MLB Road Favorite Moneyline
Moderate road-favorite moneyline bias
Rejected — a 55.1% win rate still produced PF 0.940 across 6,011 bets because the favorite price overwhelmed the hit rate. Holdout PF was 0.962.
- Category
- Sports betting
- Window
- 2012-04-05 → 2021-10-03
- Instruments
- MLB regular-season closing moneylines
- Timeframe
- Pre-game closing moneyline
- Tested
- 2021-10-03
Measured equity history
Recorded directly from the chronological test ledger.
Shown in the backtest's native equity or cumulative P&L units. It is not scaled to an investment amount because the published artifact does not provide a defensible capital denominator.
How it works
BackfillingThe bet
What market behavior this strategy is wagering on.
Plain-English explainer is backfilling — check back tomorrow. We publish the explanation only once it's written and reviewed, never auto-filled.
How it decides
What makes it enter, size, and exit a position.
Plain-English explainer is backfilling — check back tomorrow. We publish the explanation only once it's written and reviewed, never auto-filled.
How it can break
The regimes and failure modes that turn the edge negative.
Plain-English explainer is backfilling — check back tomorrow. We publish the explanation only once it's written and reviewed, never auto-filled.
Gate scorecard — 2 / 6
auto-imported from results.json| # | Gate | Result | Pass |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Minimum sample ≥300 bets | 6011 bets | ✓ |
| 02 | Profit factor ≥1.05 | PF 0.940 | ✗ |
| 03 | Max drawdown no worse than -25% | max DD -100.0% | ✗ |
| 04 | Real PF beats permutation p95 | real PF 0.940 vs permutation p95 0.950 | ✗ |
| 05 | Holdout profit factor ≥1.00 | holdout PF 0.962 | ✗ |
| 06 | Holdout sample ≥75 bets | 1505 holdout bets | ✓ |
VERDICT: REJECTED
Backing moderate road favorites produced a high-looking 55.1% win rate but still lost after price. Across 6,011 bets from 2012–2021, visiting teams priced from -170 to -110 returned profit factor 0.940 and lost 162.1 units.
The frozen 2019–2021 holdout remained negative at PF 0.962. Real PF did not beat the permutation p95 of 0.950, and the 100-unit fixed-stake bank was eventually exhausted.
This is a direct example of why win rate cannot stand in for profitability: laying a moneyline requires enough wins to cover the asymmetric loss, and this rule did not.
Frequently asked
Is MLB Road Favorite Moneyline profitable in 2026?
In this pre-registered backtest (2012-04-05 → 2021-10-03), MLB Road Favorite Moneyline returned a profit factor of 0.94 and passed 2/6 validation gates (placebo N/A). Verdict: REJECTED. Every result is published, pass or fail.
Has MLB Road Favorite Moneyline been backtested honestly?
Yes — through 6 pre-registered evidence gates appropriate to the available dataset, with the specification locked before any out-of-sample metric is computed. It failed and is published anyway.
Methodology: 11-gate validation — pre-registered spec, 6-gate battery, real market data. Full reproducible report: backtests/mlb_road_favorite/REPORT.md in the source repository.Author: Validated Research Team (Methodology v1.0 — 11-gate validation). Backtests are not investment advice.