About Me
HELLO! Welcome to my blog: The Fantasy Sports Thief. Let me tell you a little about myself. First and foremost, I am a trader of stocks working for an institutional money manager. I’ve been in the industry for over a decade now, have both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in finance, and have spent time working as both a trader and a quantitative analyst. I’m also a rabid fantasy sports fan. I’ve been playing fantasy sports since back in the day before computers, where you and your buddies had to check each others stats each week to make sure no one was fudging the numbers. Since back when all drafts were live drafts and the best wide receiver in the league was Tim Brown. Obviously times have changed, and I’ve changed along with them.
Working as a quantitative analyst means building complex models based on statistics and data in order to properly value stocks. One day it occurred to me that I could apply the same concepts to fantasy sports, building models based on data and statistics to value players. The key difference in the rankings that I produce versus the ones you see pretty much everywhere else is the concept of magnitude. Its one thing to say Player A is ranked #1 and player B is ranked #2, but how much better is Player A versus Player B? Utilizing standardized scores, I am able to place more than just a rank on every player; I am able to place a value that is comparable to other players. In other words, you can use these scores to see how much better one player is versus another. Or, more importantly, you can evaluate trades based on the total value (score) to make sure you’re getting back more value than you’re giving away. Which brings me to the second point…
I’m a trader at heart and by profession. The most important ability to have as a trader is to be able to step into the market when everyone else is frantically selling irrationally, and be able to buy. Likewise, when everyone is buying up a stock to prices that don’t reflect reality, I need to be able to ignore the noise and sell. This strategy is completely applicable to fantasy sports. During the course of a season, players go through both hot streaks and cold streaks; it’s the nature of the game. When they go through these streaks, managers tend to become irrational about their expectations. The pain endured watching a top draft pick underperform for an extended period of time is so great that managers will do anything to rid themselves of that feeling. Likewise, when a mediocre player turns on fire for an extended period of time, and sports websites across the world are writing stories on him, managers will do anything to get their hands on the next big thing.
But the truth of the matter is that every player goes through both of these streaks, with the final resting place at the end of the season being fairly close to where we projected them to be at the beginning of the season. It’s a process called Mean Reversion. Outperform your historical tendencies and you’re due for a fall. Underperform them and you’re due for a rise. The longer you go through a streak, the sharper the correction will be. That’s when WE step in. Here in Thief Nation, I start the season off by creating a model to properly value players and create projected stats (which are admittedly close to the projections of others, with some important tweaks). Then, after we draft, we begin to identify those players that are either outperforming or underperforming expectations, and we build a trade offer. In the comments section you’ll notice readers and I constantly discussing which players are ripe to sell high and which are ripe to buy low, all en route to a dominating win.
Now as a disclaimer, it’s true that some players will go on to continue having a breakout season and others will continue to have a career worst season. These episodes are few are far between. Still, we work to structure the deals in a way that ensures you’re getting current value for the players, meaning if they continue in the same direction, you break even, and if they Mean Revert, you win big. Furthermore, while I drive the discussion, I am by no means the only input you’ll receive. The large majority of my readers jump right into the discussions offering their own input, any important news releases for the players involved, and any trades in their own league involving the same players. This blog isn’t just about me talking to the world, it’s about us, it’s about Thief Nation, a community of like minded active fantasy sports players working together to dominate their league.
I know my website isn’t the fanciest, that’s because I’m a finance and sports guy, not a computer guy. I know I don’t have all the nice bells and whistles that others have. Trust me, I’m doing my best to constantly try and make it better. In the meantime, everything is and always will be free here. I do my best to get all the data that I use sent out to you in a usable format and all I ask in return is that you join the conversation. We’re always happy to get as many points of view as we can. Finally, every post made on this blog gets shot right to my wonderful phone, and I do my best to answer all questions in a relatively short amount of time. I hope you like what you see and I hope you choose to stick around through the baseball, basketball, and football seasons.
Thanks!!
