for favorites. You'll often see games that are lined at 9 or even 9.5 and I'll look for rouge lines or quick line movements that will have the favorite dip to -8.5. When that happens you can snipe the favorite and tease it down to -2.5 so that you capture the 3. Getting that whole 3 is important. You can't tease a -9 favorite to -3. Since so many games are won by exactly 3 points, you have to capture the whole 3.

That's exactly what I did this week. There are actually quite a few of these examples this week so this is a perfect time to delve into them. The first game I attacked was Ind/Hou. This game opened as roughly a PK (pick em which means no spread, aka the teams are evenly matched). I love games like this because if you play them well enough, sometimes you can actually get both sides. I saw everywhere had either a heavy PK or Ind -1 with -115ish juice (a lot of sharper books will do this. They make a game something like -1 -130 instead of an even 2 or 2.5 for this exact reason. Think of it as 'teaser defense'). One of my accounts had Ind -1.5 so I fired a bunch of Hou teasers from +1.5 to +7.5. As the week went on, money came in on Hou so the line drifted through the 0 went all the way to Hou -1.5, -2 in some places. This is what I like to call the Holy Grail of Wongs. I bet more than I wanted to have at risk on the Hou teasers, knowing I would middle/arb it out later. But now with Ind being Wongable, I was able to put in a bunch of Ind +7.5 teasers. So now I have a great position of having both teams getting 7.5 points. If the game is decided by less than a touchdown, I win both legs. I can't possibly lose both and have a really good chance of winning both. So this matchup worked out great, no matter what ends up happening.

The other matchup that was similar was GB/Atl. This opened mostly with GB -1 and one of my accounts had GB -1.5. So I did the same, fired a bunch of Atl +7.5 teasers, knowing I could arb out with GB bets later on. Well as luck would have it, the line moved towards Atl and I was able to get in on GB +1.5 teased to +7.5. Just like the Ind/Hou matchup, I have both Atl and GB getting 7.5 points. Can't possibly lose both bets and have a good chance of winning both.

I did the same thing with the LV/Buf matchup. That's been at 9 for most of the week but I was able to find Buf at -8.5 at a couple places. So I teased Buf down to -2.5. (This has mostly settled at -8, which is fine. As long as it doesn't cross the 7 I'm in good shape).

But if you're following along here you might have a question. What do you tease them with? Well good question. I've refined my approach to this a little bit over the years. Now I very rarely tease two teams that are playing at the same time. The reason being is that it's hard to hedge teasers like this. So I like to tease 1:00 games with 4:00 or later games. That way I know before the 4:00 games start which legs are still alive which ones aren't. It just so happened that there is a perfect game in the afternoon slate that was great to pair these up with. NYJ/Dal has been at an even 9 and even 9.5 all week. I was able to find Dal -8.5 at a couple of my books and that was perfect to tease down to -2.5. So my plan is that going into the 4:00 slate, if my 1:00 teasers are still live, I can hedge the Dallas bets and either go for the big middle and bet NYJ +9/9.5 (maybe even buy through the 10 and get +10.5), or lock up some money and go with the heart-attack arb by betting Jets ML (if Dallas wins by 1 or 2 I lose everything which has happened to me before. I usually do a little of both).

The other Wongable legs that I have involved are SF teased from -8 to -2 (this one actually went a little bit away from me, as SF went from -8.5 to -7ish). I have some on the Pats too, teasing from +2.5 to +8.5. This one went away from me a little bit too, as it is now mostly Pats +3. I have some on Pit too, going from +2.5 to +8.5.

The only other teasers I sometimes do that aren't true Wongs are sometimes I'll tease teams from -3 to +3.5. I look for games that are lined at +-3.5 and look for a book that puts up a heavy 3 instead of 3.5. Sometimes books will put up something like -3 -130 instead of -3.5 -105. I'm already getting a free half point right there, and I do a 6 point teaser and then buy half a point. So I get what should be a 3.5 favorite and get them at +3.5. Honestly I'm not even sure these are profitable as you're buying a lot of useless points (two 2's, the zero and two 1's. But you do get both 3's so it's at least close.) I do them rarely, only if it's perfect. For example, this week I teased Cinci from -3 to +3.5 and KC from -3 to +3.5. Neither for big money at all and usually I only do these if I have a really good leg already that I need to pair with and there aren't any other Wongable games. Also sometimes books have limits on how much can be teased on one team, regardless of bet size. That's one way to kind of get around that.

It's very important to get creative when hedging/middling these. Look at all options, including alt spreads. A little hack I've found that I don't mind burying in here for you if you've read this far: look at alternate spreads on games that have had a lot of movement on the main spread. Sometimes books forget to adjust these lines after they move the main line. (First half alt spreads are juicy too sometimes).

One thing to mention here I've said before but is very important; you have to be getting these two team, 6 point teasers at -110 or better. Anything worse than that is a non-starter. 3 teamers at +180 or better is actually better than two teamers at -110, but those are hard to find these days.

One other fun little teaser nugget. There was a pretty famous/infamous sports book back in the day called 5dimes. I think they're still around actually but for a while they were pretty notorious. They had a WHACKY owner, this guy called '5 dimes Tony'. He was famous for actually getting into the chats himself and losing it on sharps lol. I actually had a conversation with him before when they kicked me out that I remember him just being unhinged. Like, typing in all caps and swearing a bunch. They were known as a square book that tried to act like a sharp book and even had dual line sets, one for sharps and one for squares, which is super illegal at places where betting is legal. But they were messy. They used to misgrade prop bets all the time. They had really soft props though and would let you buy and sell tons of points and all kinds of unique offerings that you could take advantage of if you knew what you were doing. They were quick to ban though and that's sort of how this guy Tony got a reputation. Fun fact and I swear I'm not making this up; 5dimes Tony was fucking decapitated. And I don't mean in some sort of 'he lost a lot of money' way. I mean, they found this guys HEADLESS body in the trunk of a car in Costa Rica. Yea. You can read about it here. Pretty insane stuff. Anyway, the reason I bring it up is that 5dimes used to do this pretty clever thing where they would put up lines that would actually trick people INTO playing wongs. What they would do is take an NFL game that has a market line of say -6 -110, +6 -110. 5Dimes would instead make it something like +7.5 -170, -7.5 +150. To a noob, this LOOKS like a Wongable teaser. After all, it's a favorite of 7.5 which falls into Wong territory. However, all you're really doing is paying for points that don't exist. You're paying to cross the 7 on a team that is really a 6 point favorite. I used to think that was pretty clever and kind of funny, actually. Very on brand for them. That and the fact that Pinnacle will often line games at -1 -130 instead of -2, or -9 +110 instead of -7.5 in an effort to thwart Wong teasers shows that these bets are profitable. When the biggest guys on the block are reacting to them, you know there's something there.

Anyway, that's what I have going on this week. I'll put in some team totals on Sunday and refine my positions so that I can't get hurt too badly no matter what. I used to always go for big middles instead of taking the free money but I've changed my stance on that. I have set up so many juicy middles that just did not hit, week after week, year after year, that now I mostly just take the free arb money and move on. So say I'm heavy on Team X +7.5 in the last leg of a teaser. I used to always bet the opponent at -1.5 and try to hit the middle but I had so many gut wrenching games that didn't hit that usually now I'll just bet the opponent at -7.5 at something like +220 odds and lock up money on either side. Having access to Pinnacle's lines is a must for doing this.

That's it for now, just a quick little NFL post. I will have more to come soon, probably Sunday if I add more and/or Monday where I'll wrap up how these went. Thanks for reading and don't forget about my twitter account to follow for new posts. @poogsBLOG

Bye for now!

Twitter account for updates

Hello. Just a quick update to say that I have an official Twitter account that will serve as a way to update you guys on new posts and maybe some more stuff as we grow. I'm working on a new post now which should be out in the next couple of days.

