Sea-Sea-Seasiders Sea-Sea-Seasiders…
Occasionally, I have to be permitted a bit of self-indulgence and today’s post is exactly that.
Last Sunday, the mighty Blackpool gained promotion to the second tier of the English game for the first time in twenty nine years. Furthermore, the Seasiders won a club record ten consecutive games to close the season after only winning one of their first twelve matches and sitting in the relegation zone.
Coincidentally, the game that relegated the Pool all those years ago was my first experience of a fixed football match and, with hindsight and a touch of creative thinking, might be seen as the initial prompt that would lead to my becoming a professional gambler and, indeed, to creating the Football Is Fixed blog. The match was between Cardiff and Orient and only one outcome would lead to the Tangerines being relegated and, sure enough, that outcome came to fruition and Blackpool went down with the highest points total ever for a demoted side from the old Division Two.
The intervening years have produced some joy but much pain – losing twice to Altrincham in the FA Cup wasn’t exactly a grin and neither was turning a 2-0 1st Leg Play Off Semi Final lead gained at Bradford into a 0-3 home defeat thanks to some highly imaginative goalkeeping by a certain Eric Nixon and some idiotic presumptions of success by the Blackpool hierarchy (putting travel plans for the Wembley final in the match programme was utilised by the Yorkshiremen as a motivator, for instance).
The current Blackpool side is the best I’ve seen since the team of Mickey Walsh, Paul Hart and Peter Suddaby that repeatedly flirted with promotion to the top league and, equally, repeatedly failed at the last possible moment. Valeri Belokon, our Latvian owner, is targeting the Premiership title within five years which is entirely realistic, of course, if viewed through tangerine tinted glasses. More importantly than impossible tangerine dreams is the prospect of mocking the hillbillies of Burnley and the idiotic town of Preston again. Those distant memories of deciding to drive through Preston on a return journey to Manchester from Blackpool to celebrate a relegation for the lillyshites still linger on. We must have been crazy!
Blackpool is a big team with a big history. It deserves it’s place in the Championship and seeing 45,000 tangerine clad individuals at Wembley is an indication of the pulling power of the Pool. The players devoted the victory to all-time great Jimmy Armfield who is fighting cancer and the recently deceased Alan Ball (who was still a Blackpool player when he ran the show in the 1966 World Cup Final that still defines the mentality of the English fan).
Until recently, Blackpool received more tourists annually than Greece and all of it’s islands, but urban decline has been the pattern of late and it is interesting (and slightly disturbing) that the only blip in the Pool’s march to promotion was seen in the weeks following the government’s decision to place the first super-casino in Manchester rather than on the Fylde coast. The town doesn’t need fake urban regeneration of this type.
However, there are two factors that would allow Blackpool to become a proper force once again in English football. Unfortunately, the reopening of the bidding process for the super-casino is one of these factors. If Blackpool were to be selected in the first or second wave of victim locations, the club would inevitably benefit in a range of ways. Secondly, if Sepp Blatter were to succeed in achieving a summer football season, again the Seasiders would gain from the tourists popping in to see us hammer Chelsea via a Kiegan Parker hat trick.
I’m still in a slight state of shock over the performance of Blackpool’s promotion, Celtic’s double, FC United of Manchester’s title and AO Kerkyra almost remaining in the Hellenic Super League by achieving a draw away to the mighty Panathinaikos on the final day of the season. The clubs that I follow hardly represent glory hunting and it doesn’t come much better than this. At the very least, the success of Blackpool will lead to Bloomfield Road’s reconstruction being completed and I noticed that the first under cover stand is being erected in Garitsa (which is surely the only ground in the world where two countries, Albania and Greece, may be seen from an idyllic island). Additionally, one would hope that the Pool seek out a more robust shirt sponsor than Pointbet – the Indonesian bookmaker who disappeared underground in January closely followed by the policing authorities. The corruption in the game has tentacles which stretch a considerable distance down the English game.
But, for today, who cares?
Ee-I-Ee-I-Ee-I-O Up The Football League We Go…
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Thursday 31 May 2007
Sunday 27 May 2007
Deal Or No Deal Or No Choice
Deal Or No Deal is a highly manipulative gameshow from Endemol, the company that has brought the "pleasure" of Big Brother and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? to television screens all over the world. As is always the case with the Dutch company, considerable creative game theory underpins the competitive structure of the programme and, in this post, we intend to assess the various manipulations that enable Endemol to maximise their profits at the expense of the members of the public who are naive enough to get involved in the show at any level.
To explain the show to the uninitiated, Deal Or No Deal features twenty two contestants each of whom is in possession of a box which contains an indicator of a sum of money ranging from 1 pence to a quarter of a million pounds sterling. A computer randomly selects one of the contestants and this individual attempts to eliminate, by personal selection, the smallest amounts of cash while leaving the life changing amounts untouched. As the number of boxes decreases from 22 to 17 to 14 to 11 to 8 to 5 to 2, a banker phones through to the show's presenter to offer an amount for the box that the contestant possesses and the contestant then has to decide whether to accept the deal or to continue on with the process. Geddit?
The whole process is rigged from the moment that you pick up the phone to register your desire both to give Endemol the inflated cost of that initial call and to be on the show. Endemol plug the show at key times ie when there has been a big winner or when a contestant has pulled back from the brink of disaster to earn a life changing (to them) amount of money. "Clear all your debts, buy a new car, have that holiday that your family deserves, pay for your child's university education, look how easy it is, you can win all this just by one simple phonecall" screams smiley Noel Edmonds in the sweater knitted by his grandmother "you KNOW that you can trust me".
Deal Or No Deal depends entirely on addiction - addiction to gambling which forms the basis of the game's format and addiction to the consumerist items that might be purchased with any potential winnings. It is the monitoring of people's addictive tendencies under stress that makes the show interesting from a game theoretic perspective.
So, let's imagine that you have phoned through several hundred times and you are now one of the chosen twenty two. How do Endemol go about maximising their returns and minimising yours?
1) Prior to the selection of individuals to appear on the show, Endemol undertakes extensive background checks as there are certain types of individual that are significantly more preferable from their perspective. The poor and people with debts and people who think mathematically but with conventional wisdom and gambling addicts and the befuddled are the contestants of choice - market analysts, the rich, game theorists and creative lateral thinkers are, however, conspicuous by their absence. The reasons for this filtration is critical not only for the amounts of money that the latter grouping might achieve during their appearance but also for the publicity that their game mentality would have on Endemol's future earnings. One can increase one's chances of selection by being as invisible as possible within society and coming across as one of life's victims - claim to believe in astrology and an aversion to the number 13, for example.
2) Despite taking these precautions, there are further advantages to Endemol in the structure of the show. The average contestant appears for twenty one shows prior to selection for their game and Endemol undertake extensive psychological profiling of all participants including the monitoring of reactions under stress, socialisation choices, magical thinking, learned helplessness and degrees of confidence. By the time you take your meaningful (and informational) personal belongings with the red box up to the contestant's table, these people have got you sussed.
3) A prime target of Endemol both via background research and focusing on interpersonal interactions is the current financial needs of a contestant. What short and medium term financial goals and obstacles exist in a contestant's current life? This is very key as it allows the presenter and the banker to structure the offers in a manner that optimises the outcome from the perspective of Endemol.
4) The banker is the queen bee in this operation. This invisible and nameless individual is in total control of the process. He plays psychological games that are based on previous contestant's patterns of behaviour particularly those with similar personality styles and disorders - it should be noted here that we all believe that we are unique and individualistic but we are actually all merely an accumulation of different subsets of psychological factors. Prior to any game, the banker has a clear strategy about what to offer as a prize and when to offer it, when to be generous and when to be provocative. The most entertaining aspect regarding the banker is the creation of a personality for this invisible man by Edmonds. Contestants are placed in the territory of mind games with a character that is, effectively, a blank piece of paper. For all we know, there could be more than one banker or perhaps the banker undertakes entirely different attitudes as a game plan or whatever.
5) One of the main manipulative practices in Deal Or No Deal is the illusion that both the contestant and their accompanying box are chosen randomly by computer. Not so. Endemol choose the required contestant once they feel that the playing field is suitably tilted in their favour. And, as for the quantity of money in the box, there should be an approximately 5% chance of the biggest prize being in the contestant’s box whereas the real figure has actually been around 1%. Endemol are only truly exposed when the quarter of a million pounds is on the table as, even in the best case scenario (from their perspective) of a fully played out game ie 1p being the other box, the banker is going to have to be offering a significant amount.
6) The presenter Noel Edmonds is vital to the success of the scam in a similar manner that Chris Tarrant is with respect to Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Edmonds develops a trust link with all competitors who see a friendly face in a hostile and alien environment. Edmonds carefully judges when to target contestant’s psychological flaws with a wide range of manipulative passages that thoroughly undermine any gameplan that the competitor has developed. These presenters are financially rewarded for helping to limit the winnings on the shows – for instance, Tarrant received payment for the first series of Millionaire that was three times the total prize money given out in the entire series!
7) To find the show interesting, one has to either be addicted to gambling or interested in monitoring human behaviour in situations of choice. It is, consequently, not surprising that many bookmakers are offering versions of the game on their internet websites. Once Endemol have determined the degree to which a contestant is likely to gamble, they have ultimate control of the process. With this in mind, it is interesting to assess what type of contestant is likely to be able to maximise their potential returns. Firstly, the rich… The independently wealthy are conspicuous by their absence as such individuals couldn’t be bought off with hints about what they could achieve with the money at any given point in the game. It is not surprising that the first winner of Millionaire was already a millionaire. Secondly, professional poker players, market analysts, statisticians and creative lateral thinking types are also a no-no for Endemol. As mentioned above, the operation does not wish for individuals that are coldly able to determine the real probabilities while seeing through the disinformational bluff. For example, there is never any hint that one might be able to determine the game strategy of the banker by monitoring his offers against the average likely return if the game were repeatedly played out – they do not wish you to consider the normal distribution of outcomes.
8) The final and most entertaining bit of psyche bashing occurs when there are just two boxes left. The banker, at this point, frequently offers the chance to swap the boxes over which is a very tilted arrangement. The banker knows what is in the contestant’s box and, by working with Edmond’s slippery trust, the poor competitor is entirely bamboozled by this offer.
By taking into account the above points and by sticking to a gameplan despite all external provocations, it is possible to optimize your opportunity in this game and, yet, this is still an awkward strategy as being live on television and having your personal psychology mashed up by a slick corporate machine is a severe test of anybody’s cool.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
To explain the show to the uninitiated, Deal Or No Deal features twenty two contestants each of whom is in possession of a box which contains an indicator of a sum of money ranging from 1 pence to a quarter of a million pounds sterling. A computer randomly selects one of the contestants and this individual attempts to eliminate, by personal selection, the smallest amounts of cash while leaving the life changing amounts untouched. As the number of boxes decreases from 22 to 17 to 14 to 11 to 8 to 5 to 2, a banker phones through to the show's presenter to offer an amount for the box that the contestant possesses and the contestant then has to decide whether to accept the deal or to continue on with the process. Geddit?
The whole process is rigged from the moment that you pick up the phone to register your desire both to give Endemol the inflated cost of that initial call and to be on the show. Endemol plug the show at key times ie when there has been a big winner or when a contestant has pulled back from the brink of disaster to earn a life changing (to them) amount of money. "Clear all your debts, buy a new car, have that holiday that your family deserves, pay for your child's university education, look how easy it is, you can win all this just by one simple phonecall" screams smiley Noel Edmonds in the sweater knitted by his grandmother "you KNOW that you can trust me".
Deal Or No Deal depends entirely on addiction - addiction to gambling which forms the basis of the game's format and addiction to the consumerist items that might be purchased with any potential winnings. It is the monitoring of people's addictive tendencies under stress that makes the show interesting from a game theoretic perspective.
So, let's imagine that you have phoned through several hundred times and you are now one of the chosen twenty two. How do Endemol go about maximising their returns and minimising yours?
1) Prior to the selection of individuals to appear on the show, Endemol undertakes extensive background checks as there are certain types of individual that are significantly more preferable from their perspective. The poor and people with debts and people who think mathematically but with conventional wisdom and gambling addicts and the befuddled are the contestants of choice - market analysts, the rich, game theorists and creative lateral thinkers are, however, conspicuous by their absence. The reasons for this filtration is critical not only for the amounts of money that the latter grouping might achieve during their appearance but also for the publicity that their game mentality would have on Endemol's future earnings. One can increase one's chances of selection by being as invisible as possible within society and coming across as one of life's victims - claim to believe in astrology and an aversion to the number 13, for example.
2) Despite taking these precautions, there are further advantages to Endemol in the structure of the show. The average contestant appears for twenty one shows prior to selection for their game and Endemol undertake extensive psychological profiling of all participants including the monitoring of reactions under stress, socialisation choices, magical thinking, learned helplessness and degrees of confidence. By the time you take your meaningful (and informational) personal belongings with the red box up to the contestant's table, these people have got you sussed.
3) A prime target of Endemol both via background research and focusing on interpersonal interactions is the current financial needs of a contestant. What short and medium term financial goals and obstacles exist in a contestant's current life? This is very key as it allows the presenter and the banker to structure the offers in a manner that optimises the outcome from the perspective of Endemol.
4) The banker is the queen bee in this operation. This invisible and nameless individual is in total control of the process. He plays psychological games that are based on previous contestant's patterns of behaviour particularly those with similar personality styles and disorders - it should be noted here that we all believe that we are unique and individualistic but we are actually all merely an accumulation of different subsets of psychological factors. Prior to any game, the banker has a clear strategy about what to offer as a prize and when to offer it, when to be generous and when to be provocative. The most entertaining aspect regarding the banker is the creation of a personality for this invisible man by Edmonds. Contestants are placed in the territory of mind games with a character that is, effectively, a blank piece of paper. For all we know, there could be more than one banker or perhaps the banker undertakes entirely different attitudes as a game plan or whatever.
5) One of the main manipulative practices in Deal Or No Deal is the illusion that both the contestant and their accompanying box are chosen randomly by computer. Not so. Endemol choose the required contestant once they feel that the playing field is suitably tilted in their favour. And, as for the quantity of money in the box, there should be an approximately 5% chance of the biggest prize being in the contestant’s box whereas the real figure has actually been around 1%. Endemol are only truly exposed when the quarter of a million pounds is on the table as, even in the best case scenario (from their perspective) of a fully played out game ie 1p being the other box, the banker is going to have to be offering a significant amount.
6) The presenter Noel Edmonds is vital to the success of the scam in a similar manner that Chris Tarrant is with respect to Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Edmonds develops a trust link with all competitors who see a friendly face in a hostile and alien environment. Edmonds carefully judges when to target contestant’s psychological flaws with a wide range of manipulative passages that thoroughly undermine any gameplan that the competitor has developed. These presenters are financially rewarded for helping to limit the winnings on the shows – for instance, Tarrant received payment for the first series of Millionaire that was three times the total prize money given out in the entire series!
7) To find the show interesting, one has to either be addicted to gambling or interested in monitoring human behaviour in situations of choice. It is, consequently, not surprising that many bookmakers are offering versions of the game on their internet websites. Once Endemol have determined the degree to which a contestant is likely to gamble, they have ultimate control of the process. With this in mind, it is interesting to assess what type of contestant is likely to be able to maximise their potential returns. Firstly, the rich… The independently wealthy are conspicuous by their absence as such individuals couldn’t be bought off with hints about what they could achieve with the money at any given point in the game. It is not surprising that the first winner of Millionaire was already a millionaire. Secondly, professional poker players, market analysts, statisticians and creative lateral thinking types are also a no-no for Endemol. As mentioned above, the operation does not wish for individuals that are coldly able to determine the real probabilities while seeing through the disinformational bluff. For example, there is never any hint that one might be able to determine the game strategy of the banker by monitoring his offers against the average likely return if the game were repeatedly played out – they do not wish you to consider the normal distribution of outcomes.
8) The final and most entertaining bit of psyche bashing occurs when there are just two boxes left. The banker, at this point, frequently offers the chance to swap the boxes over which is a very tilted arrangement. The banker knows what is in the contestant’s box and, by working with Edmond’s slippery trust, the poor competitor is entirely bamboozled by this offer.
By taking into account the above points and by sticking to a gameplan despite all external provocations, it is possible to optimize your opportunity in this game and, yet, this is still an awkward strategy as being live on television and having your personal psychology mashed up by a slick corporate machine is a severe test of anybody’s cool.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Rigged Markets
Over the last six months or so, we have focused on the corruption that undermines football and the linked global betting markets. It will come as little surprise that the International Financial Markets (IFMs) are similarly rigged in favour of the insiders. Many of these abuses take on a similar format due to the parallel structures between these markets – examples would include insider trading, cornering markets, the use of disinformation, cartelised corruptions, price manipulations, monopolistic price control and the mutually beneficial collaborations between the institutions and the marketplace.
However, IFMs are both considerably more advanced in their degree of corruption and significantly more complex to decipher as the closed system is, effectively, the planet as opposed to one sport in one market sector. As with football, our Traders enjoy a marked edge in mature IFMs and much of our approach is isolationist but below we cover some of the manipulations that have existed in recent years and show how these market biases are heavily to the advantage of insiders.
The power people do not wish for public attention to be fixed on their market rigging and one of the prime manners in which this disguise is achieved is via the use of language. Even the most determined intellect can glaze over when faced with terminology like credit derivatives, credit default swaps, collateralised debt obligations and continuous proportion debt obligations. The linguistic mystique created is similar to that utilised by post modernist philosophers like Derrida and Baudrillard except that the POMOS use language in order to be taken seriously academically while the financial system abuses language to secrete their market manipulations. These markets are privatised global three dimensional chess games for the financial elite that enable huge profits to be made by insiders at the expense of the rest of the planet. Equally worryingly, nobody knows for sure how systemic risk is being accommodated by these financial instruments – Warren Buffet refers to credit derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction”, for example.
