Investing in stocks vs investing in soccer betting.
Equities are the default home for long-term capital, and for most people they should stay that way. Here is why we believe a disciplined, model-driven football portfolio can earn a higher return per unit of capital, with risk that is more controllable than a share portfolio - and the honest caveats that come with it.
What the stock market actually delivers
These are widely published long-run figures for the US market, the best-performing major equity market of the last century. Most other markets have done worse.
S&P 500 long-run nominal total return, dividends reinvested, roughly 1926 to today. Around 7% after inflation.
The S&P 500 lost more than half its value in the global financial crisis and took about five and a half years to recover its previous high.
The fastest bear market on record. Investors who needed cash in March 2020 crystallised the loss.
Adjusted for inflation, the S&P 500 did not sustainably exceed its March 2000 peak until around 2013.
Figures are approximate, rounded and drawn from publicly available index data (S&P Dow Jones Indices, Robert Shiller's long-run dataset). They describe the past, not the future.
Two very different ways to put capital to work
The comparison is not about which is "better". It is about what each asks of you and what you can control.
Small edges, recycled often
A share portfolio puts your capital to work once and relies on a large annual move. A football portfolio only needs a small edge per position, because the same money is reused every matchday for nine months of the year.
Turn the capital over enough times and a modest percentage per cycle compounds into a meaningful annual figure - while each individual position risks only a small, predefined fraction of the bankroll.
That is the whole thesis. It is not magic and it is not guaranteed: it depends entirely on the edge being real and the staking being disciplined. Those two things are our job.
- 1Price the slateModel vs market
- 2Size the stakesSmall, fixed fraction
- 3MatchdayPositions settle in 90 min
- 4Review & redeploySame capital, next week
Illustrative process only. Not a representation of past or future returns.
Risk you can define before kick-off
Known maximum loss
Every position has a stake chosen in advance. There is no overnight gap, no margin call and no "it fell 40% while I was asleep".
Independent events
Thousands of matches a season, each unrelated to the last and to the wider economy. A recession does not change who wins on Saturday.
Fast feedback
Results arrive in hours, so a model that stops working is caught in weeks, not years. Stock investors often only learn their thesis was wrong a decade later.
Betting without an edge has a negative expected return - the bookmaker's margin guarantees it. The arguments above only hold if the predictions are genuinely better than the market, which is difficult, and if staking is disciplined, which is harder than it sounds.
Losing runs are normal and can be long. Capital you place with any sports betting operation, including ours, should be money you can afford to lose entirely. Nothing on this page is a forecast of returns, a solicitation to invest, or financial advice, and betting may not be legal where you live.
We publish settled results to our clients exactly as they happened. If you would like to see how we report, ask us.
Curious how Soccer Advise would fit alongside what you already hold?
Most of our clients treat us as a small, uncorrelated sleeve - not a replacement for their savings.