Two favourites in a row held serve, and the ledger has given back most of a week. Today the shape flips again: €1,240 at risk to win €980.

Inter beat Napoli at San Siro and the lay cost €730. Two losses in a row, the first pair of the new book, and the ledger has done what small ledgers do: plus €2,940 on Thursday, plus €1,370 today, a return on risk that has gone from ninety per cent to fifty-one to twenty-eight without the method changing a single thing about how it picks. Three wins, two losses, six positions filed. That is a coin, observed briefly.

Tonight Juventus host Milan and the exchange prices the home side at 2.24 to lay. Note what that number does to the trade. Above 1.98 the liability exceeds the €980 a win pays, so this position risks €1,240 to make €980 — the same inverted shape as the Parma lay that opened this book on Monday. We are favoured to win it and we are worse off when it goes wrong. Strip the margin off the board — 2.22 Juventus, 3.4 the draw, 3.85 Milan — and the fair line reads 44.9% / 29.3% / 25.9%. Our break-even needs Juventus to win less than 44.1%; the market says 44.9%. Seven tenths of a point against us, the widest gap of the six positions so far, and around €16 of negative expectation per €1,000.

The one number worth sitting with is 29.3%. That is the highest share this book has ever seen on a draw, and it is the market saying what everyone watching already knows: two sides of this size, in the third week of a season, at a ground where neither can afford to lose, tend to end up taking a point each. Add Milan’s 25.9% and more than half the board pays us. What it does not do is pay us enough, because the exchange has read the same fixture and priced it first. That is the honest position on every card this book has filed: not a market error, a market opinion we happen to be selling. Six positions in, three and two, and the sample still tells us nothing.