So let’s have a look at some of their little games shall we?
* Backdated Share Options – A clever wheeze is to link the pay of the chief executives (CEOs) and other captains of industry to the performance of the share price of their respective companies. By aligning the strategy of a business with the rewards to it’s bosses, the thinking went that a more productive and efficient operation would result. Evidently, in the eyes of your average capitalist, this makes sense and general shareholders were co-opted into the structure in the belief that they would be handsomely rewarded for their investments. Not so. Successful CEOs approach all strategy from a psychopathic perspective and the share option scandal took on two forms. Firstly, there was a major incentive for CEOs to inflate their companies price as their personal rewards were positively correlated with this share price. This was achieved by hiding away the bad news and spinning out the good news with the acquiescence of the financial media. This manipulation is corrupt enough but it pales into insignificance when compared with the practice of backdating share options. Following 9/11, the share prices of many businesses in a number of sectors were heavily hit. Some of the bosses, when their annual share options came up for negotiation, chose to exercise their share option at the historical price ie post 9/11 rather than the current market price which had recovered in the interim period. This is market manipulation. As an everyday parallel example, imagine being able to purchase your house NOW at the price it was several years ago – an immediate resale nets a risk free profit. On a moral level, these individuals were profiting from the impact of 9/11. Equally disturbingly, there are no skills required here – insiders will profit no matter how chaotic their market strategy is. The losers are the other shareholders and market analysts while the insiders and their cohorts were laughing all the way to the investment bank.
* Chapter 11 Bankruptcy – In a competitive capitalist system, companies must be allowed to fail otherwise the system is inefficient and resources will not be allocated in an appropriate manner. True? Well, at the bottom of the shareholder capitalist system, this is undoubtedly the case and, indeed, there may not even be internal reasons for the failure as systemic risk and the decisions taken higher up the corporate ladder can erase a business boutique from the marketplace. However, there is no such hazard at the top of the American system. Businesses that are financially distressed may simply enter Chapter 11 and, following a process of debt restructuring, factory closures, workers redundancies and percentage pay-offs to creditors, are allowed to reenter the rat race without their historical millstones and liabilities – the system is only truly competitive at the bottom of the pile. As a further example of this manner of abuse, consider the case of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM). LTCM was a hedge fund established by a couple of economist nobel prize winners which didn’t prevent it from going belly up big style and who came riding to the rescue? You guessed it – the American government (but using public money, of course).
* Currencies and Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) – All countries are in reality businesses. In a manipulative global financial system, the strategy and whims of the major first world governments and the institutions that perform their dirty work eg the IMF, parts of the UN and certain investment banks and hedge funds directly target countries that are seen to be acting in an inappropriate manner with regard to the strategies of the global financial elite. Targeting the currency (as happened with Malaysia, for instance) or the pulling of FDI (too many examples to itemise!) directly destabilises democratically elected governments as a persuasion to do as they are told. This is an incredibly corrupt power play and it is little wonder that countries like Argentina are no longer willing to buy into the IMF model.
* Brokers – Placed in the position of matching trading positions for their clients allows brokers entirely inappropriate powers in the market place. A couple of the multitude of manipulations that exist for these market insiders are given below. Firstly, if a broker accepts a transaction from a client that he knows to be a mug bet, he/she simply pockets the cash and the transaction cost – the mug's position is never activated. This is particularly fruitful in absolute markets where the position taken may be either i) a win or ii) a loss. Secondly, brokers quickly determine the skilled insiders and analysts who are trading with them and offer inducements to attract future positions from such market participants. These preferential trading conditions include trading out of hours to gain a better price, no transaction costs or trading within the margin (again to achieve a more palatable price). It should be noted that such altruism is totally self-serving in that the broker will only allow such advantages so long as the broker is personally able to financially benefit from the information. Highly liquid positions or trades placed close to a threshold in a truncated market structure will not be accepted at all.
* Private Markets - Globally, there are scores of dark pools of liquidity where banks and institutional investors are able to trade anonymously outside the financial system. It is estimated that 15% of trading is now undertaken in this manner.
We could go on and on and on and on…
The rigging of the global financial system to the massive benefit of the industry insiders and to the massive disadvantage of everybody else is the sole structural parameter than forms the foundation of all markets. The manipulators create the game template while depending on regulatory capture ie a weak regulator in the control of an industry sector to ensure that their trading strategies reach fruition. All major stocks are rigged in the US and Britain although it is still possible to detect level playing field markets in some stakeholder capitalist territories.
Information crime is incredibly difficult to detect as the societal structures to police the market abusers simply don’t exist. When abuse does surface, it is highly unusual as the insiders do not make public the relevant data and it is the job of investigative market analysts to expose the corruption and manipulation. The impact of such research is always greater than it should be however as the corrupters do not plan their abusive templates with focus on how outsiders might analyse their manipulations – they focus merely on short term profit…
Part of the sleight of hand that is utilised to disguise this gross manipulation of all of our realities is numerical illiteracy. All of us find it difficult to imagine what we are unable to feel (touchy-feely syndrome). I was trained as an astrophysicist and, yet, a light year is still a tricky distance to comprehend. Similarly, most people are unable to grasp the true size of a million or a billion or a trillion because these are not figures that exist within our daily lives. This inability to perceive the real value of a figure is an extremely valuable tool in the hands of the capitalist system because we simply cannot picture the enormity of their financial abuses. In a mini attempt to illuminate this issue, I have listed a couple of figures below that I have attempted to personalise to everyday language.
a) Nearly half of the population of the developing world lives on less than $2 per day.
b) According to the Bank for International Settlements, the nominal amount of credit default swaps had reached $20 trillion by June 2006. This is the equivalent to investing $3200 PER SECOND since the year 0 BC. Additionally, the total amount traded on shares last year was $69.8 trillion which represents $11200 PER SECOND for the last two millennia! In one year...
J.K. Galbraith stated that “we associate truth with convenience, with what most accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or dislocation in life”. In our refusal to grasp the true magnitude of this psychopathic financial system in order to fill our homes with a million products we don’t need, we are living proof of the wisdom of Galbraith’s angle.
Shareholder capitalism, following on from it’s imperialist, feudal, slave owning history, has been promising the world’s poor for centuries that the only system that is able to improve their sorry lives is capitalism. Where is this improvement? Why are income inequalities higher than any point in history? Why do we put up with this abusive system? Presumably for the consumerist addiction of those one million products that we don’t need…
Collusion between government, finance, big business and military is the dictionary definition of fascism. We are taught in school about the fascism of Mussolini or Hitler but, on closer inspection, our whole history has been defined by fascism. The dictionary definition of fascism applies equally to the British, Ottoman, Spanish, Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese, German and Italian empires; to the feudal system; to the shareholder capitalism of today. Economists dress this dynamic up with the illusory “invisible hand”. This is bollocks. There is no such thing as the invisible hand. The supposed hand is very visible if you look in the right places but it is just not made publicly obvious. The role of coordinating global economic activity has been entirely fascistic for 150 years at least.
Tocquevillian liberals believe that government should encourage better citizenship and that good citizens matter more to a society than good institutions. Shareholder capitalism turns this structure on it’s head and then abuses the new structure so that such institutions are designed and coordinated for the benefit of the few psychopathic operators that run the show. To the extreme annoyance of capitalists, behavioural psychologists define social living as the default norm and capitalistic tendencies as an abusive disorder. Our species stands alone in it’s acceptance of such an abusive system while our fellow creatures have managed to work out that constructive social communities are evidently the best form of life structure and rogue operators are generally driven out of the grouping.
We are all animals…
However, IFMs are both considerably more advanced in their degree of corruption and significantly more complex to decipher as the closed system is, effectively, the planet as opposed to one sport in one market sector. As with football, our Traders enjoy a marked edge in mature IFMs and much of our approach is isolationist but below we cover some of the manipulations that have existed in recent years and show how these market biases are heavily to the advantage of insiders.
The power people do not wish for public attention to be fixed on their market rigging and one of the prime manners in which this disguise is achieved is via the use of language. Even the most determined intellect can glaze over when faced with terminology like credit derivatives, credit default swaps, collateralised debt obligations and continuous proportion debt obligations. The linguistic mystique created is similar to that utilised by post modernist philosophers like Derrida and Baudrillard except that the POMOS use language in order to be taken seriously academically while the financial system abuses language to secrete their market manipulations. These markets are privatised global three dimensional chess games for the financial elite that enable huge profits to be made by insiders at the expense of the rest of the planet. Equally worryingly, nobody knows for sure how systemic risk is being accommodated by these financial instruments – Warren Buffet refers to credit derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction”, for example.
So let’s have a look at some of their little games shall we?
* Backdated Share Options – A clever wheeze is to link the pay of the chief executives (CEOs) and other captains of industry to the performance of the share price of their respective companies. By aligning the strategy of a business with the rewards to it’s bosses, the thinking went that a more productive and efficient operation would result. Evidently, in the eyes of your average capitalist, this makes sense and general shareholders were co-opted into the structure in the belief that they would be handsomely rewarded for their investments. Not so. Successful CEOs approach all strategy from a psychopathic perspective and the share option scandal took on two forms. Firstly, there was a major incentive for CEOs to inflate their companies price as their personal rewards were positively correlated with this share price. This was achieved by hiding away the bad news and spinning out the good news with the acquiescence of the financial media. This manipulation is corrupt enough but it pales into insignificance when compared with the practice of backdating share options. Following 9/11, the share prices of many businesses in a number of sectors were heavily hit. Some of the bosses, when their annual share options came up for negotiation, chose to exercise their share option at the historical price ie post 9/11 rather than the current market price which had recovered in the interim period. This is market manipulation. As an everyday parallel example, imagine being able to purchase your house NOW at the price it was several years ago – an immediate resale nets a risk free profit. On a moral level, these individuals were profiting from the impact of 9/11. Equally disturbingly, there are no skills required here – insiders will profit no matter how chaotic their market strategy is. The losers are the other shareholders and market analysts while the insiders and their cohorts were laughing all the way to the investment bank.
* Chapter 11 Bankruptcy – In a competitive capitalist system, companies must be allowed to fail otherwise the system is inefficient and resources will not be allocated in an appropriate manner. True? Well, at the bottom of the shareholder capitalist system, this is undoubtedly the case and, indeed, there may not even be internal reasons for the failure as systemic risk and the decisions taken higher up the corporate ladder can erase a business boutique from the marketplace. However, there is no such hazard at the top of the American system. Businesses that are financially distressed may simply enter Chapter 11 and, following a process of debt restructuring, factory closures, workers redundancies and percentage pay-offs to creditors, are allowed to reenter the rat race without their historical millstones and liabilities – the system is only truly competitive at the bottom of the pile. As a further example of this manner of abuse, consider the case of Long Term Capital Management (LTCM). LTCM was a hedge fund established by a couple of economist nobel prize winners which didn’t prevent it from going belly up big style and who came riding to the rescue? You guessed it – the American government (but using public money, of course).
* Currencies and Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) – All countries are in reality businesses. In a manipulative global financial system, the strategy and whims of the major first world governments and the institutions that perform their dirty work eg the IMF, parts of the UN and certain investment banks and hedge funds directly target countries that are seen to be acting in an inappropriate manner with regard to the strategies of the global financial elite. Targeting the currency (as happened with Malaysia, for instance) or the pulling of FDI (too many examples to itemise!) directly destabilises democratically elected governments as a persuasion to do as they are told. This is an incredibly corrupt power play and it is little wonder that countries like Argentina are no longer willing to buy into the IMF model.
* Brokers – Placed in the position of matching trading positions for their clients allows brokers entirely inappropriate powers in the market place. A couple of the multitude of manipulations that exist for these market insiders are given below. Firstly, if a broker accepts a transaction from a client that he knows to be a mug bet, he/she simply pockets the cash and the transaction cost – the mug's position is never activated. This is particularly fruitful in absolute markets where the position taken may be either i) a win or ii) a loss. Secondly, brokers quickly determine the skilled insiders and analysts who are trading with them and offer inducements to attract future positions from such market participants. These preferential trading conditions include trading out of hours to gain a better price, no transaction costs or trading within the margin (again to achieve a more palatable price). It should be noted that such altruism is totally self-serving in that the broker will only allow such advantages so long as the broker is personally able to financially benefit from the information. Highly liquid positions or trades placed close to a threshold in a truncated market structure will not be accepted at all.
* Private Markets - Globally, there are scores of dark pools of liquidity where banks and institutional investors are able to trade anonymously outside the financial system. It is estimated that 15% of trading is now undertaken in this manner.
We could go on and on and on and on…
The rigging of the global financial system to the massive benefit of the industry insiders and to the massive disadvantage of everybody else is the sole structural parameter than forms the foundation of all markets. The manipulators create the game template while depending on regulatory capture ie a weak regulator in the control of an industry sector to ensure that their trading strategies reach fruition. All major stocks are rigged in the US and Britain although it is still possible to detect level playing field markets in some stakeholder capitalist territories.
Information crime is incredibly difficult to detect as the societal structures to police the market abusers simply don’t exist. When abuse does surface, it is highly unusual as the insiders do not make public the relevant data and it is the job of investigative market analysts to expose the corruption and manipulation. The impact of such research is always greater than it should be however as the corrupters do not plan their abusive templates with focus on how outsiders might analyse their manipulations – they focus merely on short term profit…
Part of the sleight of hand that is utilised to disguise this gross manipulation of all of our realities is numerical illiteracy. All of us find it difficult to imagine what we are unable to feel (touchy-feely syndrome). I was trained as an astrophysicist and, yet, a light year is still a tricky distance to comprehend. Similarly, most people are unable to grasp the true size of a million or a billion or a trillion because these are not figures that exist within our daily lives. This inability to perceive the real value of a figure is an extremely valuable tool in the hands of the capitalist system because we simply cannot picture the enormity of their financial abuses. In a mini attempt to illuminate this issue, I have listed a couple of figures below that I have attempted to personalise to everyday language.
a) Nearly half of the population of the developing world lives on less than $2 per day.
b) According to the Bank for International Settlements, the nominal amount of credit default swaps had reached $20 trillion by June 2006. This is the equivalent to investing $3200 PER SECOND since the year 0 BC. Additionally, the total amount traded on shares last year was $69.8 trillion which represents $11200 PER SECOND for the last two millennia! In one year...
J.K. Galbraith stated that “we associate truth with convenience, with what most accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or dislocation in life”. In our refusal to grasp the true magnitude of this psychopathic financial system in order to fill our homes with a million products we don’t need, we are living proof of the wisdom of Galbraith’s angle.
Shareholder capitalism, following on from it’s imperialist, feudal, slave owning history, has been promising the world’s poor for centuries that the only system that is able to improve their sorry lives is capitalism. Where is this improvement? Why are income inequalities higher than any point in history? Why do we put up with this abusive system? Presumably for the consumerist addiction of those one million products that we don’t need…
Collusion between government, finance, big business and military is the dictionary definition of fascism. We are taught in school about the fascism of Mussolini or Hitler but, on closer inspection, our whole history has been defined by fascism. The dictionary definition of fascism applies equally to the British, Ottoman, Spanish, Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese, German and Italian empires; to the feudal system; to the shareholder capitalism of today. Economists dress this dynamic up with the illusory “invisible hand”. This is bollocks. There is no such thing as the invisible hand. The supposed hand is very visible if you look in the right places but it is just not made publicly obvious. The role of coordinating global economic activity has been entirely fascistic for 150 years at least.
Tocquevillian liberals believe that government should encourage better citizenship and that good citizens matter more to a society than good institutions. Shareholder capitalism turns this structure on it’s head and then abuses the new structure so that such institutions are designed and coordinated for the benefit of the few psychopathic operators that run the show. To the extreme annoyance of capitalists, behavioural psychologists define social living as the default norm and capitalistic tendencies as an abusive disorder. Our species stands alone in it’s acceptance of such an abusive system while our fellow creatures have managed to work out that constructive social communities are evidently the best form of life structure and rogue operators are generally driven out of the grouping.
We are all animals…
Thursday 24 May 2007
Low Lie The Fields Of Athens
Congratulations are in order to AC Mafia for winning this season's Champions League Final despite originally not having qualified for the tournament due to their role in calciocaos. Galliani going up to receive the trophy with the Milan players while Berlusconi modestly applauded while sitting next to Blatter seems a thoroughly fitting finale to the season.
The match included most of the reasonings behind our starting of this blog focusing on corruption in football. The power abuse by Milan gave them a totally unmerited place not only in Europe's premier competition but also in Serie A. Milan were as guilty as Juventus in the fixing of Italian matches and should also have been relegated but the Agnelli's are not as powerful as Blair's buddy Berlusconi.
The poor organisation, unsuitable playing surface, rampant ticket touting, pre and post match rioting and a match featuring two teams who only had eleven truly competitive games all season due to their forced or strategic focus on the Champions League produced a very moderate occasion.
Liverpool's team selection was non astute. Why it took Benitez so long to realise than Zenden is an entirely overrated liability is beyond me but the Liverpool manager was not helped by the creative officiating of Herbie Fandel. If you can be bothered, check through the ninety minutes action and monitor the German's refereeing of Dirk Kuyt and Zenden. Modern day strategic management requires real time profiling of the power individual's hidden agendas and Germany's Fandel evidently has a problem with the Netherlands. Additionally, substitutions and injuries in the second half should have resulted in a minimum of four minutes injury time plus a little extra for Milan's 91st minute substitution. By blowing the whistle fully one minute forty five seconds early, Fandel imposed a further proprietary restriction on the game in addition to his allowance of Inzaghi's handled opening goal. Fandel should never have been provided with the kudos of officiating such a major game anyway following his inflammatory performance in the 1st leg of the Roma versus Man Utd Quarter Final.