So if you're interested, please follow me here:  @poogsBLOG 

My name there is SBwithPOOGS but I'll probably change that. I'm doing a little bit of a "re-brand" here as the sports betting stuff will probably be a little less and it will be more crypto and stocks/investing. But of course sports betting will always have a piece of my heart so I'll never fully abandon it. Actually the post I'm working on now has some sports stuff in it.

So give that twitter account a follow if you will. Even if you don't have twitter, you can still just go to twitter.com and check it out. Anytime I have a new post I will send out a tweet. This is in lieu of the email list.

Thank you and check back soon!

@poogsblog

Reflections Part II, Plus Crypto and Stocks

For some reason I always find myself feeling a little rushed when I write these. I have no idea why, I think it starts to feel like I'm droning on and on and no one wants to read something super long, but when I go back and read it a couple days later they really don't seem that long at all. If anything, probably too short. I thought of a few things I wanted to add to my last post but more importantly I wanted to do a long overdue crypto and stonks look around, plus some more random stuff.

To finish up a few things I was talking about last time, I don't think I really got across how much poker and more so sports betting really changed and sharpened who I am as I person. People tend to think of poker players and gamblers as shady, shifty, con-men liars who you could never trust. And if your only sample is 20-something year old "pro" live poker players, you might be right. (Honestly, SOME live poker pros do tend to be pretty scummy). But real, actual professional gamblers are some of the most trustworthy and dependable people I've ever come across. You have to not only talk the talk, which is easy, but you have to walk the walk too. It's really easy to call yourself a principled person and say you'd never do anything shady or steal from someone if you never have the chance to. It's like that famous quote, "men are as faithful as their options." Fat slobs in their 50's will say that they're loyal to their wives and would never cheat on them but that's easy when no women on the planet are looking for you. It's easy to THINK you're principled but how often are you tested? What does it even mean to be principled? These are the kinds of things that I don't think I really would have thought that much about if I didn't get seriously into advantage gambling. I certainly wouldn't have as early as I did, which was in my low 20's. The idea that you will simply do what you said you'll do, 100%, no matter what, is powerful. I think the default setting for most people is simply looking to avoid conflict at all times, and I think that's a big reason why our country is in the middle of falling apart. Somewhere around 2000 I feel like it almost became cool to be aloof and a little bit flaky? "Like yea bro, whatever, I know I said I'd do that, but now I like don't really feel like it. Take a chill pill bro." Hard, uncompromising principles aren't in fashion anymore and that probably contrbuted to the absolute silliness of the past 5 years or so. And by the way, having and standing by your principles only matters when you're tested. It only matters when it matters and you are only your actions. That's a really good lesson I got from the sports betting landscape that I try to live by with everything I do. If you're trustworthy ONLY when it's easy, then you aren't trustworthy. 

Another thing that I've talked about before that I absolutely love about sports betting and poker too to lesser extent is that you really do either win or die. You either win on your own merit or you lose. There is no bullshit. There are no government handouts, no marketing teams, no one cares who your dad is or what college you went to. There's no sucking up, there's no "my uncle went to college with the boss." Your skin color, your sex, your age, your views, even your personality, none of it matters even a little bit. There's no nonsense, really. You either can do it or you can't, and if you can't then you don't. Hell, there isn't really even luck involved. You can maybe get lucky and run good for a little while, but not long term (in sports betting anyway.) That sort of harsh clarity is refreshing, especially in todays world where "merit" is becoming a four letter word. 

The only caveat to that is with people selling picks. I'll say this again because it's important and people just absolutely do not want to hear it: DO NOT PAY FOR PICKS. EVER. No one who wins sells picks and no one who sells picks wins. It's that simple. If you're paying for picks in 2023, you really do deserve to lose money, and I'll bet anyone on here that there is not a single legit winning tout out there (with one exception. I've mentioned them before but I will again here for completeness sake. There is one tout that is legit and does win long term. They're called Right Angle Sports or RAS. But their packages cost thousands of dollars and are really meant for professionals only. The second they release a play, the market moves, usually pretty hard. They have a super complicated process for releasing plays because the biggest knock on them is simply that it's almost impossible to get their released number. The reason for that is that the market respects them and reacts accordingly to their releases. When they give out a play, the market reacts instantly. And I do mean instantly. They also specialize in more niche markets like the WNBA and smaller college football and basketball leagues. They track not only their units won or lost but also how they do against the closing line, which is the single best predictor of future success. So in short, if you HAVE to pay for picks, look into RAS. Other than that, just don't. Seeing people pay for picks really does make me sad. It's so easy to bamboozle people and everyone is always looking for a shortcut.)

I'll have more about sports betting and poker in the future, maybe I'll start posting some poker hands. But let us shift focus here for a little bit to crypto. It's been a while since I updated my positions so lets start there.

As I mentioned here before, I did get caught up in the BlockFi situation and lost a big chunk of my holdings. I think I'm going to end up getting at least a portion of it back, but I'm not counting on it. For my records, I counted what I lost in all of that as simply a giant sell for which I received nothing in return. In sports betting, my "edge" was mostly from finding and staying at really soft accounts. The drawback from such a strategy is that usually the softer the site, the bigger the chance of getting stiffed when you win. So when that does happen, you have to count it in your figures. I always only counted money in my hand as money won. If I won 10k but collected only 5k, then that obviously goes in as a 5k win. I use the same logic here. It was my own fault for trusting BlockFi so I have to count the theft as a big fat sell for zero dollars.

Now, having said all that, I am going to detail what my position would have been if the BlockFi stuff didn't happen just one time, now, simply to show my possible skill as a trader and what things should have looked like. After this, the BlockFi stuff will be factored in.

So, if I hadn't been fucked by BlockFi, my average owned BTC would be $18k, with an ROI of 44% (at BTC's current price of about 27k). My average buy price is 30k, and average sell price is 34k with mid five figures volume in buys and sells. I think that is really, really good, especially considering that I started buying BTC when it was at about 35k. Now with about 2.5 years in this space, I think I can safely say that I am a good crypto trader and I have the stats to back it up. My general strategy has always been to be slowly building up a position and sell a little bit on green days and buy a little bit on red days. I never use leverage or anything like that. Just slowly and solidly building up exposure and unwinding a little bit when it goes straight up. 

With ETH, my average owned price would be $773(!) with an ROI of 30%. LINK would be average price of $7.7 with a 20%ish ROI.

So that's the good news. The bad news is that the BlockFi stuff did, obviously, happen, and my actual current holdings are this:

BTC: Avg buy price: $30.4k, avg sell price: $28.7k. Overall average buy price: $63k. Stinks!

ETH: Overall average buy price: $7k. Not good!

LINK: Overall buy price: $10.9. Bad, but not horrible.

LTC: Unaffected by BlockFi, average price of $56 only owning a few hundred worth. I love trading Litecoin. LTC is one alt-coin that I do actually like. It does basically the same thing as bitcoin but even faster. It uses proof of work (the super secure method) and its reputation is sort of like a rock solid, boring, safe alternative to BTC. It moves around a good amount but with a decent sized market cap (it's #11 crypto in the world by market cap) it doesn't move TOO crazily. So I like to sell tops and buy back in lower. Right now I like 95 and 100 as a local top and buy back in at 89 or below.

Polygon/Matic: Also unaffected, average price of $.87 but owning a little bit more. I'm not super interested in Matic and its use case but I know that it does get used a lot and the news around it always seems pretty positive. It moves around a lot too and I'm scooping some back up after taking profits at $1.3.

So obviously the BlockFi situation was a pretty big disaster but I am a little bit proud of myself for staying the course. Eventually the whole mess will get absorbed and my buys will be lower than my sells. That will be a happy day.

