The NFL pointspread market revisited: anomaly or statistical aberration?

Roger Vergin

Applied Economics Letters, 1998, vol. 5, issue 3, 175-179

Abstract: An earlier paper by Lacey (1990) examined the National Football League betting market, using data from the 1984-1986 seasons. He tested 13 technical rules for betting and found several that had winning proportions significantly greater than 0.5 and were also profitable after transaction costs. That represented a violation of the weak form of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis. This paper provides an independent test of those same rules over the 1987-1995 NFL seasons. None of the strategies were profitable or had winning proportions significantly different than 0.5. Lacey's results were apparently just a statistical aberration rather than an exploitable anomaly. The results herein suggest the Efficient Markets Hypothesis was not violated.

Date: 1998
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DOI: 10.1080/758521377

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