This degree of influence has to be taken away from the referees and the game also needs further meritocratisation with the onset of technology as the match was characterised by numerous incorrect offside decisions. Blatter refuses to actively support technology unless it is 100% perfect which is an effective way of allowing the corruption to continue. This 100% threshold is bandied about as if the referees and their assistants are currently achieving some similarly high percentage of correctness in their decision making. Not so. If four out of ten offside decisions are incorrect even technology that is only able to reduce this to 3 out of 10 is to be welcomed and, yet, we firmly believe a level of 95% plus is possible without any great scientific breakthrough.
The match included most of the reasonings behind our starting of this blog focusing on corruption in football. The power abuse by Milan gave them a totally unmerited place not only in Europe's premier competition but also in Serie A. Milan were as guilty as Juventus in the fixing of Italian matches and should also have been relegated but the Agnelli's are not as powerful as Blair's buddy Berlusconi.
The poor organisation, unsuitable playing surface, rampant ticket touting, pre and post match rioting and a match featuring two teams who only had eleven truly competitive games all season due to their forced or strategic focus on the Champions League produced a very moderate occasion.
Liverpool's team selection was non astute. Why it took Benitez so long to realise than Zenden is an entirely overrated liability is beyond me but the Liverpool manager was not helped by the creative officiating of Herbie Fandel. If you can be bothered, check through the ninety minutes action and monitor the German's refereeing of Dirk Kuyt and Zenden. Modern day strategic management requires real time profiling of the power individual's hidden agendas and Germany's Fandel evidently has a problem with the Netherlands. Additionally, substitutions and injuries in the second half should have resulted in a minimum of four minutes injury time plus a little extra for Milan's 91st minute substitution. By blowing the whistle fully one minute forty five seconds early, Fandel imposed a further proprietary restriction on the game in addition to his allowance of Inzaghi's handled opening goal. Fandel should never have been provided with the kudos of officiating such a major game anyway following his inflammatory performance in the 1st leg of the Roma versus Man Utd Quarter Final.
This degree of influence has to be taken away from the referees and the game also needs further meritocratisation with the onset of technology as the match was characterised by numerous incorrect offside decisions. Blatter refuses to actively support technology unless it is 100% perfect which is an effective way of allowing the corruption to continue. This 100% threshold is bandied about as if the referees and their assistants are currently achieving some similarly high percentage of correctness in their decision making. Not so. If four out of ten offside decisions are incorrect even technology that is only able to reduce this to 3 out of 10 is to be welcomed and, yet, we firmly believe a level of 95% plus is possible without any great scientific breakthrough.
Tuesday 22 May 2007
The Basic Rules Of A Successful Trading Mentality
Our Unified Trading Model (UTM) incorporates several tens of thousands of trading rules to enable the model to holistically analyse any particular market. These microfocused rules are highly specificised but below we attempt to provide twenty key ways to ensure that a market participant is able to operate on a level playing field.
1) Analyse a large number of markets but be selective in one's trading.
2) Source valuable information whether interpersonal or analytical.
3) Treat all information as being of potentially equal value unless determinable otherwise.
4) Never distort information to suit one's personal psychology.
5) Contrary trading is solid. Sell at a top and buy at a bottom.
6) Never base positions on the trading dynamics and decisions of the rest of society. Individualise one's strategy.
7) Be selective in your informational sources in relation to the big picture.
8) Develop a rules based system of trading and the monitoring of prices.
9) Be risk averse on lower level positions but trade high on certainties.
10) Only close out winning positions if one's analysis of price is supportive of such profit taking.
11) Do not allow trades to run once the basis for such positions has been undermined by new information.
12) Never ever gamble. All losses that one is able to avoid are the equivalent in impact of winning trades with regard to one's cash flow.
13) Develop logical staking level rules.
14) Always be aware of the market sector phase and undertake chart pattern analysis to determine the cyclical aspects with respect to a trade.
15) Do not recreate trading rules in real time in order to suit one's gut feeling towards a particular market structure.
16) Listen to others but trust yourself.
17) All modelling is based on a fundamental assessment of value. If there is no value in a position because all the information is in the price then one is better out of the market.
18) Only hedge highly corrupt markets where late breaking information absolutely undermines any basis for the original trading position.
19) Be holistic.
20) If you do not know who you are, the markets are an expensive place to find out.
1) Analyse a large number of markets but be selective in one's trading.
2) Source valuable information whether interpersonal or analytical.
3) Treat all information as being of potentially equal value unless determinable otherwise.
4) Never distort information to suit one's personal psychology.
5) Contrary trading is solid. Sell at a top and buy at a bottom.
6) Never base positions on the trading dynamics and decisions of the rest of society. Individualise one's strategy.
7) Be selective in your informational sources in relation to the big picture.
8) Develop a rules based system of trading and the monitoring of prices.
9) Be risk averse on lower level positions but trade high on certainties.
10) Only close out winning positions if one's analysis of price is supportive of such profit taking.
11) Do not allow trades to run once the basis for such positions has been undermined by new information.
12) Never ever gamble. All losses that one is able to avoid are the equivalent in impact of winning trades with regard to one's cash flow.
13) Develop logical staking level rules.
14) Always be aware of the market sector phase and undertake chart pattern analysis to determine the cyclical aspects with respect to a trade.
15) Do not recreate trading rules in real time in order to suit one's gut feeling towards a particular market structure.
16) Listen to others but trust yourself.
17) All modelling is based on a fundamental assessment of value. If there is no value in a position because all the information is in the price then one is better out of the market.
18) Only hedge highly corrupt markets where late breaking information absolutely undermines any basis for the original trading position.
19) Be holistic.
20) If you do not know who you are, the markets are an expensive place to find out.
Monday 21 May 2007
Everybody Loves The Sunshine
There will be less frequent posts on the Football Is Fixed blog over the next eight weeks due to the fact that we all deserve our vacations. Obviously, work never stops in the 24/7 world of the global markets but I limit my input to 35 hours per week in holiday windows and, unfortunately, my colleagues, business and consultancies must take precedence over my altruism. I would envisage 2-4 posts per week particularly grouped around the key betting windows - Champions League Final, English Divisional Play Offs, Euro 2008 Qualifiers and Copa América.
Dietrological Platinum and Gold clients should be aware that information and posts will be sent out from the Kerkyra office as usual but that I will NOT be on mobile communications at any time in this window. Information for Dietrological Professional and Leisure clients will merely cover the competitions mentioned above.
By all means continue with emails but please be patient - there has to be a time for mountainbiking and hammocks! On this point, I really appreciate the feedback that I've received from many readers over the first six months or so of this blog - I've learned huge amounts about our world through your personal overviews of corruptions across territories and sectors. Yet another pleasant benefit of open source mentality.
I am travelling to Venezuela for the Copa América as Dietrological have few links and contacts in Latin America and I've bagsied going :) While there, we are intending to undertake a trial run of our in-running information provision service that will be launched in English Premiership and Champions League for season 2007/08. Our intention is to auction several slots for the duration of the season (we haven't yet determined the optimum auction model structure) whereby information will be made available in real-time as the matches are in duration. Initially, we will only be able to cover five concurrent matches although we hope to be 100% coverage for the second half of the season. Clients will be linked to our intranet where analyses will be available as soon as our own trading positions have been accommodated. 50% of the liquidity for live matches occurs on the in-running markets but, by necessity, speed is of the essence - it only takes a second to score a goal and lose a trade!
In order that I can spend as much money as possible supporting the Venezuelan economy (joke), we are trialing this system to the first ten organisations or individuals that contact us. £500 ($1000) covers one game per day for the entire tournament. Register interest under "View My Complete Profile" as usual.
Dietrological Platinum and Gold clients should be aware that information and posts will be sent out from the Kerkyra office as usual but that I will NOT be on mobile communications at any time in this window. Information for Dietrological Professional and Leisure clients will merely cover the competitions mentioned above.
By all means continue with emails but please be patient - there has to be a time for mountainbiking and hammocks! On this point, I really appreciate the feedback that I've received from many readers over the first six months or so of this blog - I've learned huge amounts about our world through your personal overviews of corruptions across territories and sectors. Yet another pleasant benefit of open source mentality.
I am travelling to Venezuela for the Copa América as Dietrological have few links and contacts in Latin America and I've bagsied going :) While there, we are intending to undertake a trial run of our in-running information provision service that will be launched in English Premiership and Champions League for season 2007/08. Our intention is to auction several slots for the duration of the season (we haven't yet determined the optimum auction model structure) whereby information will be made available in real-time as the matches are in duration. Initially, we will only be able to cover five concurrent matches although we hope to be 100% coverage for the second half of the season. Clients will be linked to our intranet where analyses will be available as soon as our own trading positions have been accommodated. 50% of the liquidity for live matches occurs on the in-running markets but, by necessity, speed is of the essence - it only takes a second to score a goal and lose a trade!
In order that I can spend as much money as possible supporting the Venezuelan economy (joke), we are trialing this system to the first ten organisations or individuals that contact us. £500 ($1000) covers one game per day for the entire tournament. Register interest under "View My Complete Profile" as usual.
Sunday 20 May 2007
A Shit Hanging From A Stick Mk II
The new Wembley Stadium is the most expensive sports stadium in the world coming in at around £1 billion ($2 billion) about 45% of which is public money - professional fees for lawyers alone reach over £150 million. As a comparison, the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff cost £125 million and the Stade De France £190 million (at 1999 and 1998 prices respectively) while the rival bids for an English national stadium were around 40% of the cost of the new Wembley. This staggering price has been created by ineffective governorship by Multiplex (the construction company), Wembley National Stadium Ltd (WNSL) and the British government.
WNSL is a wholly owned subsidiary of our highly ineffective and politicised Football Association (FA) and their inability to collaborate and compromise has been a constant drain on resources while Multiplex were simply out of their depth once they had been selected in a rather opaque tendering process. The government, as ever, has to share much of the blame. The insistence that the national stadium be in London was typical of the rampant centralisation of all valued projects in England and, by choosing the capital rather than the regions, the government charged every single person in the country an extra £5. Regeneration of the regions and creative urban regeneration do not form a part of the government's hidden manifesto. As an example, when Manchester attempted to host the Olympic Games, London's support was conspicuous by it's absence. Compare this with the efforts made by the great and the good to bring the games to London and the difference in attitude of the government is obvious. Already (five years prior to the event), the Treasury and the Department of Culture Media and Sport are expecting the cost of the games to be FOUR TIMES the original estimate of £2.35 billion. Indeed, the centralisation of prestige projects while the regions get the nuclear power stations and act as the testing ground for the social impacts of the super-casino is the standard national template in England.
Anyway, back to Wembley... So, we accept being ripped off again and we tolerate this centralisation because we expect that, despite the cost and time overruns and the highly ineffective management of the project at all levels, a professional venue for the global game has been created. Really?
Within sixty seconds of the game starting, it was evident that £1 billion does not necessarily mean that a suitable pitch can be created. The ball bobbled all over the place throughout the game undermining any hope of a sporting spectacle - Ronaldo may well have been tired after a long season but a poor pitch is a great skill leveller. It is surely pertinent that the only decent team move in the whole game was that which led to Chelsea's winning goal and, here, the ball was volleyed between players avoiding the dreaded turf. One month ago, Alan Shearer played a five a side game at the new Wembley and stated that the pitch simply wasn't up to the task. Did WNSL replace the surface? What, and spend yet more cash, of course not... The imperative was rather to overcharge the true fans with ludicrous ticket prices that meant that the first FA Cup Final at the stadium was nowhere near sold out while allowing freebies to all insiders. The spectacle that the FA desired turned into a damp squib which, considering the massive amount of manipulation undertaken by the FA to ensure a Man Utd/Chelsea Final, is scandalous (even from their perspective). Despite the myopic noises suggesting that the new Wembley had been worth waiting for, this is just spectacular society spin. It wasn't. There was a colossal global audience for this turgid entertainment (sic) and, if Jorge Valdano thought the all-English Champions League Semi Final was like watching "a shit hanging from a stick", what on earth did the man make of yesterday?
The last two FA Cup competitions have taken on degrees of manipulation beyond the standard nonsense that we have come to expect. Numerous previous posts have correctly predicted and itemised these machinations and yesterday was another piece of revenue for my Trading Team but the competition has been entirely devalued.
One incident summed up the whole event. Essien fouls Giggs/ Giggs scores/ Bennett gives nothing (neither a goal nor a foul by Essien nor a foul by Giggs). The reality had to be one of these things as the ball clearly crossed the line. Plastic Paddy Lawrensen immediately earned his consultancy fee from the Professional Game Match Officials Board (PGMOB) by studiously avoiding the evidence with a progressive retraction from "excellent refereeing by Bennett" to "it didn't cross the line" to "even if it did cross the line, it was a foul by Giggs" to "the ref definitely got it right" - is he paid by the quote?
Of course, the utilisation of goalline technology would have solved the issue but we are repeatedly told that such technology cannot yet be created. NASA can send probes into space that are able to utilise the gravitational effects and solar system positioning of our celestial neighbours to visit several other planets and their moons on one journey but determining whether a football crosses a line is, apparently, still beyond our modern science.
Give me one week with an applied physicist and an IT person and we could create a system that works for goallines and offsides. This is absolutely not complex. The dynamic for a truly meritocratic game is once again trumped by the requirement of the manipulators to maintain as much control on outcome as possible in the hands of our beloved Mr Bennett or whoever else happens to be selected to shape our realities.
WNSL is a wholly owned subsidiary of our highly ineffective and politicised Football Association (FA) and their inability to collaborate and compromise has been a constant drain on resources while Multiplex were simply out of their depth once they had been selected in a rather opaque tendering process. The government, as ever, has to share much of the blame. The insistence that the national stadium be in London was typical of the rampant centralisation of all valued projects in England and, by choosing the capital rather than the regions, the government charged every single person in the country an extra £5. Regeneration of the regions and creative urban regeneration do not form a part of the government's hidden manifesto. As an example, when Manchester attempted to host the Olympic Games, London's support was conspicuous by it's absence. Compare this with the efforts made by the great and the good to bring the games to London and the difference in attitude of the government is obvious. Already (five years prior to the event), the Treasury and the Department of Culture Media and Sport are expecting the cost of the games to be FOUR TIMES the original estimate of £2.35 billion. Indeed, the centralisation of prestige projects while the regions get the nuclear power stations and act as the testing ground for the social impacts of the super-casino is the standard national template in England.
Anyway, back to Wembley... So, we accept being ripped off again and we tolerate this centralisation because we expect that, despite the cost and time overruns and the highly ineffective management of the project at all levels, a professional venue for the global game has been created. Really?
Within sixty seconds of the game starting, it was evident that £1 billion does not necessarily mean that a suitable pitch can be created. The ball bobbled all over the place throughout the game undermining any hope of a sporting spectacle - Ronaldo may well have been tired after a long season but a poor pitch is a great skill leveller. It is surely pertinent that the only decent team move in the whole game was that which led to Chelsea's winning goal and, here, the ball was volleyed between players avoiding the dreaded turf. One month ago, Alan Shearer played a five a side game at the new Wembley and stated that the pitch simply wasn't up to the task. Did WNSL replace the surface? What, and spend yet more cash, of course not... The imperative was rather to overcharge the true fans with ludicrous ticket prices that meant that the first FA Cup Final at the stadium was nowhere near sold out while allowing freebies to all insiders. The spectacle that the FA desired turned into a damp squib which, considering the massive amount of manipulation undertaken by the FA to ensure a Man Utd/Chelsea Final, is scandalous (even from their perspective). Despite the myopic noises suggesting that the new Wembley had been worth waiting for, this is just spectacular society spin. It wasn't. There was a colossal global audience for this turgid entertainment (sic) and, if Jorge Valdano thought the all-English Champions League Semi Final was like watching "a shit hanging from a stick", what on earth did the man make of yesterday?
The last two FA Cup competitions have taken on degrees of manipulation beyond the standard nonsense that we have come to expect. Numerous previous posts have correctly predicted and itemised these machinations and yesterday was another piece of revenue for my Trading Team but the competition has been entirely devalued.
One incident summed up the whole event. Essien fouls Giggs/ Giggs scores/ Bennett gives nothing (neither a goal nor a foul by Essien nor a foul by Giggs). The reality had to be one of these things as the ball clearly crossed the line. Plastic Paddy Lawrensen immediately earned his consultancy fee from the Professional Game Match Officials Board (PGMOB) by studiously avoiding the evidence with a progressive retraction from "excellent refereeing by Bennett" to "it didn't cross the line" to "even if it did cross the line, it was a foul by Giggs" to "the ref definitely got it right" - is he paid by the quote?
Of course, the utilisation of goalline technology would have solved the issue but we are repeatedly told that such technology cannot yet be created. NASA can send probes into space that are able to utilise the gravitational effects and solar system positioning of our celestial neighbours to visit several other planets and their moons on one journey but determining whether a football crosses a line is, apparently, still beyond our modern science.
Give me one week with an applied physicist and an IT person and we could create a system that works for goallines and offsides. This is absolutely not complex. The dynamic for a truly meritocratic game is once again trumped by the requirement of the manipulators to maintain as much control on outcome as possible in the hands of our beloved Mr Bennett or whoever else happens to be selected to shape our realities.
Saturday 19 May 2007
Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely And Globally
The omnipresence of corrupt formats and hierarchies spreads across the entire capitalist infrastructure - from football to business and from politics to finance. Due to the extensive and singular rewards available to a monopolist, there is a constant dynamic underpinning the strategies of all power groups which aims to effectively corner all relevant sectors. These manipulations of our world and our lives create huge inefficiencies in the shareholder capitalist system as individuals are chosen not meritocratically but via a whole range of different non-democratic processes.
No matter how these individual power bases are established and structured, there are a number of factors that appear with repetitive regularity when one chooses to analyse corruption.
