Eight teams changed places on the MARS Ladder this week, though none from amongst the prevailing Top 3 or Bottom 5.

For only the third time this season, Investors have recorded back-to-back profits across consecutive rounds. The earlier instances were in Rounds 2 and 3, then Rounds 3 and 4, and the profits there were much less significant.

Apparently, if you can beat the reigning premiers you can beat the runners-up of the year before. That's the only rationale I can posit as to why the Head-to-Head Fund has made its only bet this week on Port Adelaide, at home again, facing the Pies.

Now that all teams have had 12 opportunities to impress the judges, it's time for me to take a look at team Ratings.

It's time to ask the question again: which are the teams to blame for Investors' losses so far, and which are the teams to thank for making them smaller than they otherwise would be?

With two rank, home team outsiders snatching victory in the final term, the competition enjoyed a much-needed surprisal injection this week.

This week marks the last of the short rounds for the home and away season and the first of the rounds where, historically, the Head-to-Head Fund has been at its best.

Wagering can be such a cruel pastime. When Collingwood led by almost 9 goals at the main break in Sunday afternoon's game against the Dogs, I thought that our line bet on them, giving 39.5 points start, was close to bankable. I'd mentally written-off the two SuperMargin wagers, and a quick calculation revealed that the loss of these two SuperMargin bets, coupled with the successful line bet, would leave the Recommended Portfolio at virtual breakeven for the round. Not a great result, but not too bad.

After last week's unaccustomed and uninspiring inactivity, this week sees a return to more usual levels of wagering. Investors have a financial stake in each of the half-dozen contests.

For Investors, there's very little action and no joy at all to report for the round just completed. Our lone, hopeful wager on the Dees survived contact with reality for about a quarter before disappearing in a flurry of second-quarter Magpie goals and behinds. Over the final three quarters of Monday's game the Dees were outscored 16.14 to 4.4. Still, the wager was small, and the Head-to-Head Fund is only weighted 30% in the Recommended Portfolio, so the net result was just a 0.4c loss.

Round 11: 12 teams, 6 games, 4 days, 2 home team rank underdogs, 1 bet.

All the MARS action was mid-table again this week, with the teams Ranked 5th through 9th the only ones to move. The Blues and the Roos each jumped three places while the Eagles fell 3, the Dons 2, and the Crows 1 spot.

It's nice to be able to report to Investors a small profit for the latest round though it'd be even nicer if I knew they'd been aware of all of the wagers that produced this most welcome of outcomes. But that would require that I'd not copied and pasted our SuperMargin wager on the Cats to make it appear to be a curious SuperMargin wager on the Dogs. Cats, Dogs - always easy to confuse in my experience.

It took far longer than usual for the TAB Sportsbet Bookmaker to finalise the markets for a number of this week's mismatches yet, in the end, the Head-to-Head Fund decided to pass on everything that he offered - including the Dees at $17 - and the Line Fund sniffed value in just three markets. Only the Margin Fund provided Investors with a reason to be interested in a wider range of contests.

Again it's only mid-table movement that we see on MARS Ratings this week with no changes amongst the top 4 and the bottom 8. The middle 6 sees three pairs of position swaps as the Eagles and Crows, Dons and Blues, and Roos and Pies trade places.

Until the final game of Round 9 you could describe the games from which our best wagering performances had come using a single characteristic: they were the ones on which Investors had no wagers.

The Line Fund and the Margin Fund are less active this week, venturing just 3 and 10 wagers respectively, while the Head-to-Head Fund has, for the second week running, made just a single, surgical selection.

A slight change of format for the MAFL MARS Leaderboard this week, consolidating information about the week-by-week changes in each team's MARS Ratings and the most recent 5 weeks into the one table.

If luck-deprivation were a recognised condition Investors surely qualified for government assistance on the strength of this weekend's results.

It's been a strange day, it seems, over at TAB Sportsbet. First, it took them 20 minutes to post the line markets, which if not an entirely unusual behaviour is certainly atypical, but they posted 7 of them as "Extra Line" markets and only two of them as the more traditional "Line" markets, a situation that they'd not resolved a considerable time later. Then it took them until 9pm tonight to post the last of the SuperMargin markets.