My overall outlook right now is that it feels like we're in the middle of a bear market. A good tried and true fact of the crypto space is that prices always bottom on apathy, not on bad news. When you look back on prior bear markets, prices bottomed out when simply no one was talking about Bitcoin or crypto. A good metric for that is new subscribers to popular youtube crypto channels. There's a guy I follow who charts this stuff and the general interest in crypto is definitely down and waning further, but it does look like it still has a ways to go. There's a big annual crypto "conference" in Miami happening this week and from what I've gathered, attendance is around 15k people. Last year it was 35k. So that's a pretty good snapshot of where we are, interest-wise right now. I think this whole year is going to be choppy/flat and then we might get a bull run with new highs in mid 2024 which is also about when the halving is expected to happen. So my general strategy is to slowly keep buying and building up positions and probably fading any runs. If we dip under 17k again, that'll be the time to back the truck up. 

I read a decent book recently called "The Lords of Easy Money." It's by a finance journalist who covered the Fed for two decades. It was a good look at not only the Fed and its policies, but at the people who make up the Fed. It was similar to "The Creature From Jekyll Island" except way less conspiracy theory-y (and a lot shorter). I took away a few tidbits that I thought were interesting. For one, the whole money printing/QE disaster came from Ben Bernanke who was the chairman from 2006 to 2014. He was a super academic, bookworm nerd type guy and he operated exactly how you'd expect one of those guys to. He was famous for super complicated, mumbling speeches where people were always confused trying to decipher what he was saying. He loved equations and acronyms as these sort of guys usually do. He directed the Fed to print trillions of dollars during the 2008 crisis and a big chunk of the book was about how people inside the Fed warned against it for one major reason: it would be hard to stop. And the detractors were right. Once they started printing money, the market started to expect it. And once that happens, it becomes hard to stop doing it and not crash the economy. 

We all know what happened in 08 and in the subsequent years, but it was interesting to learn that Janet Yellen was Bernanke's like little protege. Their offices were right next to each other and they had lunch and hung out often. I think anyone who has worked in an office knows that stuff like that is important. So it wasn't any big surprise that Yellen managed the Fed similar to how Bernanke did. But the most interesting thing I learned was that Jay Powell was very much NOT in the little academic clique. He came from a private equity job and bounced around a little bit from the public sector to private sector before joining the Fed. 

I say all this because I think it's at least a little indicator of where the Fed terminal rate ends up. Ever since the government really turned on the money printers in 08, a huge factor in the stock market (or any market now, really) is what the Fed does with its rate. This effects the interest rate of every other bank and institution across the country and has big ramifications on big, publicly traded companies. And the history of the Fed is generally that they start hiking rates and announce that they're going to keep raising rates until some benchmark is reached (right now it's getting inflation under control and, believe it or not, INCREASING unemployment). But what usually happens is that while they're increasing rates, something breaks or some big business goes under or almost goes under and threatens to take everyone down with them. And then the Fed has to either stop raising rates and keep them steady, or decrease them. That has happened so many times that the market actually expects it. So the futures on where the rate ends up always prices in a rate cut before the date that the Fed says it'll cut. However, I think this time may be different. I think Powell MAY be a little bit different than the norm and he may stick to his plan more than the market thinks. He's been pretty consistent so far, even with the whole SVB bank fiasco. 

With that in mind, I think stocks along with crypto will come down this year. I think these last few months are a little bit of a dead cat bounce. It just didn't quite feel like enough of a dip, did it? The unwinding of all this silliness and can-kicking has to come for us at some point. I think best case scenario is some sort of a soft landing but really, who knows. If Powell does stay on track and keep raising rates, which he should, maybe we get inflation at least a little bit under control (at least with the public numbers. I don't trust CPI reports anymore. Did you know that they constatnly change how the CPI is calculated? Which makes it pretty hard to use it to compare inflation data of the past). If that happens, when the Fed finally does reverse course and starts to bring rates back down again, that might be the catalyst for the next bull run. It may all line up for mid 2024 with the BTC halving (and maybe a new President, friendlier to the economy). I think a year from now could be the start of a new run. If we do get a big crash in the meantime and we see new lows in crypto and in equities, that is when you need to pounce. You make money in bull markets but you get rich in bear markets.  That's my outlook right now, anyway.

That's about it for now, check back soon as I will be writing more in the near future. See ya!

Reflections on a Decade-Plus of Semi Pro Advantage Gambling

Well, it's official. Officially official. My career as "semi-pro" handicapper is over. I haven't made any money on props for almost two years now and my volume has dropped to just about zero. I'm still involved in sports betting, I've still never had a losing year, I still manage/operate multiple accounts (something I can't quite get into here) and I'll probably always bet stuff like team totals, off market straights, teasers and I'm always on the lookout for correlated parlays. But what I've always considered to be actual sports betting; modeling/handicapping, creating and improving models, I do think that is done for me.

 There are two major reason why. Number one, I just don't have the time or the will to dedicate to it anymore. I used to fucking LOVE it. Seeing a book release it's props for the day used to be like taking a hit of something. It was all I thought about, all the time, and I was good at it. Now I'm married, have a kid on the way and a real career. You can't just pop in once or twice a week for a couple hours and beat these props anymore. Like anything else worth doing, it takes a lot of time to manage accounts, create models, tweak them, follow lineup changes and rule changes, who got pushed off the power play, who's injured, etc. It's a lot.

When I first started, no one even knew what a prop was. Season long fantasy sports were just starting to really take hold, but daily fantasy was still over a decade away. I used to handicap props with pen and paper, spend maybe two hours a day, and turn a profit. I didn't even start using excel until after I moved back from Las Vegas. But right around the time daily fantasy became a thing, suddenly everything changed. Everyone was interested in player props and the lines got way, way sharper. And that's reason number two. I HATE to admit it, but I just can't beat em anymore. I know a few guys that do/did what I do and everyone is pretty much in the same boat. It really was free money for a while and part of me knew that it couldn't last.

So with that being said, it feels like a good time to detail my "career", how I started, how it all went and some lessons and wisdom I've gleaned from it over the years. Let's get into it. Little bit of story time...

It all started with poker. No one in my family or friends was remotely interested in poker, so it wasn't like I was around it when I was young. The first time I remember being interested in poker was watching an episode of The Shield. They were playing cards, drinking, having fun and I thought damn, that looks fun as hell. So I got some of my friends into it and we played little friendly home games, trying to figure out the rules. I slowly learned and read books and got better and better and started playing online (Party Poker!). I'd play in local VFW tournaments and always did pretty good.

When I got to college, I met a group of kids who had a small little weekly dealer choose friendly game. That got me into the scene a little bit and there were a few kids who were decent and took it seriously. I eventually morphed that game into a real weekly $1/2 no-limit game at my apartment, ran it well, and I ended up running that game my entire time at college. I had professional dealers, $1 drinks and even girls giving massages for a while (which, by the way, was the official line. There's something brutally awkward about girls that you know giving massages who aren't masseuses). Eventually we got a real solid group of regular players, some that didn't even go to college. I raked max $4 a hand and also played in the game. Running and playing in that game was honestly the most fun and rewarding thing I think I've ever done that also made me money. 

I met a lot of people I wouldn't have otherwise and some of them had a pretty profound impact on me. There was one group of older Spanish guys who were regulars who were absolute hustlers. They had a friend who wrote a script for ticketmaster and were able to buy up tickets quick for stuff right when they came out (mind you this is well over 10 years ago). They'd rent out computer labs and have rooms full of people just typing in captchas. They had a Tickle Me Elmo scheme where they bought garages full of these things before they were huge for one Christmas and made a ton re-selling them. The schemes weren't exactly my style, I like to try to bring a little value to people in whatever I'm doing, but I admired their hustle. They were day traders too and I learned a lot about the Fed and why their press conferences were important. There was another guy who came who was a real pro poker player and it was cool just to see him operate. I learned so much from that game. It was kind of like the education I was supposed to be getting in class.