* Secrecy - Whether a strategy is semi-legal or illegal, a prime concern of monopolists is the control of information flow that might undermine their power. This may be achieved internally by both limiting the number of participants in a corruption and by structuring the internal hierarchy in manners appropriate to the needs of the individuals at the top of such hierarchies. Although this system of concentric circles of power within a monopolistic organisation is in the interests of all insiders, it is particularly valuable to the prime manipulators ie the positions of ultimate power.
* Hierarchy - Different undemocratic hierarchies result from the age of a particular manipulative structure. New areas of cartelisation and monopoly (eg football) tend to be more horizontally integrated than the older establishment organisations (eg the triads and the freemasons) that are highly vertically integrated. This is not to imply that, say, Rupert Murdoch and Andy Gray are equally powerful, but rather to indicate that there are less levels to Sky's pyramid of control within their vertical monopoly.
* Competitive Corruption - Although the goal of all mature businesses and organisations is monopolistic control, the presence of governmental bodies adds friction to the dynamics of the process. Unfortunately, this deceleration is merely a temporary factor as, eventually, either the strategies of government and corrupt organisations develop shared synergies or creative bribery greases the necessary palms of the state. The window of market activity prior to monopoly sees different power groups battling for the ultimate control of their sectors. For example, the global football markets are currently being fought over by American private equity firms, Sky television, the triads behind the highly liquid Asian markets, the Russian and Italian mafia, the major European bookmakers and the B'nai B'rith zionist entity.
* Generational Issues of Subtlety - One of the reasons that the corruption in football is comparatively easy to model in comparison with more expansive societal criminality is that football's structures are naive in their format. Creative corruption is scientific in it's foundations and utilises logic, psychology, sociology, game theory etc etc. Experience, both within and between generations, of a power base helps to establish a considerably more opaque entity which requires significantly more advanced algorithms to solve.
* The Media - The media are more than happy to confront corruption in other cultures and territories but virtually never focus on the corruption within their own system - although it should be noted that this willingness to publicise foreign criminality tends to disappear if linked to corrupt structures in the media outlet's prime territory. Masonic and corrupt entities directly target the necessary societal sectors to enhance their power and the media is a critical part of informational control in spectacular society. For example, in twenty years of reading The Economist, I have never seen the word "freemason" mentioned once which is highly peculiar considering the omnipresence of the masonic handshake in business, politics, military, the police and the legal system. Similarly, isn't it slightly unusual that the Asian betting markets rarely are mentioned in the media despite over 95% of global football betting turnover occurring in the Far East? In the words of Chomsky, "propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state".
* Viral Nature of Corruption - Once a power grouping has identified the requirement to control a particular business, sector or organisation to the benefit of their proprietary strategy, the prime aim is to infiltrate. Only one individual is needed initially and the takeover proceeds exponentially as the target operation is increasingly and virally overrun. For example, during a consultative project, one of our Trading Team watched the Board of Directors of one particular organisation develop from one member of the catenians to total catenian control within ten years. In football, the equivalent process sees firstly one referee corrupted by the system prior to an extension of this control through the co-opting of other referees (sometimes by force but more usually by utilising the fact that everyone has their price).
* In different territories, different power strategies are utilised to optimise the control. For example, in Italy their mafia target businesses, the legal system, the Italian investment banks, media, sport etc - how else did Berlusconi avoid prosecution repeatedly through statute of limitations or, for that matter, convert Milan's 45 point deduction and relegation to Serie B into a top four finish in Serie A and a place in the Champions League final? Meanwhile, in China, the triads are big on distributive networks, business and gambling. Each corrupt edifice incorporates the necessary territorial power loci.
* In many locations, the educational system forms the foundation of the corruption. As an example, Nicolas Sarkozy is the first Gaullist president since Pompidou not to have graduated from the elite Ecole Nationale d'Administration in Paris (Hungarian ancestry, you see) while the ubiquitous Oxbridge is an ever present in the British hierarchy.
A combination of some or all of these factors allow psychopathic operations to effectively corner their target markets, sectors and territories. These groups exert control on a capitalist system that was specifically designed for the maintenance of control whether it was medieval steeplejacks in England or the American private equity firms of today. When these power operations have achieved their monopolistic control, their prime aims are both to utilise this control for financial gain and to ensure that such control is not relinquished willingly.
If the masses are to be expected to accept this degree of corruption regarding both income inequalities and a hierarchical class system then surely the compromise must be a meritocratic system. Not so. Meritocracy is as much an anathema to the power operators as the dreaded positive discrimination (affirmative action in the US/ quotas in South Africa). Any structure that enhances the opportunities of the systemically disenfranchised groups is regarded as a "manipulation" of the markets by capitalists - totally unlike the masons, catenians, mafia and monopolistic concerns then! There is a simple and blatant duality of reality here. Discrimination in favour of the poor = bad; manipulations and corruptions in favour of the power people = good. The efficiency and productivity of the global economic system is undermined by the widespread and inappropriate corruption and nepotism that exists at the top of the system. It is this lack of meritocracy at the top that results in the First and Second World's employment stresses and pressures and in the Third World's slavery. What sort of meritocracy produces Bush - Clinton - Bush - Clinton presidencies out of a population of 300 million?
Our only leverage is that the power bases may possess the private income, the capital and the contacts but they most certainly lack the charisma and the creativity necessary to achieve their lofty goals. Effectively, within our business structures, these people are upper class but possess no class - their structure is dependent on bribing brains to be acquiescent and obedient.
There are many structural weaknesses to the shareholder capitalist system including it's built-in obsolescence in relation to the finite boundaries of the planet which we share - think climate change. But, an equally major destructive force is education - to maintain the flow of productivity and growth, they must educate a percentage of the masses. It's their problem that we don't all take the bait...
No matter how these individual power bases are established and structured, there are a number of factors that appear with repetitive regularity when one chooses to analyse corruption.
* Secrecy - Whether a strategy is semi-legal or illegal, a prime concern of monopolists is the control of information flow that might undermine their power. This may be achieved internally by both limiting the number of participants in a corruption and by structuring the internal hierarchy in manners appropriate to the needs of the individuals at the top of such hierarchies. Although this system of concentric circles of power within a monopolistic organisation is in the interests of all insiders, it is particularly valuable to the prime manipulators ie the positions of ultimate power.
* Hierarchy - Different undemocratic hierarchies result from the age of a particular manipulative structure. New areas of cartelisation and monopoly (eg football) tend to be more horizontally integrated than the older establishment organisations (eg the triads and the freemasons) that are highly vertically integrated. This is not to imply that, say, Rupert Murdoch and Andy Gray are equally powerful, but rather to indicate that there are less levels to Sky's pyramid of control within their vertical monopoly.
* Competitive Corruption - Although the goal of all mature businesses and organisations is monopolistic control, the presence of governmental bodies adds friction to the dynamics of the process. Unfortunately, this deceleration is merely a temporary factor as, eventually, either the strategies of government and corrupt organisations develop shared synergies or creative bribery greases the necessary palms of the state. The window of market activity prior to monopoly sees different power groups battling for the ultimate control of their sectors. For example, the global football markets are currently being fought over by American private equity firms, Sky television, the triads behind the highly liquid Asian markets, the Russian and Italian mafia, the major European bookmakers and the B'nai B'rith zionist entity.
* Generational Issues of Subtlety - One of the reasons that the corruption in football is comparatively easy to model in comparison with more expansive societal criminality is that football's structures are naive in their format. Creative corruption is scientific in it's foundations and utilises logic, psychology, sociology, game theory etc etc. Experience, both within and between generations, of a power base helps to establish a considerably more opaque entity which requires significantly more advanced algorithms to solve.
* The Media - The media are more than happy to confront corruption in other cultures and territories but virtually never focus on the corruption within their own system - although it should be noted that this willingness to publicise foreign criminality tends to disappear if linked to corrupt structures in the media outlet's prime territory. Masonic and corrupt entities directly target the necessary societal sectors to enhance their power and the media is a critical part of informational control in spectacular society. For example, in twenty years of reading The Economist, I have never seen the word "freemason" mentioned once which is highly peculiar considering the omnipresence of the masonic handshake in business, politics, military, the police and the legal system. Similarly, isn't it slightly unusual that the Asian betting markets rarely are mentioned in the media despite over 95% of global football betting turnover occurring in the Far East? In the words of Chomsky, "propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state".
* Viral Nature of Corruption - Once a power grouping has identified the requirement to control a particular business, sector or organisation to the benefit of their proprietary strategy, the prime aim is to infiltrate. Only one individual is needed initially and the takeover proceeds exponentially as the target operation is increasingly and virally overrun. For example, during a consultative project, one of our Trading Team watched the Board of Directors of one particular organisation develop from one member of the catenians to total catenian control within ten years. In football, the equivalent process sees firstly one referee corrupted by the system prior to an extension of this control through the co-opting of other referees (sometimes by force but more usually by utilising the fact that everyone has their price).
* In different territories, different power strategies are utilised to optimise the control. For example, in Italy their mafia target businesses, the legal system, the Italian investment banks, media, sport etc - how else did Berlusconi avoid prosecution repeatedly through statute of limitations or, for that matter, convert Milan's 45 point deduction and relegation to Serie B into a top four finish in Serie A and a place in the Champions League final? Meanwhile, in China, the triads are big on distributive networks, business and gambling. Each corrupt edifice incorporates the necessary territorial power loci.
* In many locations, the educational system forms the foundation of the corruption. As an example, Nicolas Sarkozy is the first Gaullist president since Pompidou not to have graduated from the elite Ecole Nationale d'Administration in Paris (Hungarian ancestry, you see) while the ubiquitous Oxbridge is an ever present in the British hierarchy.
A combination of some or all of these factors allow psychopathic operations to effectively corner their target markets, sectors and territories. These groups exert control on a capitalist system that was specifically designed for the maintenance of control whether it was medieval steeplejacks in England or the American private equity firms of today. When these power operations have achieved their monopolistic control, their prime aims are both to utilise this control for financial gain and to ensure that such control is not relinquished willingly.
If the masses are to be expected to accept this degree of corruption regarding both income inequalities and a hierarchical class system then surely the compromise must be a meritocratic system. Not so. Meritocracy is as much an anathema to the power operators as the dreaded positive discrimination (affirmative action in the US/ quotas in South Africa). Any structure that enhances the opportunities of the systemically disenfranchised groups is regarded as a "manipulation" of the markets by capitalists - totally unlike the masons, catenians, mafia and monopolistic concerns then! There is a simple and blatant duality of reality here. Discrimination in favour of the poor = bad; manipulations and corruptions in favour of the power people = good. The efficiency and productivity of the global economic system is undermined by the widespread and inappropriate corruption and nepotism that exists at the top of the system. It is this lack of meritocracy at the top that results in the First and Second World's employment stresses and pressures and in the Third World's slavery. What sort of meritocracy produces Bush - Clinton - Bush - Clinton presidencies out of a population of 300 million?
Our only leverage is that the power bases may possess the private income, the capital and the contacts but they most certainly lack the charisma and the creativity necessary to achieve their lofty goals. Effectively, within our business structures, these people are upper class but possess no class - their structure is dependent on bribing brains to be acquiescent and obedient.
There are many structural weaknesses to the shareholder capitalist system including it's built-in obsolescence in relation to the finite boundaries of the planet which we share - think climate change. But, an equally major destructive force is education - to maintain the flow of productivity and growth, they must educate a percentage of the masses. It's their problem that we don't all take the bait...
Friday 18 May 2007
The Bum Ref Index 2006/2007
Based on The Economist's Big Mac Index which utilises the economic fallacy of purchasing power parity to determine which global currencies are over/under-valued, Football is Fixed introduced the Bum Ref Index in November. This assesses the negative impact that Premiership referees have on the games in which they officiate together with our proprietary individual psychological profiling and the institutional and individual manipulations relating to bookmakers, clubs and other corrupt power loci. The final end of season positions are listed below:
16. Wiley 4.13
15. Webb 3.97
14. Styles 3.76
13. Dowd 3.75
12. Bennett 3.30
11. Poll 3.20
10. Rennie 3.11
8. Dean 3.04
8. Foy 3.04
7. Mason 2.76
6. Riley 2.74
5. Walton 2.64
4. Gallagher 2.61
3. Atkinson 2.64
2. Halsey 2.47
And the most meritocratic, least biased and least corrupt referee for 2006/07 is Mark Clattenburg at 2.30. Marriner, Tanner, Probert and Stroud officiated in too few games to develop a database.
Pulling a few revealing pieces of information from the data:
* Trading rooms have been aware of the momentum towards the Professional Game Match Officials Board's (PGMOB) target of achieving a select group of ten referees for Premiership matches. The ten officials that were selected most frequently for Premiership games this season refereed 273 of the 380 games (72% of the matches). Indeed, taking the leading fourteen officials into account shows that only 39 games in the entire season were not under the jurisdiction of this elite group. The absolute minimum structure for ultimate control of the Premiership is ten referees but, obviously, injuries, bans, vacations and European appointments demand that the actual pool be larger than this. Game Theoretic modelling suggests that fourteen is the actual minimum number of referees required for absolute corruption as one has to take account of the critical nature of the 4th official in all live Premiership Sky matches. No other major league globally relies on such a small grouping of officials and there must be a real concern that such a grouping can have such a major impact on the highly liquid global markets.
* One of the justifications presented by the PGMOB to support such a limited grouping of referees is that these officials are, in some manner, superior to your average referee. Some points on this smokescreen. The five referees utilised most frequently throughout the season in Premiership games were Wiley and Poll (31), Styles (29), Webb and Bennett (28). If the PGMOB's arguments stood the test of scrutiny, these officials, being allegedly better than the norm, would be expected to be challenging Mark Clattenburg as the least manipulative ref. Yet, these five individuals occupy 5 of the bottom 6 rankings in our index! Visually, one sees far more meritocratic officiating in the lower English leagues and there is extensive contrary evidence to the assertions of the powers that be.
* The referees do not all sing from the same hymn sheet. Fragmented cartelisation, in all of it's forms, is an incredibly complex area of analysis. With regard to Premiership football officials and with an appreciate nod in the direction of Anna Karenina, all honest referees resemble one another, each corrupt referee is corrupt in his own way.
* Televised games have markedly greater betting turnover and analysis of the live appearances of our little mafia enhances the overall model. Over 50% of the games refereed by Dowd, Styles or Wiley were Sky events and, further, over 40% of Webb, Dean and Poll's events were Murdoch games too. In comparison, Gallagher was selected on just one occasion (7%).
* And the power extends over to the FA Cup with only Bennett, Webb, Dean and Wiley officiating in three or more live televised games.
* Dietrological undertake extensive psychological profiling of all key market participants and, with regard to the refereeing, the above rankings are supported by a more thorough micro-analysis although, for isolationist reasons, we choose not to publicly discuss these areas.
My Trading Team approach all of our analysis and modelling in a blue sky manner. We never approach a particular project with prescribed attitudes to the market operators and power structures. One of the prime reasons that we are able to undertake high level Consultancy Projects in collaboration with leading Premiership clubs (as well as other leading European outfits) is our impartiality. The justifications for squeaky-cleanliness in one's analysis are overbearingly obvious. We analyse the markets to make our living trading on such markets. If we were to approach these markets with proprietary but fallacious blinkers, our trading activities would suffer. Furthermore, establishing ourselves as independent analysts results in our statistics, data and research achieving an extra level of status to all of our consultancies. In contrast, numerous amateurish market participants and insiders create false constructs based on limited knowledge of a market sector. The inability to create Bayesian visions results in these people developing absolutist positions that are simply absurd eg referees being biased towards, say, Manchester United or Chelsea as an actual power structure. Not so. Undoubtedly, the big clubs have clout but the statistics show such generalisations to be hollow and ludicrously simplistic - taking into account club hierarchical power is but merely a cornerstone for a high rise piece of model construction. A little knowledge is a non-profitable thing...
All of our team are in agreement that we would prefer a less corrupt version of the game and we will continue to publicise the manipulations against our game's interests wherever such corruption is rooted. Once we become certain of the negative input of a individual (or a group of individuals), we trade it but, once the information is in the price for the professionals, we will share our observations with Dietrological clients and Football Is Fixed readers.
16. Wiley 4.13
15. Webb 3.97
14. Styles 3.76
13. Dowd 3.75
12. Bennett 3.30
11. Poll 3.20
10. Rennie 3.11
8. Dean 3.04
8. Foy 3.04
7. Mason 2.76
6. Riley 2.74
5. Walton 2.64
4. Gallagher 2.61
3. Atkinson 2.64
2. Halsey 2.47
And the most meritocratic, least biased and least corrupt referee for 2006/07 is Mark Clattenburg at 2.30. Marriner, Tanner, Probert and Stroud officiated in too few games to develop a database.
Pulling a few revealing pieces of information from the data:
* Trading rooms have been aware of the momentum towards the Professional Game Match Officials Board's (PGMOB) target of achieving a select group of ten referees for Premiership matches. The ten officials that were selected most frequently for Premiership games this season refereed 273 of the 380 games (72% of the matches). Indeed, taking the leading fourteen officials into account shows that only 39 games in the entire season were not under the jurisdiction of this elite group. The absolute minimum structure for ultimate control of the Premiership is ten referees but, obviously, injuries, bans, vacations and European appointments demand that the actual pool be larger than this. Game Theoretic modelling suggests that fourteen is the actual minimum number of referees required for absolute corruption as one has to take account of the critical nature of the 4th official in all live Premiership Sky matches. No other major league globally relies on such a small grouping of officials and there must be a real concern that such a grouping can have such a major impact on the highly liquid global markets.
* One of the justifications presented by the PGMOB to support such a limited grouping of referees is that these officials are, in some manner, superior to your average referee. Some points on this smokescreen. The five referees utilised most frequently throughout the season in Premiership games were Wiley and Poll (31), Styles (29), Webb and Bennett (28). If the PGMOB's arguments stood the test of scrutiny, these officials, being allegedly better than the norm, would be expected to be challenging Mark Clattenburg as the least manipulative ref. Yet, these five individuals occupy 5 of the bottom 6 rankings in our index! Visually, one sees far more meritocratic officiating in the lower English leagues and there is extensive contrary evidence to the assertions of the powers that be.
