saddo. can back up your argument but still very very sad, i'm a rugby fan and like to watch a game of rugby not use a freakin abacus

She is like this every frigging day on the HKR site.

To say it gets boring is a complete understatment.

Quote Mrs Barista="Mrs Barista"Send me a list of his Test scores and I'll run them through Grubb's model to see whether 333 is a single value outlier in that dataset. '" stats.cricinfo.com/ci/engine/pla ... ew=innings

Quote Mrs Barista="Mrs Barista"Send me a list of his Test scores and I'll run them through Grubb's model to see whether 333 is a single value outlier in that dataset. '" stats.cricinfo.com/ci/engine/pla ... ew=innings

Cheers bud. I'm a messageboard fan and like to post without personal insults. In my defence it was your chum Barnacle Bill who started this averaging/outlier exclusion extravaganza, which unfortunately has derailed what was intended to be a positive thread about improving financial performance in some SL clubs. I'm not sure why this is TBH.

Exactly right.



Within these sports club models profit is almost irrelevant. What is most relevant is the operating cashflow, as it is that which dictates how much the club benefactors need to inject.



If Mrs Barista has all of the club balance sheets (opening and closing) then perhaps she can construct a simple FRS1 cashflow statement and tell us what their operating cashflow is (as opposed to net cashflow) ? That is a much better indicator of how clubs are performing than arbitrary P&L reserve movements.



Profit is vanity, cash is sanity.

Eh? Don't you need to have disclosure of cash equivalents (ie overdrafts) to do that properly?

I challenged excluding Quins "in your opinion", you then suggested a "standard deviation diagram". I didn't need to invent one of those because by calculation it is clear that Quins fall within +- 3 standard deviations of the mean.



You decided to persist with the nonsense of that approach and made a graph with an arbitrary cut off £1,000,000 above and below the median as if that proved anything at all.



At this point you included this strange statement "It's almost as if you're trying to downgrade the financial performance of the rest of the competition so the results of your club are compared to an average distorted by a loss twice as great as the next worst club. Assuming the accounts are filed at some point." Which I think is telling in terms of the real purpose of this pseudo scientific excercise.



Even in this statement you cling onto the notion that because Quins loss is twice that of the next biggest loss making club that in some way justifies their exclusion. You still have not explained why that logic should not apply to Leeds whose profit is 4.5 times that of the next biggest profit making club.







I haven't abandoned a request for valid statistical technique which reasonably excludes Quins at all, I'm still waiting for one.





The Grubbs test cannot exclude Quins because Quins are a part of the data set "SL Clubs profit/loss 2009". Their results are normal for that data set. They fall within +- 3 standard deviations of the mean, which is where we would expect the vast majority of results to lie. They do.



You will continue to grasp at this straw though because having made an absurd statement "In my opinion Quins are not representative" you then sought some kind of technique (after making up a couple of your own) which, if used inappropriately, appears to support your exclusion of Quins. Grubbs doesn't, Quins are a SL club and their financial results contribute to the data set "financial results of SL clubs 2009"



If, as has been mentioned, Crusaders post a £1,000,000 loss what happens to Quins then? Do they get put back in your calculation because they've suddenly become a SL club again?



What if Saints and Hudds had not reported yet or you didn't like their results either so decided to exclude them "in your opinion" as well as Quins. Do you then also exclude Leeds because they become an outlier? And then what is the value of your conclusion about the data set?



The reason for this preparatory "study" concluding in a made up "average" is to pave the way for a further dig at Rovers when their "less than expected" losses are published.



If people think that unlikely then they only need to see a few of your posts on the Rovers forum.





You may follow Hull FC but your passion is sniping at Rovers.

Mrs B is certainly an-a-Count-ant.

What, the average that was mentioned once until you started this stats-fest you mean?

Neil Hudgell reported that Rovers lost £450k last November, so why would actually filing those accounts make any difference to what I've already posted, other than taking the average down a bit? Unless the "improvement" he referenced is in the region of +£250k it won't change Rovers relative position to the other clubs. It won't alter the fact that 4 clubs have turned in a profit this year vs 1 last year and a further 3 are around(ish) breakeven, of which one is Wigan who have confirmed a return to profitability this year. It also won't change the fact that Harlequins are a statistically significant outlier from the rest of the clubs who have filed. The point you make on Saints/Hudds/Leeds being excluded on a whim is a great one, because if you run Grubbs against data for everyone excluding Harlequins, there are no significant outliers in this population that may be excluded.

I've never talked about club x's profit / loss being greater or less than a certain multiple of the next nearest, that was you, cockle. A shame then that this was shot down by the key statistical test for determining outliers.



Using a separate argument, just in case you now say I'm trying to muddy the waters, I do commercial finance for a living. I do it pretty well and get paid pretty well for doing it. One of the key things I look at is relative performance, whether by geography, channel, brand, category, you name it, and I define control groups on all these dimensions on a daily basis. I can tell you now that from a performance review perspective I'd be discredited if I reported a benchmark that included an outlier of this magnitude. I could report both, but there would be a demand to strip one out also to see a more representative average performance.



You seem rather unwilling to discuss the key point here which is that on the face of it, results generally speaking are a bit better. I think this is a good thing, although as Derwent correctly points out, a bit of a crude measure, but nonetheless one that has been used in the past. Do you think it's encouraging? Even if include Harlequins, add in £450k loss for Rovers (this being worst case given the improvement still to be added in) and £1m for Crusaders, the average loss is -£370k, so an improvement. But the real improvement surely is from a position in 2009 of only one club in profit and Hudgell's Sun article saying "everyone is losing £500k a year", it seems perhaps we are now in a better place than that. Or am I being too naive?

Who said it would?







And if you exclude Saints and Hudds "in your opinion" Leeds becomes an outlier. Does that mean they're no longer a SL club suitable for inclusion in the data set 'SL clubs finacial results 2009'? What this does is reveal the nonsense of your method. As does including a loss (not confirmed) for Crusaders of £1,000,000 because then Quins are no longer an outlier using Grubbs technique.



But I stress, the use of Grubbs is erroneous, again you choose to ignore this because it highlights your lack of statistical rigour. Grubbs would be used to check if a result belongs in a data set i.e it is not an erroneous result from a different data set that has crept in by mistake. Unless you are arguing that it is a fundamental mistake to include Quins in the financial results of all SL clubs, which might be the case if say the results of the Union club had been used or some other error had been made. But that is not the case.





















Well done you.









You wouldn't, because you've only just learned about Grubbs. If you used this test (wrongly, presumably since you are here

) in your everyday work, you wouldn't need to exclude Quins "in your opinion" in the first place, or make up some arbitrary cut off point around the median, when I questioned your method.









If you include Crusaders supposed loss of £1,000,000 you HAVE to include Quins by your own methodology. This is the absurdity of your position. Quins aren't a SL club but if Crusaders are included then Quins become a SL club again.





Your hanging off Neil Hudgell's every word is not really a revelation.

Not at all.



If you have the balance sheet you can work out the OCF quite easily from the movements in working capital and the annual EBITDA. So long as you have the opening and closing balances for debtors, creditors and stock then you can work out what the cashflow was from normal operating activities though in some cases you'd have to have an educated guess at EBITDA due to lack of a detailed P&L.