The Fibonacci Strategy Revisited: Can You Really Make Money by Betting on Soccer Draws?

Jiří Lahvička

Journal of Gambling Business and Economics, 2014, vol. 8, issue 2, 72-77

Abstract: TThis article investigates the strategy of betting on soccer draws using the Fibonacci sequence. In the previous literature, this strategy has been found to be both simple and profitable in both simulated and real betting markets, indicating that the soccer betting market is not even weakly efficient. First, the behavior of the Fibonacci strategy is analyzed in a simulated strongly efficient market. It is shown that the strategy is not and cannot be profitable in such a market; however, it could still be profitable in a real market under the following two conditions: first, some bets on draws have positive expected values; second, the amounts bet on such matches are high enough to more than compensate for expected losses from the other bets. This could happen if bookmakers underestimated the probability of a draw after a long string of non-drawn matches. The strategy is therefore tested on a real data set of almost 60,000 European soccer matches. Contrary to the previous findings, all tested versions of the Fibonacci betting strategy are found to lose money. The previous positive results could be explained by a very low number of trials.

Keywords: Fibonacci betting strategy; market efficiency; soccer; sports betting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L83 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.ubplj.org/index.php/jgbe/article/view/832 (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Fibonacci Strategy Revisited: Can You Really Make Money by Betting on Soccer Draws? (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:buc:jgbeco:v:8:y:2014:i:2:p:72-77

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.jgbe.com/index_files/Page492.htm

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Gambling Business and Economics is currently edited by Leighton Vaughan Williams, Nottingham Business School

More articles in Journal of Gambling Business and Economics from University of Buckingham Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dominic Cortis, University of Malta ().