* The referees do not all sing from the same hymn sheet. Fragmented cartelisation, in all of it's forms, is an incredibly complex area of analysis. With regard to Premiership football officials and with an appreciate nod in the direction of Anna Karenina, all honest referees resemble one another, each corrupt referee is corrupt in his own way.
* Televised games have markedly greater betting turnover and analysis of the live appearances of our little mafia enhances the overall model. Over 50% of the games refereed by Dowd, Styles or Wiley were Sky events and, further, over 40% of Webb, Dean and Poll's events were Murdoch games too. In comparison, Gallagher was selected on just one occasion (7%).
* And the power extends over to the FA Cup with only Bennett, Webb, Dean and Wiley officiating in three or more live televised games.
* Dietrological undertake extensive psychological profiling of all key market participants and, with regard to the refereeing, the above rankings are supported by a more thorough micro-analysis although, for isolationist reasons, we choose not to publicly discuss these areas.
My Trading Team approach all of our analysis and modelling in a blue sky manner. We never approach a particular project with prescribed attitudes to the market operators and power structures. One of the prime reasons that we are able to undertake high level Consultancy Projects in collaboration with leading Premiership clubs (as well as other leading European outfits) is our impartiality. The justifications for squeaky-cleanliness in one's analysis are overbearingly obvious. We analyse the markets to make our living trading on such markets. If we were to approach these markets with proprietary but fallacious blinkers, our trading activities would suffer. Furthermore, establishing ourselves as independent analysts results in our statistics, data and research achieving an extra level of status to all of our consultancies. In contrast, numerous amateurish market participants and insiders create false constructs based on limited knowledge of a market sector. The inability to create Bayesian visions results in these people developing absolutist positions that are simply absurd eg referees being biased towards, say, Manchester United or Chelsea as an actual power structure. Not so. Undoubtedly, the big clubs have clout but the statistics show such generalisations to be hollow and ludicrously simplistic - taking into account club hierarchical power is but merely a cornerstone for a high rise piece of model construction. A little knowledge is a non-profitable thing...
All of our team are in agreement that we would prefer a less corrupt version of the game and we will continue to publicise the manipulations against our game's interests wherever such corruption is rooted. Once we become certain of the negative input of a individual (or a group of individuals), we trade it but, once the information is in the price for the professionals, we will share our observations with Dietrological clients and Football Is Fixed readers.
Thursday 17 May 2007
Anthony Blair - Another Of History's Psychopaths
As the era of Anthony Blair's Prime Ministership thankfully draws to it's conclusion, a spot of psychological profiling is in order and, below, we offer a case study indicative of Blair's primary psychological disorder - Psychopathic Personality Disorder (PPDs). For an outline of the paradigm of PPDs, see previous post at: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/01/psychopathic-personality-disorder.html.
Leading psychologists are largely in agreement that the holistic modelling of personality and psychopathology is particularly revealing when one comes to study military, business, financial and political leaders. A statistically significant percentage of such individuals throughout history have exhibited PPDs. So we should not think of Blair as being unusual, he is merely one of the latest in a long line of inappropriate characters. Indeed, Blair's former Chief of Staff described him as "Napoleonic" in a comparison with a historical PPDs figure. PPDs is a combination of two fundamental psychological disorders Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPDs) and Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPDs) and, in our case study, we merely list attributes related to the disorder and leave you to make up your own mind on whether the adjoining prompts are indicative proof of the man's condition.
* Most PPDs are male.
* He has little compassion or guilt for the outcomes of his behaviour - Even if Blair truly believed that waging an illegal war in Iraq following twelve years of continual economic and military bombardment was the correct course of action, where is his remorse for the dead Iraqi civilians and British soldiers? Estimates suggest that up to half a million children died as a result of the economic sanctions and the number of innocent deaths now has reached the stage where the Iraqi government have decided no longer to release figures (Britain has already refused to honour it's obligations in this area). Only an individual with PPDs is able to detach themselves from the human impacts of their decision making on this scale.
* He is fearless under threat - The slippery semantics and posturing that form the bedrock of Blair's public face morphs into an altogether more assertive characterisation when the man's back is pressed up against the wall. If it weren't for the consequences of his robust defences of his inappropriate actions, one would have to admit to being impressed by the ferocity, pseudo-logic and strategy in these performances.
* He is aggressive, oppositional and opportunistic - Numerous examples may be put forward including his attritional approach to Prime Minister's Question Time and his monthly press abuse conference. Whatever the full truth of their interactions, Blair has exhibited each of these characteristics in his dealing with Gordon Brown. Additionally, there are high level rumours around that Blair was allegedly approached by the CIA while at Oxford and this opportunism has formed the foundation of his strategy since. True or not, it certainly explains some of his more puzzling global hierarchical positionings eg Bush's poodle syndrome.
* Many psychopaths are shrewd and calculating and struggle to learn the social mechanics of interpersonal communication thus masking their disorder. Some are able to develop a thoroughly charming mask and are not typical of society's view of such a perpetrator - Personally, I never accepted Blair's mask from day one but that isn't the point. Blair has been able to convince enough of the people enough of the time to give credence to his fake and spun public persona. He rarely drops his mask however. The only time in recent years where I remember such an occurrence was when some inbred Tory suggested in parliament that we were becoming "a police state". Blair's apoplectic response was most revealing. A future angle that should be attempted in the destabilisation of PPDs Blair would be to ask him for proof that he was ever a member of Hackney and Shoreditch Labour Party (as he claims) - we have seen evidence that this is one of Blair's little porkies...
* The combination of ego and cunning is always present - Blair's nickname at school was Carmen and his narcissism is an everpresent feature of his public appearances. His staged cringeworthy "trust me" performances are a subtle mixture of ego and cunning.
* PPDs seek to control others while doing everything possible to avoid being controlled themselves - think cabinet ministers selection, attitude to the arms and oil industries, United Nations, Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Gordon Brown, lecturing the late pope on the validity of an illegal war, avoidance of proper argument, erosion of human rights, limitation of public and parliamentary scrutiny, replacing the House of Lords with people who support him or his party (sometimes even financially, allegedly). Our invalid trust in him is his justification for approaching international treaties, regulations, formats and processes with utter scorn.
* Their goal in life is to achieve power and prosperity by monopolistic abuse - He repeatedly places himself above global norms of behaviour which is as near to monopolistic political power attainable in an alleged democratic country and system. For a good two years now, Blair's sole focus has been his legacy.
* Their moral perspective can be described as "morality is an illusion/ goodness is weakness/ trust is naive" - This template neatly fits any aspect of Blair's career that one chooses to assess. His tokenistic lip service to issues like Third World poverty and Climate Change while being a driving force in turning a supposedly Socialist party into a neo-conservative one that actively promotes and induces poverty and environmental carnage is a typical duplicity.
Furthermore, PPDs stretches across the upper echelons of the Labour party - virtually none of the power operators believe in anything other than the pursuance of their own power. Prescott, Jowell, Darling, Beckett, Hoon, Straw, Goldsmith, Levy, Brown, Hewitt, Reid etc etc are marked in their shared absence of responsibility for the results of their actions and inactions and, politically, possess no policies to fill their procedural vacuums. There is no belief in an aim or even in a process to achieve a particular aim. The PPDs mask is replaced here by a party-wide collective mask known as spin. Indeed, Blair's main legacy must be that he, as a psychopathic leader, has created a psychopathic party that fits comfortably into a nationally and globally psychopathic system.
There are media campaigns for Blair to become a "world vicar". Really! While I am willing to accept a life framework where the lunatics have taken over the asylum, some of these spectacular society stunts just push the whole farce a little too far. Blair is directly or indirectly responsible for millions of innocent deaths globally and has absolutely no moral foundation to undertake anything purporting to be for the good of anyone else anywhere ever! Desmond Tutu? Perhaps. Tony Blair? Get a grip...
Leading psychologists are largely in agreement that the holistic modelling of personality and psychopathology is particularly revealing when one comes to study military, business, financial and political leaders. A statistically significant percentage of such individuals throughout history have exhibited PPDs. So we should not think of Blair as being unusual, he is merely one of the latest in a long line of inappropriate characters. Indeed, Blair's former Chief of Staff described him as "Napoleonic" in a comparison with a historical PPDs figure. PPDs is a combination of two fundamental psychological disorders Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPDs) and Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPDs) and, in our case study, we merely list attributes related to the disorder and leave you to make up your own mind on whether the adjoining prompts are indicative proof of the man's condition.
* Most PPDs are male.
* He has little compassion or guilt for the outcomes of his behaviour - Even if Blair truly believed that waging an illegal war in Iraq following twelve years of continual economic and military bombardment was the correct course of action, where is his remorse for the dead Iraqi civilians and British soldiers? Estimates suggest that up to half a million children died as a result of the economic sanctions and the number of innocent deaths now has reached the stage where the Iraqi government have decided no longer to release figures (Britain has already refused to honour it's obligations in this area). Only an individual with PPDs is able to detach themselves from the human impacts of their decision making on this scale.
* He is fearless under threat - The slippery semantics and posturing that form the bedrock of Blair's public face morphs into an altogether more assertive characterisation when the man's back is pressed up against the wall. If it weren't for the consequences of his robust defences of his inappropriate actions, one would have to admit to being impressed by the ferocity, pseudo-logic and strategy in these performances.
* He is aggressive, oppositional and opportunistic - Numerous examples may be put forward including his attritional approach to Prime Minister's Question Time and his monthly press abuse conference. Whatever the full truth of their interactions, Blair has exhibited each of these characteristics in his dealing with Gordon Brown. Additionally, there are high level rumours around that Blair was allegedly approached by the CIA while at Oxford and this opportunism has formed the foundation of his strategy since. True or not, it certainly explains some of his more puzzling global hierarchical positionings eg Bush's poodle syndrome.
* Many psychopaths are shrewd and calculating and struggle to learn the social mechanics of interpersonal communication thus masking their disorder. Some are able to develop a thoroughly charming mask and are not typical of society's view of such a perpetrator - Personally, I never accepted Blair's mask from day one but that isn't the point. Blair has been able to convince enough of the people enough of the time to give credence to his fake and spun public persona. He rarely drops his mask however. The only time in recent years where I remember such an occurrence was when some inbred Tory suggested in parliament that we were becoming "a police state". Blair's apoplectic response was most revealing. A future angle that should be attempted in the destabilisation of PPDs Blair would be to ask him for proof that he was ever a member of Hackney and Shoreditch Labour Party (as he claims) - we have seen evidence that this is one of Blair's little porkies...
* The combination of ego and cunning is always present - Blair's nickname at school was Carmen and his narcissism is an everpresent feature of his public appearances. His staged cringeworthy "trust me" performances are a subtle mixture of ego and cunning.
* PPDs seek to control others while doing everything possible to avoid being controlled themselves - think cabinet ministers selection, attitude to the arms and oil industries, United Nations, Iraq, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Gordon Brown, lecturing the late pope on the validity of an illegal war, avoidance of proper argument, erosion of human rights, limitation of public and parliamentary scrutiny, replacing the House of Lords with people who support him or his party (sometimes even financially, allegedly). Our invalid trust in him is his justification for approaching international treaties, regulations, formats and processes with utter scorn.
* Their goal in life is to achieve power and prosperity by monopolistic abuse - He repeatedly places himself above global norms of behaviour which is as near to monopolistic political power attainable in an alleged democratic country and system. For a good two years now, Blair's sole focus has been his legacy.
* Their moral perspective can be described as "morality is an illusion/ goodness is weakness/ trust is naive" - This template neatly fits any aspect of Blair's career that one chooses to assess. His tokenistic lip service to issues like Third World poverty and Climate Change while being a driving force in turning a supposedly Socialist party into a neo-conservative one that actively promotes and induces poverty and environmental carnage is a typical duplicity.
Furthermore, PPDs stretches across the upper echelons of the Labour party - virtually none of the power operators believe in anything other than the pursuance of their own power. Prescott, Jowell, Darling, Beckett, Hoon, Straw, Goldsmith, Levy, Brown, Hewitt, Reid etc etc are marked in their shared absence of responsibility for the results of their actions and inactions and, politically, possess no policies to fill their procedural vacuums. There is no belief in an aim or even in a process to achieve a particular aim. The PPDs mask is replaced here by a party-wide collective mask known as spin. Indeed, Blair's main legacy must be that he, as a psychopathic leader, has created a psychopathic party that fits comfortably into a nationally and globally psychopathic system.
There are media campaigns for Blair to become a "world vicar". Really! While I am willing to accept a life framework where the lunatics have taken over the asylum, some of these spectacular society stunts just push the whole farce a little too far. Blair is directly or indirectly responsible for millions of innocent deaths globally and has absolutely no moral foundation to undertake anything purporting to be for the good of anyone else anywhere ever! Desmond Tutu? Perhaps. Tony Blair? Get a grip...
Wednesday 16 May 2007
Developing Anti-Corruption Matrixes And Paradigms
It seems that, subconsciously, I have decided to celebrate May Day by focusing to a significant degree on corruption this month and today you are going to get more of the same. The intention of this post is to attempt to establish further the foundations of a construct that squeezes the corruption from the game of football. To illuminate our arguments, we will use two different areas - i) the underground, semi-legal and non-regulated global betting industry and ii) the selection of referees for Premiership games.
The perpetrators behind the capitalisation of football are going for the "having the cake and eating it" trip. These power bases target absolute control thereby maturing the marketplace through the development of a cartelisation, duopolisation, monopolisation or fragmented cartelisation systemic structure. By creating the dynamics for a maturing market via their greed, these operators effectively undermine their preferential market positioning as external observation of their machinations reveals the urgent necessity of regulation, transparency and integrity. This is typical of the short-termism found in all psychopathic behaviour. A more enlightened grouping of insiders would tilt the playing field in their proprietary favour but only to the degree that such manipulations are not observable to many market outsiders - most stakeholder capitalism functions on this latter level. But we are not in stakeholder territory anymore...
GLOBAL BETTING MARKETS - In numerous previous posts, we have described the infrastructure of the global football trading system. It is our firmly held belief that the First World money that is being dumped on the Premiership clubs is an investment primarily based in the opportunities offered by these markets. We confidently predict the first £1 billion ($2 billion) betting market on a single match within the next 2-5 years (the major games are already grossing half this figure). When prize money for performance related excellence is trumped to this magnitude by the financial benefits of corruption, the game is in trouble. This is analogous to the mature British horseracing markets where the 2:15 at Catterick might have prize money of £3000 while millions are bet on the race. Where is the dominant money? The layers pay off the connections of their book liabilities and everybody wins apart from the mugs.
The degree of corruption that is about to be unleashed onto the global game, but specifically the English Premiership, will take the game past the point of no return and our great game will become permanently rotten to the core at the most professional levels. Don't get me wrong, it is bad enough at the moment - any sector/league that is attracting the likes of Abramovich, Murdoch, Al-Fayed, Thaksin Shinawatra, Gaydamek, Kroenke, the Glazers, Hicks and Gillet, Magnussen and Lerner is in trouble.
The global football betting markets MUST be regulated and legalised and forced to operate with the degree of transparency and openness that has to be expected of a highly liquid, mature trading market. This must happen imminently. A massive proportion of the global turnover exists in Asia but all regions have a responsibility to formalise and regulate these markets. A few prompts...
* The betting markets should be traded via New York, London and Tokyo plus significant other territories eg Hong Kong, Thailand and Singapore.
* All information/news relating to the events should be released to the market exchanges to undermine insider advantage as with all other market participants.
* All relevant regulation to apply to football betting markets including a ban on insider trading and all other forms of market manipulation.
* Open source global pricing data to be publicly available.
* Proper rules of disclosure with respect to the trading decisions of those in privileged informational loci.
* Effective regimes to sniff out the pockets of corruption that will still exist in a cellular masonic structure within the marketplace. Forensic market analysis is an incredibly revealing area.
* Security of trade and payment.
* Provision of Proprietary Research and Analysis.
PREMIERSHIP REFEREES - Critical to the regulation of the global betting markets is the effective management and monitoring of key power operators within the marketplace. Every sector possesses a unique infrastructure and, in football, a key individual is evidently the referee. An incredibly simple non-corruptible construct might be as we suggested in an earlier post:
"...lets see 38 referees in the Premiership. 19 men and 19 women. Lets have technology determine the legality or otherwise of penalties, goals and sending offs. All officials will only referee any given team once per season. All microphones that are worn by officials to be on an open communication line. No sponsorship of individual teams by bookmakers. Referees should not work with the same assistant referees. Referees and players banned from betting (directly or indirectly)".
The people who gain from the corruption of our game require a small control group of referees. The Bundesliga utilises over forty referees while the Premiership uses less than twenty (and there are still rumours of the development of a core group of just 10 individuals). In Game Theoretic terms, the smallest number of individuals that NEED to be involved in a corruption is ALWAYS the prime number. Every extra person increases the probability of informational leakage and/or the discovery of the systemic scam. Every dynamic that causes movement away from this potential equilibrium position will increase the cleanliness of our game. In theory, a centralised system of bribery and corruption is more preferable for the perpetrators than a network of individual operators who, through double marginisation, achieve inefficient returns.
Shareholder Capitalist entities repeatedly slice away at obstructive regulation, opposition, competitors, level playing fields and meritocracy in any other form as they seek to impose their own control template. To maintain any hope of a future input for the people who are paying for this global brand ie you and me, we must be attempting to undertake our own slicing of their corrupt edifice by researching, analysing, reporting, solving and publicising the machinations that are corrupting our sport.
This is a tug of war and there's some big bastards on their team. But, public perception is a key core area that influences spectacular society's agendas and blogs are a prime source of this dynamic.
