Essendon lurches into its Finals campaign with a MARS Rating of just 988.2, rating it behind both the 9th-placed Roos on 1,002.4 and the 10th-placed Dogs on 1,000.9. That makes the Dons the lowest MARS rated team to participate in a Finals series since the West Coast team of 2002, which entered September rated 987.7 and exited in week 1, ironically at the hands of the Dons.

A season-high 25.9 Ratings Points changed hands in Round 24, more than 7.5 of them as a result of the lopsided result between the competition front-runners. Still, none of the horse-trading of Points mattered at all for the rankings of teams 1 through 10, the first effects being felt by Adelaide, previously 10th, dropping two places and allowing Fremantle and Melbourne, both losers, to rise by a spot.

If you're an Investor, I can only hope that you read and independently acted on the Simulations blog, in particular this entry from 2 weeks ago in which I noted the value in the Suns for the Spoon at $3.75, because you certainly didn't get much value from your Portfolio investment this weekend.

Somebody knew something. Within 2 hours of the line market being posted on the TAB on Wednesday, the Suns, granted 75.5 points start by those who determine these things, had moved from $1.90 to $1.70. Meantime, the head-to-head market, frequented it seems by different money, ill- or un-informed and therefore unaware of the team announcements to come, steadfastly supported the Gold Coast's Monday assessment as $13 prospects.

Prior to running the Fund algorithms for this week I was concerned that they might both turn bet-shy which, coupled with the substantial possibility of pronounced inactivity during the weeks of the Finals, would have left Investors with a loss and no hope of mitigating it. I need not have worried.

This week, four pairs of teams swapped ladder positions on the MARS Ratings Leaderboard, half of them teams from MARS' top 8.

It's a fraught time of year to be wagering on teams whose places in the finals have largely been determined and I can't but help feel that Investors were bitten by this fact over the weekend with the Cats perhaps 1% off their game and consequently going down to a determined Swans team playing finals footy, and the Dons doing just enough to beat Port Adelaide but nowhere near enough to cover a 70.5 points spread.

I've railed in the past about the iniquity of the so-called "unbalanced draw", that is, the fact that teams don't get a chance to play every other team at home and away over the course of the season. Here on MAFL, railing requires empirical justification, so it's time I estimated the likely impact of this imbalance.

I can acknowledge the beauty in them but I find it difficult to watch Olympic events such as the Ice-Skating, Gymnastics and the Diving, where the final marks are essentially deductions from perfection rather than accumulations from zero. It's for similar reasons that I loathe wagering weekends like the one we Investors are facing this week where success is largely about avoiding losses rather than about totting up gains.

More ripples rather than ructions on the MARS Ratings Leaderboard this week, as the West Coast and St Kilda, the Roos and the Swans, and the Lions and the Tigers traded places.

The weekend's perfect 3 from 3 wagering performance by the Head-to-Head Fund wasn't enough to overcome the 0 and 3 performance from the Line Fund, resulting in a 5.5c decline in the Portfolio price, sending it to 92c.

At the start of the season I wrote about the impressive aggregate performance of the (revamped, bye-accommodating) MAFL Heuristics over the period 2006 to 2010. This year the MAFL Head-to-Head Fund has recorded a significant loss - would any of the Heuristics have done better?

Investors can look forward to far more wagering action this weekend, starting with the first and ending with the final game of the round. In all, six of the round's eight games will have a bearing on Portfolios.

Lots of jostling for minor placings this week as the teams from positions 8 through 15 participated in four games of pairwise leapfrog. The Gold Coast, meantime, shed a further 4.5 Ratings Points to put them just one decent shellacking away from emphatically claiming the title of lowest MARS rated team of all-time, an honour currently lumped upon the St Kilda team of 2001, which finished that season with a MARS Rating of 947.21.

I've been planning to play with the cascade charts function of this Excel sparklines add-in for some time, and this weekend's relatively wager-free status gave me the opportunity.

At least this week I can claim that Investor Portfolios were in profit at the end of a game.

It's all about Saturday for Investors this week as we've no wagers on the Friday night game nor any on Sunday's fare, which leaves us beholden to the Hawks, Freo and the Dogs.

I suppose after 19 rounds you'd hope to have a bead on teams' abilities. If that's the case then it's no great surprise that we saw only 3 pairs of swaps on the MARS Ratings ladder this week, with two of those pair swaps merely clarifying the relative ineptitude of the teams that will already be making other plans for September.

Yet another good week for Investors, whatever your metric, sees Investor Portfolios at 99.3c thanks to a 5.7c gain by the Head-to-Head Fund and a 7.3c gain from the Line Fund, its sixth profitable round in a row.

This week's portfolio of wagers reminds me of the archetypical visit to the dentist: little prospect of anything positive, probably a little pain, and the real possibility of lasting physical, psychic and financial trauma.