29 December 2009
NFC markets — what to do, what to do…
Posted by QuikSand under: Prediction Markets .
As we have been following the WSEX markets for the NFC championship, this weekend posed a genuine fork in the road for the top dog, the New Orleans Saints.
Sitting at a buy price of $47 coming into this weekend, the Saints could lock up home field advantage with a solid showing — and that’s essentially all they can accomplish during the regular season, for purposes of the playoffs-based market we are watching. However, the results from the Saints’ actual weekend are more mixed:
-they lost their game against the lowly Tampa Bay Buccaneers, looking rather unlike a top contender in doing so; but
-when Minnesota lost on Monday Night (in slightly less disappointing fashion to an oddly rejuvenated Chicago bears team playing at home), the Saints still “backed into” the NFC’s top seed
So — the mathematical possibility of New Orleans having to play a road game is now eliminated. That’s good for their share price. But to the extend you subscribe to belief in things like momentum across the season, what you have seen on the field the last two weeks doesn’t exactly inspire confidence to make the Saints a nearly odds-on proposition.
The WSEX pseudomarket has essentially split the difference, with this week the BUY price for the Saints landing at $45, down from $47 before this weekend. We renew our call here that there is potential value in the market here for the less-pricey candidate teams, like the Philadelphia Eagles (buy at $17), Green Bay Packers (buy at $9) and perhaps the Arizona Cardinals (buy at $10).