ROI, yield, and why neither means much alone

Return on investment is profit divided by total staked. Yield is the same calculation under a different name in some markets. One hundred profit on two thousand staked is five per cent, however many bets produced it.

It normalises for how much was risked, which is genuinely useful, and it deliberately discards how the risk was distributed — which is where most of the information lives.

A high ROI at long prices is expected and unremarkable; a modest ROI at short prices can be exceptional. The figure has to be read against the average price or it cannot be read at all.

And that is the trap. It is quoted as though it were comparable across strategies. It is only comparable within one, and the average price is the field that would make it interpretable and is almost never published beside it.

What to do with it. Report and demand three numbers together: return, bet count, and average price. Any one of them alone is decoration.