Through that game, I eventually met someone who we'll call Jay. One thing that always bothered me growing up was that I was always looking for someone who operated the way I did. I was always hustling, I had all kinds of little "businesses" (I even had a little 'record label' at one point) and money making schemes, but I could never really find a partner. Even with the punk band I was in in high school, it always felt like I was kind of dragging everyone around me into whatever I was doing. I was dying to meet someone who'd approach ME with something. 

I knew right away that Jay was that guy. He was like a version of me but from a different town, and I know he felt the same way. We got pretty close in college and I found out he was a bookie. Or, more precisely, trying to be a bookie. He was pretty degen which will come into play later on, but he introduced me to the world of sports betting and PPH books and taking action. 

So college comes and goes. The poker game dies out once I graduate, but me and Jay stay in touch. I became a "bookie" by myself for a while, taking action over the phone, and that eventually morphed into teaming up with Jay onto his book as well as buying up a couple of local smaller bookies. So we had a pretty decent sized sports book going. He handled the people, I handled the lines and the money. We were two young kids chasing guys all over the place for money and we always let everyone believe that were just agents working for some big scary boss man. But it really was only us the whole time.

And let me tell you, being a bookie is a nightmare. The nuts and bolts of it are brutal. The lies, the complaining, the nonsense, it's way too much. Ever had a grown man cry to you? When you're like 20 years old? It's uncomfortable. But I did get very valuable information from it. Everyone knows that the average sports bettor loses, but to actually see it from the bookie side is different. You honestly cannot believe how bad the average person is at betting. It always used to astound me how it seemed like people were actually trying to lose. If you just bet straight bets, you're betting -110 on something that should be even odds (generally, of course.) That's bad enough. But most people just have to add to it. They do parlays with no regards to price or odds, they buy random points, they get the worst number possible, they tease stuff like basketball totals. I could go on and on. I'm not kidding, it was shocking to sit there and watch the bets come through. I remember putting teasers from -110 to -120 and having absolutely no drop off in action.

But that was one of my first light bulb moments. Instead of looking at it like I was the house "taking" bets, I looked at it like I was the one making the bets. I was simply getting the opposite of what the customers were betting. So if someone bet the Patriots at -7.5 -110, I looked at it like I had the bet of whoever the Pats were playing at +7.5 +110. And for some reason that really clicked with me. Instead of waiting around for these deadbeats to "give me bets," I could find them myself. 

Around this time I stumbled upon a pretty obscure message board for sports bettors. It was a sub forum of a poker forum and for whatever reason, this little message board was where some of the absolute top level guys in sports betting hung around and talked about beating sports (for you youngins, before social media, message boards was where everyone hung out online and traded information). I got pretty immersed and engaged in it, read every book I could find, every post from the top guys. It's AMAZING how much free information is out there if you know how to look. And one of the books I got from those forums was "Attacking Las Vegas" by Justin7 (that was his username, I forget his actual name). In that book he outlines how to price a couple different props. And that was all I needed, really. I took that logic and just applied it to other props/sports and those little examples in that obscure book became the genesis for just about every model I ever made. 

I became obsessed with being a professional gambler. It really was my singular focus. I was scooping up all the low hanging fruit around me. All the kids who called themselves bookies and gave out lines over the phone I absolutely obliterated. I'd destroy one guy and then have him get me an account with someone else and cut them in. I had a BoDog account that I ran up from a $500 deposit to over 13k before they threw me out. I mean, I really was doing it. 

Around 2009, my friend and I moved to Las Vegas. I told everyone I was going to play poker, which was true, but my main focus was betting sports. Maybe one day I'll go into detail into my Las Vegas excursion, but it only lasted a year. I wasn't even keeping track of my results back then but I pretty much broke even after expenses out there. I never had to work and lived fine, but I wasn't growing my bankroll. I learned a lot out there, of course, but the main thing I learned was that I didn't want to live there and do that forever. Las Vegas is kind of depressing. Every single atom out there is trying to separate you from your money. There's no roots, no one is from there, no one really knows each other, people come and go like nothing. Between the non stop bachelor parties and the slot zombies giving away their pensions one spin at a time, it didn't feel like home to me. At all.

So around 2011 I moved back to MA thinking that I was pretty much done with advantage gambling. Little did I know though, that was really the beginning of my sports betting career. The years between 2011 and about 2016 were the top of my sports betting/poker days. I finally started keeping really good weekly records (which you 100% have to do if you're at all serious about this) and put everything onto excel. I had killer prop models for all 4 major sports and hooked back up with Jay. I kept a tiny piece of the sports book but that was mostly his thing. We had a great system though where he would get me all these amazing PPH accounts but have me betting. He'd handle collecting and the bookie thought it was him betting, but it was really me. And it was great because he was a really outgoing, sociable kid with a reputation for being a bit of a degenerate gambler but someone who *almost* always paid. He definitely always lost though so people couldn't wait to give him accounts. 

Some of the stuff that happened in those years was really funny looking back. The first local guy I remember literally putting out of business was this kid who took action on his phone. He didn't know anything about hockey so he was giving me NHL totals at -110 both sides. You might realize, lots of times these lines are priced at something like -250 or worse. So I'm getting -110 on stuff that should be -220. That lasted a while before he figured it out.

 Another time I remember using this guy who worked with my friend at a car dealership. He gave out a line of +6 on some Alabama football game when the market was +2. 

The stuff I got away with with correlated parlays was borderline obscene. I had one book with a beefy credit limit, something like 20k a week, and they took correlated parlays (I'm going to call them CP's from now on). I would max bet every single CP, both sides, full game AND first half. That lasted for a while until one day the bookie, mad and confused as to why I kept winning, tried to copy my bets. The place he tried to use wouldn't let him, obviously, and he finally figured it out. 

I had an account with a huge scary looking guy who used to run security for Godsmack. I had to give him my ID in a creepy bar to get the account. I beat him up on props for a while and when he gave me the boot, I told him what I do and I cut him in. He got me a few accounts after that that lasted for years. 

I got a guy to give me 25% off of WEEKLY losses. 

I found businesses in Lawrence that are secretly bookies who take CP's, and I've had some Spanish speaking friends go with me to translate. The tickets are all in Spanish, it's pretty funny. It's so hard to get the bets in that I want through the kid translating that it isn't even worth it anymore though. 

I've been threatened by "the mob" (which was bullshit), I've paid people to collect for me, I've had lots of money 'stolen' from me from people not paying when I win. Honestly I could go on and on. I have a terrible memory too so I know there's stuff I'm forgetting. The days of running around getting my own accounts was pure whackiness.

I played poker throughout this time too and would go to Foxwoods for a couple nights at a time about once a week. I got pretty good at a fairly niche limit game down there and that was a great way to break up the monotony of being in front of my computer all the time and keep my poker skills sharp.

Eventually Jay's demons caught up to him and things blew up pretty spectacularly. He had to "go away" for a while so I ran his book myself for a month or so until I just literally could not take it anymore. I think I just gave it up, I don't remember selling it or anything. Being a bookie really is a hard way to make an easy living and was so not my style honestly.

As the scammers and dead beats came and went, I did eventually fall in with a really solid couple of groups who I've worked with for almost a decade now. The cream really does rise to the top. In this scene, tons of people come and go and if you ever stiff someone, it's over for you. So the guys that last, last for a reason. I get accounts now and don't have to deal with any nonsense from either side. I pay for it by having to give up more equity than normal but it's a trade off. I have a good thing going now that is way less work and stress but still keeps me involved.

Anyway, like I said, the handicapping has been drying up for awhile now. The first prop market I ever learned how to beat was NFL sacks. For whatever reason, I've always done well with them and really enjoy betting them. NHL shots on goal is a close second. And I'm down on both for over a year now. This years NHL playoffs was sort of my last hope. My last attempt at real modeling and it has not gone well at all. If I can't beat NHL shots on goal, especially at playoff time, it's probably time to pack it in. So what have we learned? Well, if I had to make a quick list...

