Who needs this Joseph Buchdahl geezer, he seems surplus to requirements while we have pythonic, LinusP around (to name but a few)pythonic wrote: ↑Fri May 03, 2019 12:29 pmLike Joseph Buchdahl writes in the article:
"Unsurprisingly, the longer the odds the greater the variance or spread in outcomes. Of course, for these expected break-even scenarios the variance (or square of the standard deviation) is directly proportional to the odds minus 1.
Betting at longer odds will mean you have a greater chance of doing a lot better than expected just because of good luck (the distribution tails are fatter at higher yields). Of course, the reverse, is unfortunately also true since the distributions are symmetrical."
It's funny how once you have a 'name' you can get plaudits (and paid!) for writing articles stating the bleedin' obvious. That's not a dig at you for reproducing it, far from it, i'm sure there's lots who hadn't twigged what that abstract explains or gone the extra step and figured out the maths, or just needed a big name to confirm what's already been said on this thread.
But he really is just saying that for a given return, your income stream will be more predictable if you sell beans than it would be if you sell boats. At least he shows the reader some respect by starting sentances with 1 x "Unsuprisingly" and 2 x "Of course" which makes a nice change.