Good luck Michael with the strategy for gaining market share to improve profit.
I had the winning model for week 5. I kept it unchanged for week 6 and we can all see what happened I ended up in 63rd position. Given my current strategy isn’t giving consistent results I’m going to change it so feel it’s OK to share my feedback from weeks 5 and 6.
In week 5 I wrote a market share of 13%, avoided any large claims (maybe there weren’t any) and managed the following.
Looking good I thought, so let’s leave it unchanged for week 6… Ouch…
So there are few things of interest.
First, I gained market share. That shouldn’t surprise us… as a market on average we’re doing a good job of losing money, so I could believe that market rates are rising as the weeks go by.
Second, gaining market share means an increased likelihood of picking up large claims. It looks like there were 3 large claims (given claims are now capped to 50k) in the week 6 market and lucky me managed to pick them up more often than not.
If you believe large claims are predictable and you’ve set your rates accordingly then they shouldn’t worry you.
But if you think they are largely random then we are all playing a game of chance. In that case I suspect the lucky winner will be someone who sets their rates at an uncompetitive level, writes a small but profitable market share and avoids the large claims to take home the prize.
Time will soon tell, but in the meantime I’m going to go back to the data once more to see what I can make of the large claims. An then I had a cunning plan to prevent me from repeatedly picking up the large claims in the leaderboard calc which @alfarzan has just scuppered by declaring that the leaderboard is now calculated deterministically rather than by simulation as was the case!