1) KEEP RECORDS. That is rule number one. You must keep track of what you're doing if you're doing this at all seriously. All you really need is money won/lost too. I separate everything so I know how I'm doing in, say, football props vs teasers vs straight bets, and I keep track of my overall ROI, but all you really need when you're starting out is weekly win or loss. Do it every Monday, make a little sheet in excel. It's fun. I guarentee that no matter what the results are after a month or two, you'll be surprised.

2) STOP BETTING STRAIGHTS. You are not going to win betting straight bets. Period. You gotta stop. Start with the smallest limit markets and go from there.

3) DON'T MAKE THE BOOKIES LIFE EASIER. Stop betting parlays! Seriously. Same with buying points. And learn how to bet NFL teasers. You can learn about Wong teasers in literally 5 minutes.

4) IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOUR EDGE IS, YOU DON'T HAVE ONE. 

5) KNOW AT WHAT PRICE YOU WOULD TAKE THE OTHER SIDE. This is a good one. If you'd bet "your team" at any price, you're a sucker. Being a sucker is ok but only if you know you're a sucker.

Another thing is that you don't really choose to "go pro." It isn't like one day you're not a pro and one day you are. For me, I was just working less and less and betting more and more until I was barely working at all (I did usually keep a real job but for a while I was working like 10 or less hours a week). It's a cool feeling when you have a solid year or two under your belt and you realize, hey, I really am a professional gambler.

I do have two major regrets about all of it though. The first one is that I wish I had taken it all more seriously (which is a bit odd for me since I generally take everything too seriously). I always felt like a little bit of an imposter, like I wasn't REALLY a pro sports bettor, and I'm not even sure why. I should have learned about excel and databases way earlier and way more in-depth. I took some free online courses about modeling and statistics, but I didn't really take them seriously. And then towards the end I actually had a little bit of the opposite problem. Once I had like 5 solid years behind me, I thought anything I touched would be profitable. I did some dumb things that I should have pulled the plug on way sooner. I thought I could model team totals better than the market which never worked. I beat my head against the wall trying to beat some obscure props for way too long when I should have stuck with what worked. I for sure should have at least tried to make some money with daily fantasy.

My second regret is not being better with the money. I'm generally pretty good with it, I'm not one of those guys that it just burns a hole in their pocket. And I did save and have a really good chunk for a long time. But I so should have bought property or a laundromat or something. Some passive income. I could have honestly probably set myself up, not for life, but pretty close. Oh well.

Overall though I look back very fondly of those days. The first few years were absolute craziness. I really wish I had this blog back then. I can't even imagine the stuff I'm forgetting. And even though it didn't last forever, I never really expected it to. I think I did better and lasted longer than anyone would have expected when I started.

So that is just about it with sports betting. Crypto trading now scratches that itch for me and that and stocks will be the main focus here going forward.

Thanks for reading! Check back soon I will have some crypto stuff up.

"One lesson, please!"

There is no better teacher in the world than experience. You can tell a kid hundreds of times for years "don't touch the hot stove", but all those warnings and all those years pale in comparison to the millisecond of him actually doing it, searing his hand and searing the lesson in his mind forever. He won't touch another bright red oven burner for the rest of his life. And you can hear "not your keys, not your coins" until the cows come home, but nothing drives home the point more than waking up and finding out that your funds are "frozen" on an exchange.

I am, of course, talking about the FTX collapse and subsequent fall out. I didn't have anything on FTX, but I had a nice chunk on BlockFi. "Had" being the operative word there. Embarrassingly, I didn't even realize BlockFi was tied into FTX until it was too late. BlockFi "paused" withdrawals literally a couple hours after I made my last blog post and only told people with one email late Friday night. Waking up that Saturday was like a fever dream. 

Luckily I didn't have everything on BlockFi. Not even half of everything. I guess I intuitively knew not to put all my eggs into one basket, but I certainly had a good chunk on there and now it's all gone. Just an unmitigated disaster of epic proportions. 

(One side note and possible saving grace: based on their court appearance and from what they've said recently, I think there's at least somewhat of a chance that BlockFi customers will get back the crypto that was in their Wallets as opposed to what was in the Interest bearing accounts. If you don't know, BlockFi sort of advertised themselves as a crypto savings account and offered 7+% interest on crypto and stablecoins. Then they were taken to court in New Jersey and the ruling was that they could no longer offer interest bearing accounts in the U.S., but anyone who had one could keep theirs and keep earning but couldn't deposit anymore into it. So I, like many others I assume, just figured I'd keep my interest account going there forever and anything else I bought on there just went into my Wallet. So if I do end up getting the Wallet balance back I would consider that a MAJOR win. But I'm absolutely not counting on it).

First off, this will 100% never happen to me again. I bought my own cold wallet and transferred everything I had on other exchanges onto it. New Rule number 1: NO CRYPTO ON EXCHANGES, EVER. Anything I buy now I move to my cold wallet immediately, save for a couple hundred in each crypto to sell/trade. Absolutely no exchange is safe, period. They never were. And while this is unquestionably horrible and embarrassing beyond belief, it doesn't make me "mad" at bitcoin whatsoever. If anything it strengthens the case for (self-custodial) BTC. This kind of thing can happen anytime and on any exchange, and not just to crypto. Wealth has been confiscated by the State in every country since the dawn of wealth. Even in America less than 100 years ago, the government made it illegal to own gold under the penalty of jail time. So if you own crypto, you simply MUST purchase a cold wallet. They're not as hard to set up and use as you might think. {Pro tip: I recommend the Nano Ledger type S that DOESN'T have bluetooth. And when you buy one, buy it directly from Ledger, not on Amazon or any other third party site. There are thousands of youtube videos showing how to set it up and use it. I recommend "the crypto dad" on youtube for his Ledger unboxing/walkthrough video.}

And while this doesn't deter me or my outlook on crypto in the future, I can't lie and pretend this isn't embarrassing and borderline devastating. I mean, I fully knew and understood the "not your keys" mantra and why keeping BTC on an exchange literally nearly defeats the entire purpose of crypto. It's not like I'm some guys uncle who just plopped down 5k on an exchange and left it there. I am fully in this space and fully cognizant of the risks. And I still got burned. I just truly could not envision a scenario where BlockFi would simply default on 100% of its customer funds overnight. Like, what?? But here we are.

The second worst thing about all this is that the warning signs were there. I still remember the day I got the email from them offering 7.5% on stablecoins. It didn't seem right to me and I should have pulled out that day. Even worse, BlockFi actually paused withdrawals a few months ago! That was why they were even in bed with FTX in the first place. FTX bailed them out (or not, apparently). The fact that I didn't get out after that happened is kind of mind blowing, even to me. And while BlockFi and FTX are absolute criminal scumbags who I sincerely hope rot in prison (yea like that'll happen), the cold, hard truth is that I deserved this. I can't plead ignorance and the warning signs were all there. It's been tough to really sort of digest this and admit it, but it is the truth. The world is a big place filled with all kinds of people, and it's on you to protect yourself. No one else is going to do it for you, even the people who are paid to. And it's not enough to just "know" this, you have to live by it too. 

Now, THE worst thing about all of this is where my money actually went. If they gambled recklessly with customer funds and the money was just lost, that's one thing. It's a horrible and illegal thing, of course, but it's a lot less horrible than where the money actually went in this case. MY money, like my own literal money that I earned, went to some of the absolute worst, scummy cretins on this planet and towards some of the worst causes imaginable. Top Democrat politicians and mega donors. Corrupt regulators and Bankers. Money printers. Fucking "UKRAINE". It'll probably go towards anti-crypto regulation. Picturing my money being spent on some corrupt Ukrainian arms dealers' hotel stay for the week, or in the pockets of Maxine Waters or Katie Hobbs. Like, some of the worst people who exist with power, all working towards some of the worst policies this country has ever seen. Things I'm diametrically opposed to and which got me into crypto in the first place. They have some of my money and are using it to advance some of the most damaging ideas we've ever seen. It's so absurd it's practically vulgar. It's so ironic that it's borderline funny to be honest. 

