Fantasy Premier League - how did Mr. IPO fare?

It was quite funny when Bloomberg came up with an article - What Fantasy Football Can Teach You About Managing Your Money. 

I wrote something similar in August last year - Learn how to "invest" from Fantasy Premier League ("FPL"). Go read it, a lot of the "tips" I said still hold true.

Anyway, the gist of Bloomberg article (in case you can't access it) is as follows:

There is a long tradition of game playing among finance professionals, and fantasy football is no exception. Bond manager Bill Gross spent his formative years at the blackjack table. Warren Buffett famously plays bridge several hours a week, and poker remains a popular pursuit in the finance community.

As in finance, these games are characterized by incomplete information: Players have to assess the probability of outcomes in the face of uncertainty. As a result, they can hone skills that are transferable into financial markets.

Effectively, the task is one of portfolio construction. Over the course of a season, an active manager will make about 500 individual decisions in an effort to optimize the portfolio.

As in portfolio construction, there are a variety of strategies managers can employ. Momentum-based strategies follow players' recent form. The "hot hand" in sports has been variously dismissed by academics as a fallacy, but the latest research gives it some credence. Some managers seek out value, picking players who look mispriced relative to their performance. Others adopt a "Moneyball" approach, using quantitative tools to identify players whose underlying stats signal an impending upturn in performance.

The best managers use all three approaches and block out market noise, according to a 2021 study by mathematicians at the University of Limerick. They concluded that, "the prime factors in determining a manager's success are found to be long-term planning and consistently good decision-making in the face of the noisy contests upon which this game is based."

Whatever the strategy, a feature in common with financial markets is the erosion of edge, and the speed with which fantasy football has grown shows how that can play out. Ten years ago, Fantasy Premier League was played by fewer than 2.8 million managers. Since then, participation has grown at a rate of 12.7% a year. In parallel, the amount of content available has increased markedly. Dedicated websites and podcasts have sprung up and specialist Twitter accounts attract hundreds of thousands of followers. Such resources have made access to information more widespread. No longer can a manager gain an edge with knowledge of player injury absences or of a starting line-up; now, that information is broadly disseminated. Everybody competes with the same information in hand.

A consequence is that the median fantasy manager is getting better. In any activity that combines a combination of luck and skill, when the variance of skill goes down, proportionately more of the outcome becomes attributable to luck. Investment strategist Michael Mauboussin calls this "The Paradox of Skill." He identifies it in the field of active investment management, and it's present in fantasy football, too.

This year, the Fantasy Premier League game was won by American Jamie Pigott, who achieved a higher points score than any winner in the past 20 years. I came a measly 39,319th. In past seasons, I've almost broken into the top 1,000, but I fear the likelihood of that happening again is receding. With more managers competing, all with the same information, the game is getting harder. The impact of more active competition is evident in the performance of managers chasing Jamie: the gap between his score and that of the 100,000th ranked manager was narrower than it has ever been, and it keeps narrowing.

Performance Review - How did Mr. IPO fare in his first full season

As mentioned in the Bloomberg article, there were 9,131,935 players in FPL. The author ended at 39,319 which is pretty impressive. I was close to breaking the top 100,000 but ended at 412,263 with a total points of 2,365. (Yes, I do plot my progress) and that is 479 points behind the top player - Jamie Pigott. Maybe Mr. IPO should organise a league next season for his fan club!