The dispiriting angle on this whole struggle for the game of football is that we are all effectively fighting for a semi-corrupt structure rather than a systemic one. There is no revolution here. We were all too slow (or otherwise engaged) to see that Rupert Murdoch is a slightly different operator than Ken Bates and realism now dictates that our primary target is a stakeholder but, unfortunately, still capitalist structure for what is, after all, the people's game.
I'm sure that I used to campaign for something slightly more utopian than a caring conservative infrastructure. I trust/hope that it is the world that has moved and not me.
The perpetrators behind the capitalisation of football are going for the "having the cake and eating it" trip. These power bases target absolute control thereby maturing the marketplace through the development of a cartelisation, duopolisation, monopolisation or fragmented cartelisation systemic structure. By creating the dynamics for a maturing market via their greed, these operators effectively undermine their preferential market positioning as external observation of their machinations reveals the urgent necessity of regulation, transparency and integrity. This is typical of the short-termism found in all psychopathic behaviour. A more enlightened grouping of insiders would tilt the playing field in their proprietary favour but only to the degree that such manipulations are not observable to many market outsiders - most stakeholder capitalism functions on this latter level. But we are not in stakeholder territory anymore...
GLOBAL BETTING MARKETS - In numerous previous posts, we have described the infrastructure of the global football trading system. It is our firmly held belief that the First World money that is being dumped on the Premiership clubs is an investment primarily based in the opportunities offered by these markets. We confidently predict the first £1 billion ($2 billion) betting market on a single match within the next 2-5 years (the major games are already grossing half this figure). When prize money for performance related excellence is trumped to this magnitude by the financial benefits of corruption, the game is in trouble. This is analogous to the mature British horseracing markets where the 2:15 at Catterick might have prize money of £3000 while millions are bet on the race. Where is the dominant money? The layers pay off the connections of their book liabilities and everybody wins apart from the mugs.
The degree of corruption that is about to be unleashed onto the global game, but specifically the English Premiership, will take the game past the point of no return and our great game will become permanently rotten to the core at the most professional levels. Don't get me wrong, it is bad enough at the moment - any sector/league that is attracting the likes of Abramovich, Murdoch, Al-Fayed, Thaksin Shinawatra, Gaydamek, Kroenke, the Glazers, Hicks and Gillet, Magnussen and Lerner is in trouble.
The global football betting markets MUST be regulated and legalised and forced to operate with the degree of transparency and openness that has to be expected of a highly liquid, mature trading market. This must happen imminently. A massive proportion of the global turnover exists in Asia but all regions have a responsibility to formalise and regulate these markets. A few prompts...
* The betting markets should be traded via New York, London and Tokyo plus significant other territories eg Hong Kong, Thailand and Singapore.
* All information/news relating to the events should be released to the market exchanges to undermine insider advantage as with all other market participants.
* All relevant regulation to apply to football betting markets including a ban on insider trading and all other forms of market manipulation.
* Open source global pricing data to be publicly available.
* Proper rules of disclosure with respect to the trading decisions of those in privileged informational loci.
* Effective regimes to sniff out the pockets of corruption that will still exist in a cellular masonic structure within the marketplace. Forensic market analysis is an incredibly revealing area.
* Security of trade and payment.
* Provision of Proprietary Research and Analysis.
PREMIERSHIP REFEREES - Critical to the regulation of the global betting markets is the effective management and monitoring of key power operators within the marketplace. Every sector possesses a unique infrastructure and, in football, a key individual is evidently the referee. An incredibly simple non-corruptible construct might be as we suggested in an earlier post:
"...lets see 38 referees in the Premiership. 19 men and 19 women. Lets have technology determine the legality or otherwise of penalties, goals and sending offs. All officials will only referee any given team once per season. All microphones that are worn by officials to be on an open communication line. No sponsorship of individual teams by bookmakers. Referees should not work with the same assistant referees. Referees and players banned from betting (directly or indirectly)".
The people who gain from the corruption of our game require a small control group of referees. The Bundesliga utilises over forty referees while the Premiership uses less than twenty (and there are still rumours of the development of a core group of just 10 individuals). In Game Theoretic terms, the smallest number of individuals that NEED to be involved in a corruption is ALWAYS the prime number. Every extra person increases the probability of informational leakage and/or the discovery of the systemic scam. Every dynamic that causes movement away from this potential equilibrium position will increase the cleanliness of our game. In theory, a centralised system of bribery and corruption is more preferable for the perpetrators than a network of individual operators who, through double marginisation, achieve inefficient returns.
Shareholder Capitalist entities repeatedly slice away at obstructive regulation, opposition, competitors, level playing fields and meritocracy in any other form as they seek to impose their own control template. To maintain any hope of a future input for the people who are paying for this global brand ie you and me, we must be attempting to undertake our own slicing of their corrupt edifice by researching, analysing, reporting, solving and publicising the machinations that are corrupting our sport.
This is a tug of war and there's some big bastards on their team. But, public perception is a key core area that influences spectacular society's agendas and blogs are a prime source of this dynamic.
The dispiriting angle on this whole struggle for the game of football is that we are all effectively fighting for a semi-corrupt structure rather than a systemic one. There is no revolution here. We were all too slow (or otherwise engaged) to see that Rupert Murdoch is a slightly different operator than Ken Bates and realism now dictates that our primary target is a stakeholder but, unfortunately, still capitalist structure for what is, after all, the people's game.
I'm sure that I used to campaign for something slightly more utopian than a caring conservative infrastructure. I trust/hope that it is the world that has moved and not me.
Tuesday 15 May 2007
Using Simple Game Theory To Eliminate Corruption
Game Theory allows foolproof infrastructures to be created. Game Theory also enables corrupt power people to develop templates that lubricate their proprietary corruptions. This post attempts to address one of the basic foundations that corruption is dependent upon - a pliant structure with suitable loopholes. Although the examples shown below relate to betting markets, the same manipulations may be seen throughout mainstream capitalism - from government legislation to the auctioning of 3G mobile spectrum and from military strategy to the establishment of business contracts and even the entire infrastructure of industry sectors. And don't even get me started on the usage of Game Theory to undermine our alleged democratic process in order to initially obtain and then maintain political power.
The first and most important fact to establish is that most Game Theory is absolutely not rocket science. Similarly to Econometrics in relation to Behavioural Economics, Game Theorists are able to find solutions for simple constructs but form spurious non-robust configurations when attempting to model the more holistic structures that underpin all quality modelling. Game Theorists generally focus on the specific and the black box rather than the Bayesian.
Game Theory has major impacts on the game of football. None of the power structures around us have randomly reached their current form and all decisions undertaken by these power bases are set against a strategic plan entirely based on Game Theory.
* UEFA and FIFA utilise simple Game Theory in the making of the draws for both the qualifying and finals of their respective flagship competitions, Euro and World Cup. For the benefit of the host country, the media, geopolitical and economic reasons, certain structures must be established and certain goals achieved. Some of these templates are merely tinkerings eg host nation must qualify to the latter stages of the competition - for the other three teams in the host nation's group, however, this equals corruption.
* Game Theory, in it's most simple form, was also behind many of the machinations in the English Premiership that we have described over the season. For example, we have frequently highlighted the issue of late changes of referee which is a phenomenon that ONLY occurs in England. The choices of the two officials to be interchanged and the timing of the alteration with regard to the markets and, obviously, the specifics of the match may be optimised to maximise the returns to the individuals who are theorising the structure.
* A psychologically based Game Theory is also employed in the provision of disinformation in the media. Thorough analysis of the output of corrupted media is a necessary input to profitable contrary trading strategies which is a rather neat proof that the initial journalism was suitably game theorised in the first place!
These are just three of scores of similar structures that we could share with you. But I'd rather move on to the other use of Game Theory. As Game Theory may be utilised to develop simple watertight corrupt structures, it may also be used to create the equivalent structures to prevent corruption. Is such positive Game Theory ever utilised? Well... no actually, it's not.
In numerous previous posts we have suggested constructions and templates that simply solve the issue of corruption and non-meritocracy in events and betting markets. Among the many corrupt structures that we have solved using the simplest Game Theory are the following:
* Corrupt referees in the Premiership
* Enhanced detection of the illegal usage of Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs)
* Eurovision Song Contest Prizes and Voting
* The utilisation of technology for decisions in football matches
* The solving of criminal behaviour through the analysis of betting market patterns
* The issue of players gambling
Football Is Fixed desire to not only publicise the corruption but to offer solutions. Even if there may be a reluctance from some individuals to face up to the corruption (not many people have the same privileged informational access as market analysts do and, by proprietary and legal necessity, we are unable to provide fulsome proofs of some of our angles), it surely makes sense to put in place robust structures that undermine ANY potential for corruption in the future. Or, of course, you can just leave things as they are and allow the infestation of corruption within the game to become ever more absolute.
Finally, as the mathematics behind these solutions is bobbins when compared with some of the stuff our Trading Team get up to, why isn't it simply put into practice? Who benefits most by these things not being implemented? Who suffers the most? Which market infrastructures are most affected by the different templates?
Bottom up democratic and meritocratic Game Theory can create a cleaner game. Easily. There will always be corrupted events. Always has been, always will be... But the lack of an anti-corruption momentum in the English game has allowed the criminality to become systemic.
The first and most important fact to establish is that most Game Theory is absolutely not rocket science. Similarly to Econometrics in relation to Behavioural Economics, Game Theorists are able to find solutions for simple constructs but form spurious non-robust configurations when attempting to model the more holistic structures that underpin all quality modelling. Game Theorists generally focus on the specific and the black box rather than the Bayesian.
Game Theory has major impacts on the game of football. None of the power structures around us have randomly reached their current form and all decisions undertaken by these power bases are set against a strategic plan entirely based on Game Theory.
* UEFA and FIFA utilise simple Game Theory in the making of the draws for both the qualifying and finals of their respective flagship competitions, Euro and World Cup. For the benefit of the host country, the media, geopolitical and economic reasons, certain structures must be established and certain goals achieved. Some of these templates are merely tinkerings eg host nation must qualify to the latter stages of the competition - for the other three teams in the host nation's group, however, this equals corruption.
* Game Theory, in it's most simple form, was also behind many of the machinations in the English Premiership that we have described over the season. For example, we have frequently highlighted the issue of late changes of referee which is a phenomenon that ONLY occurs in England. The choices of the two officials to be interchanged and the timing of the alteration with regard to the markets and, obviously, the specifics of the match may be optimised to maximise the returns to the individuals who are theorising the structure.
* A psychologically based Game Theory is also employed in the provision of disinformation in the media. Thorough analysis of the output of corrupted media is a necessary input to profitable contrary trading strategies which is a rather neat proof that the initial journalism was suitably game theorised in the first place!
These are just three of scores of similar structures that we could share with you. But I'd rather move on to the other use of Game Theory. As Game Theory may be utilised to develop simple watertight corrupt structures, it may also be used to create the equivalent structures to prevent corruption. Is such positive Game Theory ever utilised? Well... no actually, it's not.
In numerous previous posts we have suggested constructions and templates that simply solve the issue of corruption and non-meritocracy in events and betting markets. Among the many corrupt structures that we have solved using the simplest Game Theory are the following:
* Corrupt referees in the Premiership
* Enhanced detection of the illegal usage of Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs)
* Eurovision Song Contest Prizes and Voting
* The utilisation of technology for decisions in football matches
* The solving of criminal behaviour through the analysis of betting market patterns
* The issue of players gambling
Football Is Fixed desire to not only publicise the corruption but to offer solutions. Even if there may be a reluctance from some individuals to face up to the corruption (not many people have the same privileged informational access as market analysts do and, by proprietary and legal necessity, we are unable to provide fulsome proofs of some of our angles), it surely makes sense to put in place robust structures that undermine ANY potential for corruption in the future. Or, of course, you can just leave things as they are and allow the infestation of corruption within the game to become ever more absolute.
Finally, as the mathematics behind these solutions is bobbins when compared with some of the stuff our Trading Team get up to, why isn't it simply put into practice? Who benefits most by these things not being implemented? Who suffers the most? Which market infrastructures are most affected by the different templates?
Bottom up democratic and meritocratic Game Theory can create a cleaner game. Easily. There will always be corrupted events. Always has been, always will be... But the lack of an anti-corruption momentum in the English game has allowed the criminality to become systemic.
Monday 14 May 2007
Sopho Khalvashi And Marija Šestić - L'Art Supreme
The Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) needs to be restructured.
Although, undoubtedly the movingly soulful winning song by Marija Šerifović deserved victory, the next nine places in the contest were filled with derivative dross - sexist rural Ukrainian folk music and Russian women dressed as schoolgirls singing about being paid for sex, for example.
This must change. Not only does the current competition format ensure a value in performing lowest common denominator idiot art that appeals to the alcohol fueled European television voters but it also undermines one of the few opportunities of international exposure for talented young musicians from Europe's less powerful countries.
On an artistic level, the songs performed by Sopho Khalvashi and Marija Šestić are among the most beautiful pieces of soul music that I have heard in recent years. Each of these two pieces of music possesses that rare gift of an inner emotional and cultural soul. Effectively, these two artists finished third and second, respectively, once the more flippant entries are removed. And, yet, by finishing in 12th and 11th, the full degree of their deserved international exposure is compromised. For example, there has been a magnitude of difference in the global press coverage of the gutter art of Ukraine and Russia in comparison with the beautiful soundscapes generated by these two performers.
The ESC has several prime issues that need to be addressed in order to protect their brand, plan strategically for the future and to optimise the experience both the artists and the ESC itself.
The focus areas are i) the dumbing down of the competition; ii) the negative impact on the truly talented artists; iii) corruption; iv) regional voting issues; v) promotion of Black artists. These separate issues overlap and we attempt to address the combination of problems with potential solutions in an holistic manner.
The ESC requires financial returns from it's contest and, consequently, the telephone voting mechanism is sacrosanct. The first major adjustment that the ESC should undertake is to divide the ESC into two separate contests each with the same candidates. The mainstream ESC would be decided as is currently the case while a parallel list of the top three artistic performers would be chosen by a panel of judges. These judges would be selected by the ESC on a rotational level (each of Europe's six regions would provide one judge and each judge would sit for just one year). This structure has the additional benefit of controlling any corruptive influences that would accrue through longevity of office. The benefits to the ESC are obvious - they can expand their brand and move upmarket while, much more importantly, the young musical talent throughout Europe will be provided with a more meritocratic route to potential success.
The ESC should also consider including artist's videos as part of the competition. The artistic process is multimedia and the ESC is stuck in a time warp in not assessing the full range of expression. The creative production of the videos for Sopho Khalvashi and Marija Šestić is surely an extra dimension that should be addressed in the determination of winners and losers.
There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the British media complaining about what, through their xenophobic lenses, is seen as corrupt and cartelised voting by countries in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Not so... Firstly, a type of cultural bias exists throughout Europe and people vote for musical forms and styles with which they are familiar. There is absolutely no difference between the Belgians voting for the Dutch and vice versa merely based on musical taste and the same reality existing between, say, Romania and Moldova... North west Europe should stop bleating and produce some decent music. In addition to the impact of similarity in musical taste, neighbouring countries throughout eastern and southern Europe have hugely mobile population groupings (Russians in Estonia and Hungarians in Romania, for instance) which also leads to voting for your homeland in the same way as the Irish do in England. No problem there then either... If the ESC is to have a truly uplifting cultural impact, it will be through sharing high quality art alongside the mainstream. The impact of this musical fusion of styles will lead to greater numbers of people being able to enjoy and appreciate beautiful music from other cultures within our continent. The nationalistic elements of the competition should be played down for the creation of a continental forum where music is appreciated for it's art rather than it's country of origin. If the countries in the north and west wish to accelerate this process in order to be able to compete on a level playing field sooner, allow devolution for your regions :)
The creation of a second prize within the ESC will also help to address the blatant racism that is exhibited in the voting. Not one Black artist survived the Semi Final. The existence of a widespread continental racism in the ESC - for example, check out which countries gave Poland nil points - is not a surprise when wider society also displays the same racist attitude. Allowing Black performers to compete and win will actively address the rampant racism that exists across Europe.
If the ESC is able to adapt to change quickly, it can become a much more weighty institution while not losing the frivolity with which it has built it's edifice. The ESC can achieve this through providing a route to western audiences for hugely skilled and highly educated musical talent from countries like Georgia, Bosnia-Herzogovina and Serbia that exist in challenging geopolitical conditions. The ESC must recognise that their competition represents one of the few potentially meritocratic links to the west for all the artists involved in the event and should restructure to maximise it's positive impact on the careers of these artists.
And we all gain out of this process too. I have extensive music collections, both here and in Greece, and yet the ESC helps me to fill in the gaps in my musicological knowledge - I will most certainly be checking out the music of the Laz people of Georgia and the output of the Banja Luka Music Academy after this year's event.
On a personal level, there was another surprisingly enjoyable aspect to trading on the ESC markets. Throughout my career as a Market Analyst, I have created profit by analysing and trading on the destructive impact of shareholder capitalism on financial markets. Trading on the ESC provided an almost unique experience of trading on a market that was, to some extent, creative and constructive in form. Making money out of my historical music industry A&R skills together with the artistic talents of the artists from Georgia, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzogovina felt like a whole lot more positive process than trading yet another corrupt market structure. It has even set me thinking as to ways in which to re-explore my personal future investment and project strategy so as to incorporate a creative musical entity of some sort.
If the music world is still myopic by the time this project surfaces, my first label targets would be Sopho Khalvashi and Marija Šestić...
Although, undoubtedly the movingly soulful winning song by Marija Šerifović deserved victory, the next nine places in the contest were filled with derivative dross - sexist rural Ukrainian folk music and Russian women dressed as schoolgirls singing about being paid for sex, for example.
This must change. Not only does the current competition format ensure a value in performing lowest common denominator idiot art that appeals to the alcohol fueled European television voters but it also undermines one of the few opportunities of international exposure for talented young musicians from Europe's less powerful countries.