It really does make me sad though, not just for myself personally, but for bitcoin in general. This kind of stuff, the money printing, the buying of elections, the corruption, the bail outs, the ongoing war in Europe that we're sponsoring for some reason. It's all the kind of stuff that helped create the hard and sound money rules of BTC, with its capped supply and heavy duty security. And BILLIONS of dollars in crypto just got stolen to fund all of it. This is indeed a very dark time for the crypto space. Something we'll probably remember forever.

A couple more things on FTX before we move on. The details about this SBF guy and his whole operation are astounding. And I don't mean that lightly. I mean literally read about this whole thing and you will be astounded. He bragged about playing video games while being on huge business calls moving millions of dollars. His little weirdo girlfriend who he put in charge of their trading arm DIDN'T KNOW WHAT A STOP LOSS WAS. She bragged publicly about doing amphetamines. There was a group of about a dozen or so of them and they all lived together and were openly fucking each other in their little "polycule" or whatever the fuck they called it in the Bahamas. FTX didn't have a compliance board! Oh and ready for this? Their chief regulatory officer, Dan Friedberg (sorry but of course that's his last name) was one of the major players in the Ultimate Bet 20 million dollar scandal! You couldn't make that up if you tried. Was ANYONE looking at these guys, at all? (If you don't know, Ultimate Bet was an online poker site back in the day that very famously stole customer funds. One of the owners of the site and some of his minions hacked into the site and were playing while being able to see their opponents cards. They made off with at least 20 million. At least they were all caught though, and had to pay it back plus went to jail. Just kidding! They didn't even GET CHARGED never mind make restitution, and this Friedberg guy wasn't even disbarred from being a lawyer. It's almost enough to make you want to do something drastic, isn't it?)

Before I really lose my mind, one silver lining here is that this could have happened 5 years from now and it would have been much, much worse. Clearly this was going to happen at some point and imagine if this all went down years down the line when these exchanges built up even more trust and people had even more money on them. Imagine if bitcoin was worth 80k. If it had to happen, which it did, it's better that it happened now during a bear market. It's painful but I can rebuild from here.

So what can we learn from this? Besides the obvious "not your keys, not your coins", I think one lesson is that as a society and as investors, we need to stop giving these little weirdo "wunderkind" children so much respect. New isn't always better. Not being able to look people in the eyes is not an admirable trait. Wearing pajamas and playing league of legends in business meetings does not make one a genius. In the age of billion dollar IPO's and the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, I think it's clear that everyone got a little too loose. Well, not a little too loose, actually. This is 'sleeve of wizard' loose. It's a bad look for not only the crypto industry, but just our society in general. We're easily bamboozled. And this guy SBF's veneer of "effective altruism" was like the icing on the cake. "How can he be bad, his hair is weird and he's committed to giving other people's money to Democrats!" Beware the addy-d out wolf in sheep's pajamas, I suppose.

I'm a little all over the place here and I'll probably have more to say about this as it all unfolds. If you're out there and you got burned like me, don't let it chase you from the space. That's whey they want. I know in my little circle, people are capitulating. People are just done with it all and I can't say I blame them. But this is the worst time to give in. Like the saying goes, 'be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.' If you have your principles, stick with them. Don't let SBF and his little alien looking fuck buddy win. Take a break if you need to, sure, but don't give up. Bitcoin is the future. The road will be rocky and there will be more set backs, but stick with it.

Personally, I am taking a little breather. I've probably been a little bit too into it all, making too many trades, buying every single dip. I sold off a chunk of my ETH as I think the btc/eth valuation is going to come way down. My plan from here on out is to just keep slowly buying BTC, keep it in my wallet, and when the btc/eth valuation comes back to earth, buy up more ETH with BTC. I'll update my new positions next post. I have the BlockFi mess just labeled as a huge sell with a nice fat zero for dollars received. So now I'm way upside down with all my buys being higher than my sells. My poor sheet is hard to look at now. My avg BTC price went from 22k to something like 40k now and ETH is even worse. But like I said, I'm not going anywhere, and maybe someday we'll all laugh about that time that little weirdo who almost brought it all down.

Check back soon, see ya!

EMERGENCY PRESS CONFERENCE!

Well all hell broke loose pretty much as soon as I pressed 'send' on my last post. I had that post done Monday night but I was planning on adding a little bit to the end on Tuesday morning. Then the market just fell off a cliff so I put it out there before I'd have to delete the whole thing. The theme of my last post and the big question on everyone's mind right now is 'is the bottom in?' Was 19k the bottom and we go sideways then up from here? And the answer to that question was a resounding NO. Bitcoin dropped from 21k all the way down to about 15.5k is just three days. It has since rebounded a little bit and is now hovering around 17k. So my sells all look pretty good and I was able to get back in at 17 and 18k. I didn't quite hit the exact bottom but close. Matic actually dropped all the way to exactly .83, my exact target buy, and then shot back up to a dollar and change. But I freaking missed it. It played out almost exactly as I predicted but I was buying the bitcoin and LINK dip so hard, I didn't have any powder at the moment to scoop up anymore Matic. Very, very mad at myself. I'm very slowly trying to have a little bit more trust and confidence in my convictions but this was just a flat out miss. I think now is an absolute terrific time to at least start buying bitcoin, but to be fair I thought that at 30k too so who knows.

I did say two posts ago that I expected one more leg down for BTC. Was this it? To be honest, I don't think so. I think there's still some room to go but I think we're close. All the metrics I've seen suggest we usually drop about 83% in ROI from the latest peak and I think we're at right about 80%. I think 14k might be the bottom but I wouldn't be shocked if it went as low as 10k. If it goes under 8k I'll still be buying but that would be quite uncomfortable.

I think ethereum is going to crash even harder. It's been way north if its regression band for a while (Ben Cowen on youtube) and I think we're going to see some really cheap prices on ETH in the next 6 months or so. I'll for sure be looking to scoop up lots of it if it goes to something like $500, which wouldn't shock me.

A big driver of this latest dump has been the FTX disaster. If you haven't heard, FTX is an exchange with a native token that just went bankrupt. There's lots of wordy, confusing reasons and explanations and excuses you can read about if you want, but the bottom line is that yet another DEFI exchange/token went broke. And this isn't poopypeecoin either. Tom Brady and Steph Curry had FTX endorsement deals. It was all over the Super Bowl last year. It's really not a good look at all for the crypto space, de-fi in particular. Like I said before, the more I see, the more of a BTC-maxi I become. Live by this mantra: "Never marry an alt-coin".

I got my average BTC price down to 22.1k. So obviously I'm still under water but not too bad. I'm steadily marching towards owning a full one, too. My ETH price is still 1309. I didn't go as crazy buying ETH because like I said, I think it's coming down further. 

I did a real good job waiting it out with Chainlink. I started selling its latest pump at 7.3 and was selling all the way to 9 where it topped out. It hovered in the 8s for a while and I started seeing some bullish LINK things around the internet, which I haven't in a long time. I got a little nervous it was going to keep running but I was patient and scooped it back up in the mid 6's during the this latest crash. My average LINK price is now 10.6.

I got back in on Litecoin and a tiny bit on Matic but small amounts so not much news there. My average prices are 32.6 and .2 on LTC and Matic respectively, but with tiny amounts. I'm mad I missed the dump on Matic, but I think it'll come down like I do with ETH. If you look at the MATIC/BTC pair, it looks way over valued. I like the idea of sticking with mostly BTC here and if/when the Ethereums and Matics of the world come down, I can buy them with BTC.

