Mean Reversion Machine – GW37: Zen and the art of portfolio maintenance

“Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows, by itself.” Over the 30 years I have been pretending to write about investment, I confess the Zen argument in favour of index investing had rather passed me by. Following the gameweek of two halves just passed, however, my eyes have been well and truly opened to the possibility, thanks to the team selection of Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola.

Of course, I have long been aware that the ability to do nothing is a hugely underrated skill in the field of fantasy football. My go-to quote in this area tends to be Blaise Pascal’s “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone” – but an uncharacteristic urge to freshen things up led me to the work of 17th Century Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō, with which I started this piece.

Let’s now compare and contrast the different, ahem, ‘investment journeys’ experienced over the last week by our MeanReversionMachine portfolio of the most-owned players in the FPL game and its adviser’s rather more active version. Ahead of Manchester City’s double gameweek, both featured a triple-up on that team’s players and both had played the triple-captain chip on Haaland.

Last Saturday night, after the first of what would be two 3-0 home wins for City, your portfolio adviser was feeling terribly pleased with himself. With another game still to play, Haaland was already on three x 11 points, O’Reilly had a respectable enough five and, best of all, the -4 taken to bring in Doku in place of the out-of-form Semenyo had paid off with a man-of-the-match performance and 11 points.

At the same time, Semenyo had blanked – for a sixth match in succession – as had Cherki who had been the most-bought player ahead of each of the last two gameweeks, as you can see in our Herdwatch tables below. With your adviser’s team thus sitting well inside the top100,000, dinner out with the family by the canal in London’s Little Venice tasted especially sweet that night.

And then came Wednesday and the City line-up for the second match. Ahead of this weekend’s FA Cup Final, Haaland and Doku were on the bench and O’Reilly not even in the squad. Playing the whole match, Semenyo finally remembered where the goal was, Cherki bagged an assist and MeanReversionMachine stalwart Guehi banked a second clean sheet to emerge as City’s top-scoring asset of the week. Doku got a point; Haaland none.

Dear Reader, it has been emotional. And yet only for the active portfolio, which now sits a little outside the magic 100,000 rank. Deprived of agency, beyond signing up to a simple set of rules way, way back in August, the passive portfolio sailed serenely on – unbothered by Semenyo’s recent form and duly rewarded for its Spock-like approach with an answer of sorts to last week’s musing about mean reversion.