Little Acorns – Introduction
Insp Jonny reviews Little Acorns
8th April 2012
Hi Bloggers, a combination of LTO’s server problems and my own internet connection issues over the last two and a bit weeks has meant this update is long overdue. I can only apologise for that.
Anwyay, the table below shows results when using the Fibonacci staking system. Results using level stakes are stated at the end of this update.
I think it’s important to mention that, despite this being a system, I may not get the exact same results as somebody else using Little Acorns. Obviously, odds are changing all the time, and this means that certain selections may qualify at one time, and may not an hour later. I can’t physically watch the odds changing all day long, so there may well be selections I have missed which may have actually been qualifiers.
Because of my internet connection issues and a holiday, there have been a few non-betting days (some days have been betting days but had no selections also)
Also, one little slightly confusing bit. In the “Result” column, a win, means that the bet itself has won and not that the horse has won. This is a laying system, so if the result says won, then the horse has lost and therefore the bet has won.
| Date | Selection | Odds | Result | Stake | Profit | Bank |
| 07/04/2012 | Sir Tantallus Hawk | 1.89 | won | £1.00 | £0.95 | £183.80 |
| 05/04/2012 | Perfect Words | 2 | won | £1.00 | £0.95 | £182.85 |
| 30/03/2012 | Prince Tam | 1.91 | won | £1.00 | £0.95 | £181.90 |
| 30/03/2012 | Quinsman | 2 | won | £1.00 | £0.95 | £180.95 |
| 29/03/2012 | Perfect Chi | 2 | won | £2.00 | £1.90 | £180.00 |
| 28/03/2012 | Anaconda | 1.78 | Loss | £1.00 | -£0.78 | £178.10 |
| 27/03/2012 | First in Command | 1.85 | Loss | £1.00 | -£0.85 | £178.88 |
| 27/03/2012 | Plenty Pocket | 1.87 | won | £1.00 | £0.95 | £179.73 |
| 25/03/2012 | Rival D’estruval | 1.68 | Loss | £1.00 | -£0.68 | £178.78 |
| 25/03/2012 | Thelobstercatcher | 1.8 | won | £1.00 | £0.95 | £179.46 |
| 24/03/2012 | Forgotten Hero | 1.93 | Loss | £1.00 | -£0.93 | £178.51 |
| 14/03/2012 | Palawi | 1.91 | won | £1.00 | £0.95 | £179.44 |
| 12/03/2012 | Offbeat Safaris | 1.92 | Loss | £1.00 | -£0.92 | £178.49 |
| 12/03/2012 | Whizaar | 1.98 | won | £1.00 | £0.95 | £179.41 |
| 09/03/2012 | Little Fritz | 1.87 | won | £2.00 | £1.90 | £178.46 |
| 08/03/2012 | Overrule | 1.61 | Loss | £1.00 | -£0.61 | £176.56 |
| 08/03/2012 | Old Tricks | 2 | Loss | £1.00 | -£1.00 | £177.17 |
| 06/03/2012 | Stand Guard | 1.71 | won | £1.00 | £0.95 | £178.17 |
| 04/03/2012 | Persian Snow | 1.99 | won | £1.00 | £0.95 | £177.22 |
| 03/03/2012 | Absinthe | 1.95 | won | £1.00 | £0.95 | £176.27 |
| 02/03/2012 | Sunley Pride | 1.86 | won | £1.00 | £0.95 | £175.32 |
| 02/03/2012 | Dreambrook Lady | 1.95 | won | £13.00 | £12.35 | £174.37 |
| 01/03/2012 | Colour guard | 1.87 | Loss | £8.00 | -£6.96 | £162.02 |
| 26/02/2012 | Barbers Shop | 1.52 | Loss | £5.00 | -£2.60 | £168.98 |
| 25/02/2012 | Teaforthree | 1.59 | Loss | £3.00 | -£1.77 | £171.58 |
| 25/02/2012 | Grumeti | 1.55 | Loss | £2.00 | -£1.10 | £173.35 |
| 20/02/2012 | Red Somerset | 2.00 | Loss | £1.00 | -£1.00 | £174.45 |
| 18/02/2012 | Roxelana | 1.79 | Loss | £1.00 | -£0.79 | £175.45 |
| 18/02/2012 | Keys | 1.70 | won | £1.00 | £0.95 | £176.24 |
| 18/02/2012 | Binocular | 1.71 | Loss | £1.00 | -£0.71 | £175.29 |
Non-betting days were: 21st to 24th of February, 15th to 23rd March.
Fibonacci Staking
Starting Bank: 176 pts
Bank after day 35: 183.8 pts
Profit: 7.8 Pts
Level Stakes (5 pts)
Starting Bank: 176 pts
Bank after day 35: 200.84 pts
Profit: 24.84 pts
Results are inclusive of 5% commission taken on winnings by the Betting Exchange.
