A new book, one position a day, and a favourite the market barely believes in. Parma at 2.36 is not really a favourite at all. That is why we are selling it.

The book starts again today, at zero. The first attempt ran ten lays between the 22nd and the 30th of August and finished at minus €2,510 on €6,260 of liability — two wins, both of them draws, eight losses, no upset. That ledger is closed rather than continued, because what changes today is not the thesis but the discipline around it: one position a day instead of two or three, and a straight bet on the draw available when the fixture argues for it rather than the favourite’s price. The old numbers are not carried over. They also are not hidden: they happened, they cost that, and the reason for the reset is that a book taking three positions a day was accumulating exposure faster than it was accumulating any reason to believe in itself.

Parma host Cremonese at the Tardini in the Coppa Italia, and the exchange has the home side at 2.36 to lay. That is a strange thing to call a favourite. Strip the margin from the board — 2.34 Parma, 3.35 the draw, 3.55 Cremonese — and the fair line reads 42.4% / 29.6% / 28.0%. The market is describing a coin toss with a third side. Our break-even is 41.9%: the position turns a profit as long as Parma win less than that, and the market says 42.4%. Half a point, in the wrong direction, which is the commission, and by now that sentence writes itself.

What is genuinely different is the geometry. Every position in the old book risked less than it stood to win — €310 to make €980 at the extreme — and lost far more often than it won. This one inverts both halves: €1,360 at risk against €980 of return, on an outcome the market gives 57.6% of the time. We are now favoured to win each individual position and worse off when we lose one. Neither shape is better than the other; they are the same trade wearing different clothes, and the only thing that decides either is whether the price is wrong. On a Coppa Italia tie between two sides of the same weight, with a draw priced at nearly thirty per cent, the honest answer today is that it probably is not — and the ledger begins again at zero either way.