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

[Click here to see Little Acorns]