Regards,
Inspector Jonny reviewing Little Acorns
[Click here to see Little Acorns]
Admin note – Inspector Jonny is unable to continue the review of Little Acorns so we are going to restart the review from day one over on BST.
Written by on Apr 8th, 2012. Comment. 
Passed with 5/5 Stars!
- All
By The Book Rating:
Passed with 4.5/5 stars!
- Betfair ATM Rating:
- Bonus Bagging Rating:
- Golden Key Method 2 Rating:
- Layers Of Profit Rating:
- The BetPlan Rating:
Little Acorns – Introduction
Insp Jonny reviews Little Acorns
12th February 2012
Hi Bloggers, Inspector Jonny here with a new review. This is the first review I’ve done here on Lay The Odds, though I’ve done a review before on Betting System Truths. I do quite a lot of betting in horse racing markets, both with bookmakers and exchanges. I mostly do trading and arbitrage and I also have quite a lot of experience with laying selections, which will hopefully be helpful when conducting this review.
Little Acorns is a simple laying system. The actual purchased product is an e-Book. The document is a 25 page pdf, including the system rules, staking plan, starting bank, as well as an added “bonus” called Football Bankbuilder, which I believe is also to be reviewed on LTO.
Little Acorns deals with horse racing (specifically English, but the author says he has no reason to believe it wouldn’t work on Irish racing, I will only use English racing). All selections are lays (betting on horses to lose), where certain conditions must be satisfied to identify a selection. Most conditions are price factors, (relating to available odds on Betfair), though one also requires the use of the Racing Post website.
As I’ve just alluded to, Betfair will be used to lay the selections, as it’s the largest exchange with the most liquidity. I’ll report the results with a commission of 5% on winning bets.
Though Little Acorns is a system, the time at which bets are placed is not fixed. The author says they can be placed any time before the race starts, as long as the market is formed. I imagine I’ll mainly be recording bets around 12 o’clock as this should mean the vast majority of markets will have formed. What this means is that other people may get slightly different results to me, since they may place their bets at different times.
In terms of staking plans, the author offers three different options, I will be using the first plan (Fibonacci sequence, loss recovery) and the third (level stakes). The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical set of numbers, which are calculated by adding the two previous numbers together. It so happens that this sequence crops up a lot in nature, for instance the number of petals on a flower is often a Fibonacci number (not really sure how this is relevant but I reckon it passes as mildly interesting). The Fibonacci sequence is 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34. Obviously it continues but we’re only concerned with this part of it. Basically, if a bet loses (the horse wins) we move one level up the Fibonacci sequence. For instance, my first £1 lay loses, my second lay bet will also be £1. If that loses the next will be £2, then £3 then £5 and so on. If a bet wins we revert to the first number in the sequence. I should point out that the Fibonacci sequence is the number of POINTS that should be staked. If I’m betting £2 stakes per point, then each number in the Fibonacci sequence will be doubled. If the 34 point bet loses, we revert to the first number in the sequence also. Essentially this is just a very complex loss recovery stake plan. I apologize if this explanation is horrendously complicated, If anyone has any questions about it please feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try to explain more clearly.
I’ll make this clear from the off, I do not like loss recovery staking plans. I approach betting in a very mathematical way, and mathematically, there is no reason why a loss recovery plan would do any better than level stakes to the same average bet size. All it serves to do is increase variance (imagine a graph with profits against time, increased variance basically means the ups would be bigger but also the downs would be bigger). If a system can’t make profits to level stakes, it will not make profit with any other staking plan over the long term. If anyone can prove me wrong I’ll happily remove every single word of this. I’ll also eat every item of clothing I own.
Right, rant over. I’ll report results both with the recommended staking plan (The Fibonacci loss recovery) and level stakes. The starting bank for the Fibonacci plan will be 176 points. This is what the author recommends and I’m not quite sure why. The best I’ve come up with is because its twice the maximum points staked if you end up having 9 losing lays (which would exhaust the Fibonacci staking plan and you would go back to the start). In order to make the profits achieved by the two staking plans comparable, the level stakes starting bank will also be 176 points, with a 5 point fixed stake. The 5 points is a best guess of what the average stake will be using the Fibonacci staking plan, time will tell if this is reasonable or not.
This product would set you back £97, which I would say is relatively expensive compared to other systems which just come as an E-Book. Though if the product can guarantee you long term profits, then frankly £97 is nothing.
This review will initially last for 56 betting days and if it shows promise or there is another reason why this would become necessary, it will be extended to 84 betting days.
I will try to update the review every week, and I should say I can’t guarantee that every single day will be a betting day, I occasionally might miss a day for a holiday or a hangover. Hopefully there won’t be many of these though.
