Swiss Sailing Team Athlete Portfolio Optimization
Kilian Wagen, Grégoire Siegwart, 470M bronze medal at WCS Genoa 2019. Photo: Sailing Energy Sailing Photo: 2019. WCS Genoa at medal bronze 470M Siegwart, Grégoire Wagen, Kilian SWISS SAILING TEAM ATHLETE PORTFOLIO OPTIMIZATION by Marco Versari 17-905-563 Submitted to the Department of Management, Technology and Economics, Chair of Entrepreneurial Risk Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich July 2019 Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Didier Sornette Co-Supervisor: Dr. Spencer Wheatley Co-Supervisor: Marco Brunner, Swiss Sailing Team Abstract The Olympic Sailing sport is subject to complexity, uncertainty and change. We explored this challeng- ing sport with an interdisciplinary approach, using well-known tools in Economics and Finance for a new interpretation of success in Olympic Sailing. With this work, we offer an exploration with new lenses of an eminent domain for Swiss Sailing Team. To address the topic, we firstly studied the role and the contribution of the luck. So, we computed the ratio between the variance of the winning percentages for a large sample of Olympic classes elite sailors and the variance of the hypothetic scenario where the luck is the only factor in who wins and loses the sailing races. We identified that Olympic Sailing sport is a skill-based discipline, and the medallists are affected only for 10% to 20% by luck. Secondly, we ana- lyzed in-depth the performance of the elite Swiss sailors. In total, we designed two predicting models, and we qualitatively validated both by keeping into account the luck and the risk. We are persuaded that these predictions could be used for goal setting. The first was elaborated by using the power-law func- tions; by doing so, we characterized the learning curve of each Swiss sailor and projected it into the future.
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