On an artistic level, the songs performed by Sopho Khalvashi and Marija Šestić are among the most beautiful pieces of soul music that I have heard in recent years. Each of these two pieces of music possesses that rare gift of an inner emotional and cultural soul. Effectively, these two artists finished third and second, respectively, once the more flippant entries are removed. And, yet, by finishing in 12th and 11th, the full degree of their deserved international exposure is compromised. For example, there has been a magnitude of difference in the global press coverage of the gutter art of Ukraine and Russia in comparison with the beautiful soundscapes generated by these two performers.
The ESC has several prime issues that need to be addressed in order to protect their brand, plan strategically for the future and to optimise the experience both the artists and the ESC itself.
The focus areas are i) the dumbing down of the competition; ii) the negative impact on the truly talented artists; iii) corruption; iv) regional voting issues; v) promotion of Black artists. These separate issues overlap and we attempt to address the combination of problems with potential solutions in an holistic manner.
The ESC requires financial returns from it's contest and, consequently, the telephone voting mechanism is sacrosanct. The first major adjustment that the ESC should undertake is to divide the ESC into two separate contests each with the same candidates. The mainstream ESC would be decided as is currently the case while a parallel list of the top three artistic performers would be chosen by a panel of judges. These judges would be selected by the ESC on a rotational level (each of Europe's six regions would provide one judge and each judge would sit for just one year). This structure has the additional benefit of controlling any corruptive influences that would accrue through longevity of office. The benefits to the ESC are obvious - they can expand their brand and move upmarket while, much more importantly, the young musical talent throughout Europe will be provided with a more meritocratic route to potential success.
The ESC should also consider including artist's videos as part of the competition. The artistic process is multimedia and the ESC is stuck in a time warp in not assessing the full range of expression. The creative production of the videos for Sopho Khalvashi and Marija Šestić is surely an extra dimension that should be addressed in the determination of winners and losers.
There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the British media complaining about what, through their xenophobic lenses, is seen as corrupt and cartelised voting by countries in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Not so... Firstly, a type of cultural bias exists throughout Europe and people vote for musical forms and styles with which they are familiar. There is absolutely no difference between the Belgians voting for the Dutch and vice versa merely based on musical taste and the same reality existing between, say, Romania and Moldova... North west Europe should stop bleating and produce some decent music. In addition to the impact of similarity in musical taste, neighbouring countries throughout eastern and southern Europe have hugely mobile population groupings (Russians in Estonia and Hungarians in Romania, for instance) which also leads to voting for your homeland in the same way as the Irish do in England. No problem there then either... If the ESC is to have a truly uplifting cultural impact, it will be through sharing high quality art alongside the mainstream. The impact of this musical fusion of styles will lead to greater numbers of people being able to enjoy and appreciate beautiful music from other cultures within our continent. The nationalistic elements of the competition should be played down for the creation of a continental forum where music is appreciated for it's art rather than it's country of origin. If the countries in the north and west wish to accelerate this process in order to be able to compete on a level playing field sooner, allow devolution for your regions :)
The creation of a second prize within the ESC will also help to address the blatant racism that is exhibited in the voting. Not one Black artist survived the Semi Final. The existence of a widespread continental racism in the ESC - for example, check out which countries gave Poland nil points - is not a surprise when wider society also displays the same racist attitude. Allowing Black performers to compete and win will actively address the rampant racism that exists across Europe.
If the ESC is able to adapt to change quickly, it can become a much more weighty institution while not losing the frivolity with which it has built it's edifice. The ESC can achieve this through providing a route to western audiences for hugely skilled and highly educated musical talent from countries like Georgia, Bosnia-Herzogovina and Serbia that exist in challenging geopolitical conditions. The ESC must recognise that their competition represents one of the few potentially meritocratic links to the west for all the artists involved in the event and should restructure to maximise it's positive impact on the careers of these artists.
And we all gain out of this process too. I have extensive music collections, both here and in Greece, and yet the ESC helps me to fill in the gaps in my musicological knowledge - I will most certainly be checking out the music of the Laz people of Georgia and the output of the Banja Luka Music Academy after this year's event.
On a personal level, there was another surprisingly enjoyable aspect to trading on the ESC markets. Throughout my career as a Market Analyst, I have created profit by analysing and trading on the destructive impact of shareholder capitalism on financial markets. Trading on the ESC provided an almost unique experience of trading on a market that was, to some extent, creative and constructive in form. Making money out of my historical music industry A&R skills together with the artistic talents of the artists from Georgia, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzogovina felt like a whole lot more positive process than trading yet another corrupt market structure. It has even set me thinking as to ways in which to re-explore my personal future investment and project strategy so as to incorporate a creative musical entity of some sort.
If the music world is still myopic by the time this project surfaces, my first label targets would be Sopho Khalvashi and Marija Šestić...
The Freakonomics Of English Premiership Football
Never again will Mr Graham Poll referee a Premiership football game unless the Professional Game Match Officials Board (PGMOB) and the Premiership are able to develop some random reason to provide Poll with another season of experimental officiating. We always expected that Poll would go out with a bang but his selection for Portsmouth's end of season earner with Arsenal (which also existed on a secondary and tertiary level as a match to determine Portsmouth's UEFA Cup qualification and Arsenal's bid for 3rd place) was a good final fling for the Thing from Tring. The match did not exist as a truly competitive event - if either club was really focused on the potential gains of a victory, they would not have been resting half their respective teams. Also, there might have been a booking or two. The dominant structure on the match was the late betting market in both Asia and Europe as a massive late gamble (one of the largest of the season) cascaded on Portsmouth. Graham Poll is a master of control of such events and his Asian links will be sorely missed on an impact level for the powers-that-be in the Premiership. The timeline of events relating to Portsmouth's disallowed goal are revealing:
Portsmouth score; Poll gives goal; assistant referee signals goal; assistant referee changes his mind; Poll changes his mind; no goal. Perhaps the PGMOB could release the communications from the miked up officials (both on and off the pitch). We confidently expect that Mr Poll, a year's extension notwithstanding, will achieve significant hierarchical achievement elsewhere within the game of global football. The PGMOB will also be glad to see the back of Dermot Gallagher (who also retires at the end of the season) and we share their pleasure although we expect a conveyor belt of suitably obedient individuals to replace these reptiles.
Elsewhere, the bookmakers ensured that the final round of matches of the 2006/07 season filled their satchels to bursting. In the English Premiership, the unlikely happens regularly.
The matches at Liverpool and Chelsea were standard template end of season agreed draws and a draw is virtually always good news for the layers. Indeed six of the last round of games of minimal or no significance finished with a level scoreline.
The other major news (from press coverage, far more significant than the genocide in Darfur or the deteriorating situations in Iraq and Afghanistan) has been the soap played out in East London. We have previously stated our views on the West Ham United abuse of power in several posts (most recently, see: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/04/magnussens-millions-save-day.html). We have remained silent over the season's conclusion as we had no desire to impact upon our proprietary trading activities but, now that the season is over, there are a few extra pertinent points that need to be raised regarding club power in the Premiership. As we stated in the previous post, the reasons provided for the non-deduction of points as punishment for undertaking business dealings with Media Sports Investment (MSI) were selective and spurious. The only justice-based sentence would have seen the Hammers relegated (having "great" fans and the season's late stage being rather flippant justifications, really). The degree of external support, aside from that given by the FA Premier League Disciplinary Panel, has been extensive. So confident were William Hill bookmakers that Manchester United wouldn't win their final match of the season against West Ham that they offered new customers a "free" bet on Man Utd at Even money - the actual market odds were around 8/13 (1.62). We do not believe that such an offer would have been made on one of the biggest betting days of the year without confidence in an outcome that was virtually absolute in it's corrupt structure. I have no desire to go into details but Manchester United were never going to win this game and Atkinson's penalty refusal against O'Shea was only the last of a run of favourable decisions that have fallen in the Hammer's favour in the season run in (remember the ludicrous "goal", penalty and sending off given in their favour by Howard Webb at Blackburn, for example). So, eventually, with the help of the FA, the FA Premier League Disciplinary Panel, the PGMOB and some of their opponents, West Ham United have survived in the Premiership.
Dichotomous attention has been given to Wigan Athletic and they have been, by far, the most negatively targeted outfit in the top league (see: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/04/who-do-premiership-referees-really.html). This manipulation continued right to the final whistle of their match at Sheffield at the weekend. Dean did provide them with a penalty after having earlier denied them two other spotkicks but the decision he gave could only have been more blatant if Jagielka had caught the ball and run out of the penalty box in a rugby stylee! Still no equaliser for the Yorksiremen and with Wigan tiring, Dean harshly sent off McCulloch but the Latics held on and, deservedly, stay in the Premiership (despite a total of ten minutes injury time). Emile Heskey was omnipresent and showed his high quality which has been constantly publicly devalued since he was unfortunate enough to be Michael Owen's partner when the little man wasn't always putting everything into his game.
Sheffield's demotion will be fought through the courts and Wigan's Dave Whelan has promised backing. There are now known to be seven teams who are collaborating to confront the Premier League. Scudamore was scurrying around late last week utilising the standard English approach to a crisis - divide and rule and, if no luck there, bribe. By arranging meetings with some of these clubs and by the variable conversational constructs that are alleged to have been put forward by Scudamore in these meetings, the Premier League has merely given a vivid statement to the opposition with regard to the weakness of the Premier League's position which is not known to be a particularly successful legal practice. There was a desperation by English spectacular football society to keep the West Ham scandal out of the global gaze for the climax of the season - the latest Quest update was also delayed until after the season's end. Scudamore's shuttle diplomacy thinly veiled as bribery was a final desperate attempt to be able to market the Premiership as successful and clean as opposed to corrupt and tainted.
There are other peripheral affairs that have devalued both the title race and the relegation issues - the agreement between Man Utd and Everton over Tim Howard's non-appearance against his former club in a very massive game; the media and bookmaker's milking of a non-existent title race to bolster their profits; Fulham surviving through beating a pub team from the Wirral; agreed mutually beneficial results (preferably with a little bit of private betting activity on the side); the input of PGMOB referees etc etc.
And, we are supposed to see this as competitive level playing field. The Premiership and Serie A have many similar corrupt structures and the conclusion of this season's English league will provide us with a summer of fake intrigue as the authorities and the judiciary deal with the issues. Points deductions and potential punitive relegations have been exported from the Italian game and, by performing such non-viable contortions, the Premier League has ensured, just as in Italy, that every future disciplinary decision will be measured by the yardstick of West Ham United. As the authorities are, in reality, giving West Ham £45m as a punishment then we should expect similar arbitrariness throughout any processes in the future. The sole determinants of outcome will be power/money. Over the last year, the following Premiership clubs have had minimal or no punishment despite links to corruption via bungs or illegal gambling or breaking Premiership rules or more than one of these illegalities:
Bolton Wanderers; Charlton Athletic; Chelsea; Liverpool; Manchester United; Middlesbrough; Newcastle; Portsmouth; West Ham United.
Unsurprisingly, Bury, Rotherham United and, for that matter, Sheffield United have not been similarly fortunate.
The sooner that the English population at large accepts this corrupt edifice in it's full gory glory the better. This is the prime reason why we repeatedly provide you with examples and updates of earlier examples of the ruination of our game. In Italy, which mimics our corrupt infrastructure in many ways, society accepts the power machinations in sport and politics. Dietrologia is the Italian word for "the study of what is behind something" ie a study of corruption. No Italian dinner party is complete without a couple of hours of healthy dietrologia. It is a significantly preferable psychological profile to address one's reality than to blinker one's existential boundaries to what it suits one to believe. And, it is more fun. Watching Graham Poll's last hurrah was much more interesting than the random walk of the twenty two players and the ball. I'll miss him for that at least - he was better than a shit game of football...
Portsmouth score; Poll gives goal; assistant referee signals goal; assistant referee changes his mind; Poll changes his mind; no goal. Perhaps the PGMOB could release the communications from the miked up officials (both on and off the pitch). We confidently expect that Mr Poll, a year's extension notwithstanding, will achieve significant hierarchical achievement elsewhere within the game of global football. The PGMOB will also be glad to see the back of Dermot Gallagher (who also retires at the end of the season) and we share their pleasure although we expect a conveyor belt of suitably obedient individuals to replace these reptiles.
Elsewhere, the bookmakers ensured that the final round of matches of the 2006/07 season filled their satchels to bursting. In the English Premiership, the unlikely happens regularly.
The matches at Liverpool and Chelsea were standard template end of season agreed draws and a draw is virtually always good news for the layers. Indeed six of the last round of games of minimal or no significance finished with a level scoreline.
The other major news (from press coverage, far more significant than the genocide in Darfur or the deteriorating situations in Iraq and Afghanistan) has been the soap played out in East London. We have previously stated our views on the West Ham United abuse of power in several posts (most recently, see: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/04/magnussens-millions-save-day.html). We have remained silent over the season's conclusion as we had no desire to impact upon our proprietary trading activities but, now that the season is over, there are a few extra pertinent points that need to be raised regarding club power in the Premiership. As we stated in the previous post, the reasons provided for the non-deduction of points as punishment for undertaking business dealings with Media Sports Investment (MSI) were selective and spurious. The only justice-based sentence would have seen the Hammers relegated (having "great" fans and the season's late stage being rather flippant justifications, really). The degree of external support, aside from that given by the FA Premier League Disciplinary Panel, has been extensive. So confident were William Hill bookmakers that Manchester United wouldn't win their final match of the season against West Ham that they offered new customers a "free" bet on Man Utd at Even money - the actual market odds were around 8/13 (1.62). We do not believe that such an offer would have been made on one of the biggest betting days of the year without confidence in an outcome that was virtually absolute in it's corrupt structure. I have no desire to go into details but Manchester United were never going to win this game and Atkinson's penalty refusal against O'Shea was only the last of a run of favourable decisions that have fallen in the Hammer's favour in the season run in (remember the ludicrous "goal", penalty and sending off given in their favour by Howard Webb at Blackburn, for example). So, eventually, with the help of the FA, the FA Premier League Disciplinary Panel, the PGMOB and some of their opponents, West Ham United have survived in the Premiership.
Dichotomous attention has been given to Wigan Athletic and they have been, by far, the most negatively targeted outfit in the top league (see: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/04/who-do-premiership-referees-really.html). This manipulation continued right to the final whistle of their match at Sheffield at the weekend. Dean did provide them with a penalty after having earlier denied them two other spotkicks but the decision he gave could only have been more blatant if Jagielka had caught the ball and run out of the penalty box in a rugby stylee! Still no equaliser for the Yorksiremen and with Wigan tiring, Dean harshly sent off McCulloch but the Latics held on and, deservedly, stay in the Premiership (despite a total of ten minutes injury time). Emile Heskey was omnipresent and showed his high quality which has been constantly publicly devalued since he was unfortunate enough to be Michael Owen's partner when the little man wasn't always putting everything into his game.
Sheffield's demotion will be fought through the courts and Wigan's Dave Whelan has promised backing. There are now known to be seven teams who are collaborating to confront the Premier League. Scudamore was scurrying around late last week utilising the standard English approach to a crisis - divide and rule and, if no luck there, bribe. By arranging meetings with some of these clubs and by the variable conversational constructs that are alleged to have been put forward by Scudamore in these meetings, the Premier League has merely given a vivid statement to the opposition with regard to the weakness of the Premier League's position which is not known to be a particularly successful legal practice. There was a desperation by English spectacular football society to keep the West Ham scandal out of the global gaze for the climax of the season - the latest Quest update was also delayed until after the season's end. Scudamore's shuttle diplomacy thinly veiled as bribery was a final desperate attempt to be able to market the Premiership as successful and clean as opposed to corrupt and tainted.
There are other peripheral affairs that have devalued both the title race and the relegation issues - the agreement between Man Utd and Everton over Tim Howard's non-appearance against his former club in a very massive game; the media and bookmaker's milking of a non-existent title race to bolster their profits; Fulham surviving through beating a pub team from the Wirral; agreed mutually beneficial results (preferably with a little bit of private betting activity on the side); the input of PGMOB referees etc etc.
And, we are supposed to see this as competitive level playing field. The Premiership and Serie A have many similar corrupt structures and the conclusion of this season's English league will provide us with a summer of fake intrigue as the authorities and the judiciary deal with the issues. Points deductions and potential punitive relegations have been exported from the Italian game and, by performing such non-viable contortions, the Premier League has ensured, just as in Italy, that every future disciplinary decision will be measured by the yardstick of West Ham United. As the authorities are, in reality, giving West Ham £45m as a punishment then we should expect similar arbitrariness throughout any processes in the future. The sole determinants of outcome will be power/money. Over the last year, the following Premiership clubs have had minimal or no punishment despite links to corruption via bungs or illegal gambling or breaking Premiership rules or more than one of these illegalities:
Bolton Wanderers; Charlton Athletic; Chelsea; Liverpool; Manchester United; Middlesbrough; Newcastle; Portsmouth; West Ham United.
Unsurprisingly, Bury, Rotherham United and, for that matter, Sheffield United have not been similarly fortunate.
The sooner that the English population at large accepts this corrupt edifice in it's full gory glory the better. This is the prime reason why we repeatedly provide you with examples and updates of earlier examples of the ruination of our game. In Italy, which mimics our corrupt infrastructure in many ways, society accepts the power machinations in sport and politics. Dietrologia is the Italian word for "the study of what is behind something" ie a study of corruption. No Italian dinner party is complete without a couple of hours of healthy dietrologia. It is a significantly preferable psychological profile to address one's reality than to blinker one's existential boundaries to what it suits one to believe. And, it is more fun. Watching Graham Poll's last hurrah was much more interesting than the random walk of the twenty two players and the ball. I'll miss him for that at least - he was better than a shit game of football...
Thursday 10 May 2007
Making Money Out Of The Eurovision Song Contest
It's a celebration of people!