Well that’s about it, and I’ll get started ASAP. Let’s hope that the system can deliver the results we’re looking for!
Regards,
Inspector Jonny reviewing Little Acorns
Written by on Feb 17th, 2012. Comment.
Passed with 5/5 Stars!
- All
By The Book Rating:
Passed with 4.5/5 stars!
- Betfair ATM Rating:
- Bonus Bagging Rating:
- Golden Key Method 2 Rating:
- Layers Of Profit Rating:
- The BetPlan Rating:
Lay of The Day – Final Review
4th January 2012
Rating: Neutral
Hi Bloggers, Inspector Colin here, with the final review of Lay of The Day, published by ZeroHype.
In my introduction, I explained that Lay Of The Day was a tipping service, usually selecting one horse per day to lay (lose). Advice was by e-mail, costing £15 per month, although there was a free week’s trial. The tipster, Darren, also operates a ratings service selecting winners, but this review only covers the Lay Of The Day package.
The product offer was substantially tweaked on three occasions during the trial – as follows:
For the first 23 racing days, from 5th October to 14th November, the service was pretty much as laid out above, three days having two horses selected to lay. The recommended staking approach was to target a profit figure for each bet (1 point, 2.5 points or 5 points) – so the liability varied according to the odds achieved.
Day 24 saw a radical adjustment to the approach, in that Darren advised lay bets on both the “win” and “place” markets, and increased the number of races selected – up to 7 on one day. Bets were only to be placed if the odds were below Betfair SP of 20.0. Recommended staking changed to targeting a single point per race.
This approach only lasted 5 days, when the advice changed to advising “Win” lay bets, to a fixed liability of 20 points, based on Betfair SP. Bets would only be placed if the odds were 20 or below. The Betfair site allows the limit to be applied straightforwardly in advance of the races, so although the number of selections remained high, it was not too onerous to follow the advice.
This approach was maintained from 21st November to 16th December – Day 45 of the trial. At that point, Darren introduced another approach to selecting the bets, reducing the maximum odds to 16.0 and significantly increasing the number of selections each day. At this point we decided that continuing with the current trial would be meaningless, as the methodology being used now bore little relation to those used for the majority of the trial. I monitored 4 days results from this approach.
So what were the results? Well, as might be expected given the chopping and changing, overall the service made a loss during the trial period.
Recommended Stakes
Start balance 500 points
Days 1 to 23 Stake 309.47 points Loss 11.63 points
Days 24 to 28 – Win Lay Bets Stake 112.91 points Loss 2.0 points
Days 24 to 28 – Place Lay bets Stake 103.34 points Loss 18.15
Days 29 to 45 Stake 560 points Gain 8.38
Days 46 to 49 Stake 440 points Loss 9.46
Total Stake 1525 points Loss 32.86
Closing balance 467.14 (-6.5%)
Return on Liability -2.2%
Strike rate 82.7%
Fixed Liability (at 30 points per bet)
Opening balance 1000 points
Stake 3300 points, Loss (-161.3) points.
ROI (-4.9)%. Bank (from 1000 start) 838.87 (down 16.1%).
On the face of it, Lay Of The Day should be a “Fail” – as overall it made a loss during the trial. There is also the cost of the subscription to take into account.
However, we have decided to leave the door ajar and have decided to classify Lay Of The Day as “Neutral”, as the providers are clearly developing the product. I am also aware that in the 9 days since I stopped posting results, the results have been very positive – and given the high number of selections now being made, using the recommended stakes method the service would have been in profit over the whole of the trial period!
Whilst there is no validity in continuing to provide a service which is not running profitably, had I shelled out for this service, I’m pretty sure I’d have been disgruntled to still be paying for a product which was effectively “under test” – whatever the results. On the other hand, the rest of the customer service was very good - emails were delivered promptly, the instructions were always clear, and response to queries was always prompt and courteous.
Whilst the product was very easy to implement early on, it has become a little more time consuming with more selections – up to 21 in a day. This may have put some pressure on your betting bank, but Betfair does make SP laying using a maximum odds level quite straightforward. You certainly don’t need to be around during the racing – it can all be done in the morning.
So, a “Final” Review which unfortunately doesn’t provide a clear answer – and perhaps leaves the door open for a further look should the product offer become established on a long term footing.
Inspector Colin
[Click Here to View the Lay Of The Day sales page]
Insp Colin Lay of the Day – Final Review Summary
Written by on Jan 5th, 2012. Comment.
Passed with 5/5 Stars!
- All
By The Book Rating:
Passed with 4.5/5 stars!
- Betfair ATM Rating:
- Bonus Bagging Rating:
- Golden Key Method 2 Rating:
- Layers Of Profit Rating:
- The BetPlan Rating:
Latest Discussion