In other news, the midterm elections came and kind of went (they're still counting. Guess where?) and unless the ones still counting all break for the right, which is highly unlikely, it'll be disappointing for republicans. Everyone on the planet saw a red wave coming and we barely got a trickle. Although even with it going not as good as it was "supposed" to for the right, it looks like republicans will take the House and the Senate is very much up for grabs. 538 has the right winning the House 84% of the time and the Senate 59%.

First off, as bad of a night for the right as this was, and it was bad, it certainly was not a "good" showing for the left. The party in power is supposed to win midterm elections. It seems so bad for the right because people were really expecting a blowout. The same states that did it in 2020 are taking forever to count their votes, again. This really, really needs to stop. Even if everything is perfectly on the up and up, which it isn't, but either way, it's a terrible look. Right or wrong, a lot of people are very concerned about security and integrity in our elections right now, and having the SAME counties have the SAME long, ridiculous delays is not going to restore anyone's faith. 

I think the right needs to really think about its abortion stance. Regardless of what I think, I know that  that's a big issue that people on the left just can't get behind. I've always felt that the GOP has such a perfect opportunity to use it as a bargaining chip on just about anything else. Voter ID, gun laws, taxes, anything. Budge a tiny bit on abortion and get rid of absentee/mail in voting. Boom.

Another problem on the right is WTF is with some of these candidates?? Hershel Walker?? DOCTOR OZ?! We can laugh at all of the absurdity from the left, and there is plenty, but Doctor OZ?? We've got to do better than that.

Of course, this all leads back to the one, big, massive problem the right has, lurking in the shadows. We've seen rumblings lately. It's the Trump/Desantis fight. Anyone who wanted to move on from Trump faced a lingering issue; who can replace him? Who on the right could even come close? Ted Cruz? Wrecked. Rubio? Bent the knee. Mitt Romney? Bent the knee like no one has ever bent a knee before. There really hasn't been anyone on the right that could compete with the raw ID of Trump. But now there might be. Desantis seems like the real deal and he just absolutely mowed down his opponent in Florida, flipping lots of typically blue counties in the process. (This happened early Tuesday night and people were REALLY sensing a red wave coming which only added to the disappointment). I don't think any reasonable person can argue with how he handled the pandemic. To me, he seems like Trump minus the bafoon-ery, which is exactly what I've wanted for the right since Trump came to power.

On paper, I think Trump was a good, borderline great president. I like his policies. But you don't run a country on paper and even the biggest MAGA guy has to admit, some of the Trump stuff is just flat out  embarrassing. He's an insecure guy with a massive ego. I've always thought of him as more of a murder weapon. He was the perfect guy for the moment. He called out the media and the useless in the GOP. But he's not a long term solution. He's too fragile of a guy. He needs too much. Either way, the next two years will be quite interesting to watch the top of the GOP ticket.

As if there wasn't enough going on this week, we had a CPI report yesterday (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf) that came in quite a bit better than expected. Actually, I should say, not as pants-shittingly bad as most expected. The stock market got a nice bump from it and has carried over into today. Fun fact; over the history of the S&P, the biggest pumps have come in bear markets. Everything is still way down from their recent peaks, but we're starting to see maybe some recovery? Is the bottom in for stocks? Again, who knows. I really don't think so. I think we're going to be looking at about a year of more pain and then sideways then up in 2024. Depends a lot on what the Fed does. The next BTC halving will come in 2024 which is something to keep in mind. I think we'll be looking back in two years saying "I cannot believe I could have got BTC at 16k or Tesla under $200", etc. But again, who knows.

Just remember, be greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy. "Buy when there's blood in the streets." Right now people are afraid of their shadows. The market can always go lower, so if you sit around and wait you can miss the whole thing. This isn't advice, I'm still very much a noob, but I don't think anyone will regret starting out slow with crypto or stocks right now.

That's it, expect another post soon. Bye!

Crypto Update

One thing that has amused me in the crypto world is all the hoopla about "The CME Gap" or "The Gap". If you follow crypto social medias you've definitely heard some version of this. There's even a group calling themselves the "gap boys" (lol...honestly, how embarrassing is crypto sometimes). What CME refers to is the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. On the CME, you can bet on the price of bitcoin without having to actually buy any bitcoin. It's for people who want to get in on it but are afraid of the technical or legal aspects, I would imagine. Now, the CME operates like any other American exchange and is closed on the weekends. But of course, crypto is 24/7. So whenever bitcoin makes a big move over the weekend, the price on the CME opens Monday higher or lower than where it closed on Friday. This creates a "gap", or, (ready?), a "CME gap". Up until somewhat recently, these "gaps" have always been filled. I think there's still one open at 9400ish and the gap boys will lead you to believe that the bottom isn't in until we "close the gap" or hit 9400.

This is, of course, nonsense. A gap on some random exchange that appears due to a technicality in its operating hours doesn't have predictive ability. I mean really, there's not much more to it than that. The "gaps" have been filled before because bitcoin is insanely volatile and moves around a bunch.

The only reason I'm mentioning this, I suppose, besides the fact that it's kind of funny, is that I feel like I see and hear about it a lot, and it really is a ridiculous notion. There is no predictave power in it! Just because it happened before doesn't mean it has to happen again, or is even likely to happen again. And I guess it's one of those weird kind of trend things that people are always, always looking for. I saw it in sports betting all time too. ("They're 6-0 against the spread coming off a home loss facing a non-divisional opponent with a winning record"). And I don't know what exactly it is about it that appeals to people but it's interesting.

It's largely been pain across all the markets for the past year now. It's close to exactly a year since bitcoin topped out at around 69k. I've been in buy-mode for a while now, but I just recently sold a little bit of everything in this latest little bear market pump. I think there's still much pain ahead and I'm looking to buy back in and average down. My avg BTC price now is 23,270, Ether is 1308, and Link is 14.4 (looking back on my posts I'm slowly getting these numbers down which is good). Litecoin and Matic I'm actually free loading on now as I took more profits than I ever spent. But I own tiny pieces of those two now. LTC, Matic and Link really pumped the past week or so, so I took some profits and I'll be looking to get back in pretty much as soon as possible (as soon as the price goes below my worst most recent buy, I'll start buying back in). I've been using some of the money from the alt coins to buy more bitcoin. Mostly though, lately, I've been doing the opposite, selling bitcoin for alt coins. Trading coins back and forth for each other might honestly be my most favorite thing to do in this space. I'm only up a couple hundred bucks doing it but it's 100% free money. And it really scratches that trading itch I'll always have. (Matic pumped recently because Instagram announced they've be using Matic for some kind of NFT thing they have going, by the way. Whatever. Take profits, sell the news and I'll see you again at .8.)

I started buying Matic at .835 and took quick profits at .886. Bought back in at .845 then took profits at .899 and then .925. Then bought up the dip nicely at .85, .83, .75 and even .73. Sold a little bit at .837. Back in at .807. Profits at .86, buy back in at .818, sell some .88 and .93. Buy a little bit at .86 and then sold about 80% in this latest push at .92, .99, and finally 1.22. And that is how you get your average price to be below zero. Now, if it just keeps ripping I'll look foolish and will have cost myself dearly. But if it goes back down it's a really good move. Only time will tell, but I'm betting that with the macro environment right now, this isn't the start of some massive 200% bull run for Matic or ChainkLink or Litecoin. When they come back down into my range, I'll start buying again. I wish I got into these alt-coins earlier, I do have to say. I don't really care or believe in the use cases for most of them, but I'm starting to think that I can probably make at least a little bit of money with anything that just moves a lot. I do have on rule with them though, and that is to never sell all of anything. I might go as low as under 100 bucks, but never to zero. I should probably come up with a solid number though. Let's say I never go under 200 bucks worth, from now on.