Among the most rewarding markets to model and trade are the highly inefficient young markets where the fundamentals are the main driver of value. An example is the Eurovision Song Contest which reaches the Semi Final stage this evening with the Final in Helsinki on Saturday. Though it is distinctly uncool to enjoy this extravaganza, I do. Some of the music is actually bearable (at least once), the modelling is complex, it is a celebration of pan-European culture however kitschy and market corruption is a major factor in any analysis which, when set against a background of sequins and histrionics, keeps me amused for a few hours.
The pricing of these markets is hilarious. The skilled can make a killing. Most bookmakers price up these events and, with the similarly analysable reality tv shows, are prime territory when approached with an open mind. You cannot believe how much we made on Bez winning Celebrity Big Brother, for example, just because we knew how well he would come across...
So what are the key overviews that one needs to be addressing. I offer a few angles below:
* Last year's appalling winner did not win because Eurovision had suddenly developed a heavy metal/rock audience. It won because it reminded large numbers of people of the type of dumbed down dross equivalent with that sad movie Spinal Tap. Consequently, the mimic brigade who think that moaning on in a semi-goth angst-ridden stylee is going to win any votes this year had better think again. Many of this year's entries are clear evidence that the unpleasant spectacle of rock lurks just below the surface across Europe.
* When virtually every artist I choose to listen to is Black, the presence of just two Black musicians on the Eurovision videos is a clear indication of how successful integration has been across the continent and how meritocratic the selection process is everywhere.
* The bookmakers cannot corrupt Eurovision markets. If the industry builds up unpleasant liabilities (as is happening with the Ukrainian entry), the prize will always be bigger than the corruptive bait from the aspect of the artist(s).
* This year's competition is surprisingly strong with a generally less formulaic approach leading to an open betting market. Usually, the bookmakers enjoy big runner fields but enhanced modelling can root out value.
* Diaspora counts... Be wary of the impact of immigrant groups and their redistributive impact on the vote - Poles in England and Eire; Turks in Germany; Romanians in Spain etc etc.
* Pan-European culture has homogenised our listening habits both directly and through the use of cultural imagery in the media. I-pods across Europe are shuffling the same tunes...
* National Feelgood Factor (NFF) is a major input to any solution and modelling such areas reveals complex structures in the interplay between different macro events on a nation's psyche. Ukraine - dysfunctional government/ Euro2012/ pseudo-revolution/ country effectively split in two/ "national pride" destroyed by choice of rural comedian as a portrayal of a modernising (sic) country/ extensive corruption...
* We believe that this year's winner will come from one of two schools - self-parody or pure musical talent. We would hope for the latter but Europe showed a desire for the zany last year and the continent feels no less highly strung this time around.
* Regional voting and nationalistic posturing is a key part of the modelling. Both the Semi Final and the Final must be approached independently and, indeed, fullsome analysis of the Final is only really valid after the full quota of finalists are known.
* Careful filtering of the finalists has ensured a more geographically neutral spread for the Final 24 with Eastern Europe having some domination and there are regional block weightings that need to be assessed. Geographical proximity may be many things - compare Albania/Turkey with Serbia/Montenegro, for example.
* Analysing Eurovision combines market analytical skills with A&R and musicological talents. The skill is to find value in the market but, in order to achieve this, one has to be able to assess the strengths, weaknesses and "it" factor for all the songs and also have to be able to address the cultural style that exists continentally which meant, for example, that everybody across Europe was ready for Dana International...
* Only bet with the Betting Exchanges (BXs) as the traditional bookmakers treat the overround with contempt with William Hill currently offering 156% book while Betfair are 104% and you can trade against a song winning with the BXs. Betfair additionally offer Top 4 and Top 10 markets that enable a subtle portfolio of positions to be developed on each act.
Ignore the nationalism. Enjoy the complete lack of Americanised muzak. It really doesn't matter who wins - we all win by sharing crap things about our respective cultures. This year's Israeli entry is pure Cynical Reality and, if it wins, so do we (and not only in a financial sense). I celebrate the global and continental village spectacular society portrayals of our reality even though I know, deep down, that I shouldn't...
Perhaps it is because I am a north west European with south and east European tendencies and the contest is nearer to a federal united states of Europe than any of the political structures in Brussels or Strasbourg. After much thought, that is the only viable explanation as to why I find that Eurovision is such a giggle and totally essential viewing! Even if it does mean recognising that we have become a continent full of goths...
And remember... Away middle eights count double :)
Among the most rewarding markets to model and trade are the highly inefficient young markets where the fundamentals are the main driver of value. An example is the Eurovision Song Contest which reaches the Semi Final stage this evening with the Final in Helsinki on Saturday. Though it is distinctly uncool to enjoy this extravaganza, I do. Some of the music is actually bearable (at least once), the modelling is complex, it is a celebration of pan-European culture however kitschy and market corruption is a major factor in any analysis which, when set against a background of sequins and histrionics, keeps me amused for a few hours.
The pricing of these markets is hilarious. The skilled can make a killing. Most bookmakers price up these events and, with the similarly analysable reality tv shows, are prime territory when approached with an open mind. You cannot believe how much we made on Bez winning Celebrity Big Brother, for example, just because we knew how well he would come across...
So what are the key overviews that one needs to be addressing. I offer a few angles below:
* Last year's appalling winner did not win because Eurovision had suddenly developed a heavy metal/rock audience. It won because it reminded large numbers of people of the type of dumbed down dross equivalent with that sad movie Spinal Tap. Consequently, the mimic brigade who think that moaning on in a semi-goth angst-ridden stylee is going to win any votes this year had better think again. Many of this year's entries are clear evidence that the unpleasant spectacle of rock lurks just below the surface across Europe.
* When virtually every artist I choose to listen to is Black, the presence of just two Black musicians on the Eurovision videos is a clear indication of how successful integration has been across the continent and how meritocratic the selection process is everywhere.
* The bookmakers cannot corrupt Eurovision markets. If the industry builds up unpleasant liabilities (as is happening with the Ukrainian entry), the prize will always be bigger than the corruptive bait from the aspect of the artist(s).
* This year's competition is surprisingly strong with a generally less formulaic approach leading to an open betting market. Usually, the bookmakers enjoy big runner fields but enhanced modelling can root out value.
* Diaspora counts... Be wary of the impact of immigrant groups and their redistributive impact on the vote - Poles in England and Eire; Turks in Germany; Romanians in Spain etc etc.
* Pan-European culture has homogenised our listening habits both directly and through the use of cultural imagery in the media. I-pods across Europe are shuffling the same tunes...
* National Feelgood Factor (NFF) is a major input to any solution and modelling such areas reveals complex structures in the interplay between different macro events on a nation's psyche. Ukraine - dysfunctional government/ Euro2012/ pseudo-revolution/ country effectively split in two/ "national pride" destroyed by choice of rural comedian as a portrayal of a modernising (sic) country/ extensive corruption...
* We believe that this year's winner will come from one of two schools - self-parody or pure musical talent. We would hope for the latter but Europe showed a desire for the zany last year and the continent feels no less highly strung this time around.
* Regional voting and nationalistic posturing is a key part of the modelling. Both the Semi Final and the Final must be approached independently and, indeed, fullsome analysis of the Final is only really valid after the full quota of finalists are known.
* Careful filtering of the finalists has ensured a more geographically neutral spread for the Final 24 with Eastern Europe having some domination and there are regional block weightings that need to be assessed. Geographical proximity may be many things - compare Albania/Turkey with Serbia/Montenegro, for example.
* Analysing Eurovision combines market analytical skills with A&R and musicological talents. The skill is to find value in the market but, in order to achieve this, one has to be able to assess the strengths, weaknesses and "it" factor for all the songs and also have to be able to address the cultural style that exists continentally which meant, for example, that everybody across Europe was ready for Dana International...
* Only bet with the Betting Exchanges (BXs) as the traditional bookmakers treat the overround with contempt with William Hill currently offering 156% book while Betfair are 104% and you can trade against a song winning with the BXs. Betfair additionally offer Top 4 and Top 10 markets that enable a subtle portfolio of positions to be developed on each act.
Ignore the nationalism. Enjoy the complete lack of Americanised muzak. It really doesn't matter who wins - we all win by sharing crap things about our respective cultures. This year's Israeli entry is pure Cynical Reality and, if it wins, so do we (and not only in a financial sense). I celebrate the global and continental village spectacular society portrayals of our reality even though I know, deep down, that I shouldn't...
Perhaps it is because I am a north west European with south and east European tendencies and the contest is nearer to a federal united states of Europe than any of the political structures in Brussels or Strasbourg. After much thought, that is the only viable explanation as to why I find that Eurovision is such a giggle and totally essential viewing! Even if it does mean recognising that we have become a continent full of goths...
And remember... Away middle eights count double :)
Tuesday 8 May 2007
Caborn Reborn As Born-Again Moralist
I am willing to accept that Richard Caborn is not as corrupted as Tessa Jowell in their fiefdom at the British government's Department for Culture Media and Sport but any individual who existed on the periphery of the decision making process regarding the first super-casino can hardly claim a moral high ground. And, yet, the full spectrum (from proper football all the way through to the corrupt spectacular society nonsense which is dished up today) allows people like Caborn to shuttle around a twilight zone that allows tokenistic posturing towards the most visible power structures while equally facilitating the corrupt infrastructure required by such power structures. A sort of Orwellian political duplicity...
Yesterday, Richard Caborn published a public warning to the Premier League and, by association, the G14(18) group of teams. Caborn asks (in a suitably Castro-esque posture) "is the Commission prepared to give sport back to the people?" followed by a thinly disguised power grab with "are they prepared to give powers to sport to carry out better governance and regulation without being threatened by the courts of Europe?".
Caborn's gang want the Commission to give sport an exemption from European Union rules that encourage free markets and open competition, a logical and concrete outcome, they say, of the European Council's Nice declaration of 2000 that acknowledged the specific characteristics of sport and its social role in Europe.
This is a fake reality - it is not going to happen. Football has mutated into an entirely different species of event since the Bosman ruling, the impact of major gambling liquidity and the input of Sky television. There is no going back particularly if the proposed route undermines the powers-that-be. The changes that Caborn will present to the European Competition Commissioners will be opposed at that immediate level as there is an annoyance at his tokenism. The Premier League, the UEFA Strategy Board and the G14(18) will treat any campaign against their interests as a further momentum towards the establishment of a European Super League (see: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/04/every-so-often-g1418-group-of-europes.html). Caborn appears not to see that by appearing to be fighting the good fight in an inappropriate territory, he is actually creating more destructive forces against the game. A few points...
* It is not in the interests of football for the Super League to occur.
* Whether they like it or not, UEFA and FIFA are going to have to both play second fiddle to the major teams and their cartelised representative associations and also approach all negotiations with a hidden agenda suggestive of compromise. As soon as the footballing authorities cross a threshold of the power team's own choosing, these self same teams can simply pick up their ball and start a whole new game. We'll all follow them - they know that! FIFA and UEFA know it too!
* All successful campaigns must involve realisable goals otherwise such projects are both dispiriting and futile and, furthermore, frequently strengthen the opposition. FIFA and UEFA will be required to achieve incremental adjustments protective of their specific interests and the interests of football (or both on the occasions where they coincide). Power grab = counter productive; incremental realism = the best defensive strategy. It's like chess. FIFA and UEFA are a couple of points down and the prime gameplan is solid defence with guerilla raids if and when feasible. Then along comes Mr Caborn's loose cannon riding headlong into the opposition on a suicide mission that will trigger an immediate counter attack.
* Although watching the rich get richer and the poor poorer is an unpleasant spectacle wherever it is found in society, we exist in a shareholder capitalist system. What does football expect? The game, at the top levels, sold out. Complaining about the financial strength of the major operators should be a generalised and not a specific posture. Why should the impact of manipulative money in football be regarded any differently than the equivalent money in any other sector?
* Reading a New Labour minister pontificating about illusory leftish issues usually means that there is a career breakpoint ahead. Is Caborn's timing of a public portrayal of his non neocon credentials anything to do with the forthcoming change of leadership in his party?
* Inside the game, there is an awareness of the corrupting influence of gambling money and an acceptance that the situation is about to get a whole lot worse with the influx of money from some entertaining sources. If Caborn really wanted to make an impact on the modern day reality of top tier football, he could confront the considerable forces that, having implemented a strategy for the game to sell out to the dollar, now wish for that dollar to be a gambling dollar. No chance of Mr Caborn venturing into that territory and, yet, his job title is Minister for Gambling as well as Minister for Sport... Proper bottom-up democratic reform and good governance with regard to corruption have both been conspicuous by their absence over the last ten years as indeed they were for the previous 15... In fact, as has ever been the case!
The most worrying aspect of all this for the fan of a people's football is that the individuals, businesses, governments and organisations that are scrapping for competitive edge and power within the global cash cow of football are fighting their own proprietary agendas. Nobody (except, perhaps, Platini) is taking decisions for the good of the game and, as is always the case in this system, the truly psychopathic come up trumps. The battle lines are drawn. There is a considerable daylight between Caborn's threat of "storm clouds gathering on Europe's skies" (who writes his stuff?) and the Premier League's "the idea that there is a crisis in European football that is unique in nature is a flawed concept".
Caborn should have a shave, for starters, and then take a good look at himself in the mirror. Can he really believe that inappropriately poking the money monster on our behalf but not in our interests is a preferable course of action to a different type of poking which is both in our interests and on our behalf and, much more importantly, is indicative of Caborn's job of gambling governance?
I don't care whether Chelsea buy Shevchenko.
I do care when Chelsea corrupt the outcomes of football matches.
Wow! How therapeutic was that?
Yesterday, Richard Caborn published a public warning to the Premier League and, by association, the G14(18) group of teams. Caborn asks (in a suitably Castro-esque posture) "is the Commission prepared to give sport back to the people?" followed by a thinly disguised power grab with "are they prepared to give powers to sport to carry out better governance and regulation without being threatened by the courts of Europe?".
Caborn's gang want the Commission to give sport an exemption from European Union rules that encourage free markets and open competition, a logical and concrete outcome, they say, of the European Council's Nice declaration of 2000 that acknowledged the specific characteristics of sport and its social role in Europe.
This is a fake reality - it is not going to happen. Football has mutated into an entirely different species of event since the Bosman ruling, the impact of major gambling liquidity and the input of Sky television. There is no going back particularly if the proposed route undermines the powers-that-be. The changes that Caborn will present to the European Competition Commissioners will be opposed at that immediate level as there is an annoyance at his tokenism. The Premier League, the UEFA Strategy Board and the G14(18) will treat any campaign against their interests as a further momentum towards the establishment of a European Super League (see: http://footballisfixed.blogspot.com/2007/04/every-so-often-g1418-group-of-europes.html). Caborn appears not to see that by appearing to be fighting the good fight in an inappropriate territory, he is actually creating more destructive forces against the game. A few points...
* It is not in the interests of football for the Super League to occur.
* Whether they like it or not, UEFA and FIFA are going to have to both play second fiddle to the major teams and their cartelised representative associations and also approach all negotiations with a hidden agenda suggestive of compromise. As soon as the footballing authorities cross a threshold of the power team's own choosing, these self same teams can simply pick up their ball and start a whole new game. We'll all follow them - they know that! FIFA and UEFA know it too!
* All successful campaigns must involve realisable goals otherwise such projects are both dispiriting and futile and, furthermore, frequently strengthen the opposition. FIFA and UEFA will be required to achieve incremental adjustments protective of their specific interests and the interests of football (or both on the occasions where they coincide). Power grab = counter productive; incremental realism = the best defensive strategy. It's like chess. FIFA and UEFA are a couple of points down and the prime gameplan is solid defence with guerilla raids if and when feasible. Then along comes Mr Caborn's loose cannon riding headlong into the opposition on a suicide mission that will trigger an immediate counter attack.
* Although watching the rich get richer and the poor poorer is an unpleasant spectacle wherever it is found in society, we exist in a shareholder capitalist system. What does football expect? The game, at the top levels, sold out. Complaining about the financial strength of the major operators should be a generalised and not a specific posture. Why should the impact of manipulative money in football be regarded any differently than the equivalent money in any other sector?
* Reading a New Labour minister pontificating about illusory leftish issues usually means that there is a career breakpoint ahead. Is Caborn's timing of a public portrayal of his non neocon credentials anything to do with the forthcoming change of leadership in his party?
* Inside the game, there is an awareness of the corrupting influence of gambling money and an acceptance that the situation is about to get a whole lot worse with the influx of money from some entertaining sources. If Caborn really wanted to make an impact on the modern day reality of top tier football, he could confront the considerable forces that, having implemented a strategy for the game to sell out to the dollar, now wish for that dollar to be a gambling dollar. No chance of Mr Caborn venturing into that territory and, yet, his job title is Minister for Gambling as well as Minister for Sport... Proper bottom-up democratic reform and good governance with regard to corruption have both been conspicuous by their absence over the last ten years as indeed they were for the previous 15... In fact, as has ever been the case!
The most worrying aspect of all this for the fan of a people's football is that the individuals, businesses, governments and organisations that are scrapping for competitive edge and power within the global cash cow of football are fighting their own proprietary agendas. Nobody (except, perhaps, Platini) is taking decisions for the good of the game and, as is always the case in this system, the truly psychopathic come up trumps. The battle lines are drawn. There is a considerable daylight between Caborn's threat of "storm clouds gathering on Europe's skies" (who writes his stuff?) and the Premier League's "the idea that there is a crisis in European football that is unique in nature is a flawed concept".
Caborn should have a shave, for starters, and then take a good look at himself in the mirror. Can he really believe that inappropriately poking the money monster on our behalf but not in our interests is a preferable course of action to a different type of poking which is both in our interests and on our behalf and, much more importantly, is indicative of Caborn's job of gambling governance?
I don't care whether Chelsea buy Shevchenko.
I do care when Chelsea corrupt the outcomes of football matches.
Wow! How therapeutic was that?
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