I think my biggest weakness so far trading crypto and to a lesser extent stocks, has probably been over trading. Sometimes the hardest thing to do is nothing. I always want to sell if I think I can buy back in lower later, and I'm always buying dips. I think this is pretty clearly the best strategy overall, but I often find myself selling too much too soon, or buying back in as soon as I'm in the money instead of letting it ride out more. I really felt this way when it was all bull run all the time last year. Now that I'm going through my first real bear market. though, it does look quite a bit better in hindsight. If I never sold any bitcoin, I'd be buried with an average price of 34k. It would be a while before I was in the green again. But with selling, my average price is 23.2k. The cost is that I own a lot less than I would have, but if you buy already planning to sell, you can end up with close to the amount of exposure you want.

That's it for today, Ill have an update soon with some election stuff.

Crypto, Stonks And Life

 Been a little while so lets jump right in with some quick updates:

As predicted by pretty much everyone except for the Federal Reserve, all that money printing during covid has come back around to kick us in the ass. Hard. Inflation is of course WAY up and stocks are way down. Turns out printing trillions of dollars and handing it out like you're a rich family in the suburbs on Halloween has consequences. Who knew!? The Fed has been hiking the federal funds rate and is promising to keep raising it until inflation cools off. Once again, the Federal Reserve lurches us from one catastrophe to another. Rates really should never have been as low as they were in the first place, but here we are. By the way, on the topic of the Fed, I have a rare book recommendation for anyone reading this. I seriously cannot recommend this book any harder. "The Creature From Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve" by G. Edward Griffin. Stop what you're doing right now and just order it on Amazon. I promise, it's not nearly as dry as it sounds. It's one of those books that makes you stop every couple pages and think about what you just read. The American people have been getting raw dogged by the Federal Reserve and bankers since its inception (and even before that) and it's truly mind blowing how they're able to get away with it. And people not only don't really understand what's going on, they support it! Every time I see a "support Ukraine!" thing I want to vomit. Might as well tag yourself "free use" (look it up, sicko). If you have any interest in money, investing, history, the creation of money and wealth, etc., then this book is for you. Seriously. Read it. I know you probably haven't read a book in a while so it'll be good for you.

Now let's talk a little crypto. Currently bitcoin is trading right around 20k and ethereum is around 1325. We're officially in bear market/accumulation phase and I have been accumulating. I've done a good job of selling tops and buying dips so even though my first buys were around 40k, my average bitcoin price is 23k. So I'm still in the red with BTC but not too bad and certainly not nearly as bad as it would be if I never sold anything. My average buy price is 35k and average sell price is 44.3k. I'm working my way to owning a full bitcoin which I will absolutely have by the next bull run.

I've actually done an even better job trading ETH. My overall average price on ETH is 1350 so I'm just about even. My average buy price is 1922 and my sell price is 2400. I have just shy of 4 "ethers". My general strategy is pretty simple: buy some on red days, sell some on green days. It's amazing how the general public seems to get this backwards. People pile in when an asset starts ripping, then lose their nerve and sell when it drops. Which, of course, is the exact opposite of what you want to do. If you're in crypto or you've been on sidelines watching, I think the time to buy is now. It could still go lower and I actually do think it will, but forget about trying to time the bottom. Just buy a little bit every week or so and hold on to it. And whatever you do, don't sell it at a loss.

While I consider myself a borderline BTC maxi, I have ventured into investing in a few alt coins (besides ETH which I don't even really consider an alt-coin anymore). My third biggest holding is Chainlink (LINK). Chainlink is a layer two, smart contract platform that runs on the ethereum network. Its major use case is translating real world data onto the blockchain. I love the functionality and use cases for Link, but it's "tokennomics" are concerning. There's no max supply (my favorite thing about BTC) and I keep reading things about the developers creating and selling Link coins. I started buying Link when it was in the 30's but with selling tops I've managed to get my average price to 17. It's currently trading at around 7.5 right now so I'm in the red pretty bad with it. I think Link is a good sleeper coin though so I'm not too concerned. It also tends to do pretty good in bear markets compared to other alt-coins.

The other two alt coins I have are Litecoin and Polygon (aka Matic). Neither of these two coins interest me really, except for the fact that their prices move a ton so it's pretty easy to trade. I aggressively take profits with alt-coins, so any rally's I sell a ton and then it's pretty easy to buy it back a lower price. Look at the price action with Chainlink over the past few months. It goes up then down then back up to pretty predictable levels. I've been buying Link at 7 and selling at 7.5 and up for months now. Same thing with Matic. I don't care at all about the future of Matic or litecoin, so taking profits with them is easy. My average price for litecoin is 49 and Matic is .8. 

Another thing I like doing and wish I had thought of earlier is trading crypto's for each other. Take a look at charts that show btc/eth, or btc/link, or eth/link, etc, and you can see some pretty clear channels of support and resistance. For instance, my average price for buying BTC and selling ETH is .0731 (in bitcoin), and my average price for buying ETH and selling BTC is .067. As long as the first number is bigger than the second one, it's free money. I'm only up a small amount with 'inter-cryto' trading but I made a few mistakes at the start. It's not something that came to me right away though and I suspect the same thing for other people. So if you are in this space it's definitely something to consider.

I think predicting future price moves is largely a fools errand, but for what it's worth, I do think there is one more leg down to go for crypto. I think the bottom is not quite yet in, but of course I could be wrong. I think BTC will bottom somewhere around 13-15k, hover around 20k for another year or so, then start ripping. The bear market will probably last until the Fed starts to pivot which I don't think we'll see anytime soon. I wouldn't wait around for that though and I'm sticking to my plan to keep DCA'ing in. 

My venture into the stock market was ill timed but I've been slowly buying at these depressed prices. I also expect the stock market to keep dipping, so I'm DCA'ing in there too. My general stock "thesis" is Tesla, mushroom stocks, Amazon and a few other small ones. I have some European power supply companies on my watchlist that I'm just waiting for a big red day to jump into. They've been going up lately though so I hope I didn't miss it.  I'm way more invested and interested in crypto over stocks, but stocks are fun too. Stonks. 

Personally, I recently got married which is nice. We also sold our house in late August which literally felt like getting out at the perfect time. We didn't have to buy a house immediately either, so if the real estate market goes through a 25% or so correction in the next year or so, we'll have really timed this out perfect. By the way, our house sold in less than a week and we got almost 10% OVER asking. Want to know how many offers we got? One. One offer, way over asking. Talk about top of the market.

And since I know many of you got here from my sports betting days, I have to admit somewhat somberly, I think my sports betting days are largely behind me. I still have active accounts and I still put in some action and stay involved with getting other people accounts, but that particular fire in me has been put out. I know what it takes to win at sports betting and I just don't have it in me anymore. My models are still profitable so if anyone out there is reading this and is interested in my offer to sell them and walk through how to use them, now would be the time to do it. I'll still have some updates regarding sports and who knows, maybe I will get back in seriously. But with work and now crypto and stocks, my mind and my heart are just not fully in it when it comes to sports. I remember getting that fuzzy, warm feeling when props would get released for the day, or getting a new juicy account. And sorry to say, it just ain't there for me anymore. I will definitely get back in on political betting though. 2020 political betting was probably the most fun I've ever had betting. This time around though I'll definitely get a PredictIt account and really do it right.

Like everyone else I suppose, I'm mostly just watching America crumble into a pile of ashes right before our eyes. It's weird. We're all just like watching TV and eating lunch like "yea, empires don't last forever." I really do wonder what life will be like 50 years from now. I think it's either we're on Mars or fighting a civil war with 3D printed guns. Maybe I'll get more into that for my next post. I think I'll stop here. Thanks for reading, talk soon!

(P.S. If anyone wants to get in touch with me, leave a comment with a joke in it so I know you're not a bot and I'll find you.)