Many people enjoy sports, and sports fans often enjoy placing wagers on the outcomes of sporting events. Unfortunately, most casual sports bettors lose money over time, creating a bad name for the sports betting industry. But what if we could “even the playing field?” If we transform sports betting into a more business-like and professional endeavor, there is a higher likelihood that we can make a case for sports betting as an investment.
The Sports Marketplace as an Asset Class
How can we jump from gambling to investing? Working with a team of analysts, economists, and Wall Street professionals – we often toss the phrase “sports investing” around. But what makes something an “asset class? An asset class is usually described as an investment in a marketplace with an inherent return. The sports betting world has a marketplace – but what about a source of returns?
For instance, investors earn interest on bonds in exchange for lending money. Stockholders earn long-term returns by owning a portion of a company. Some economists say that “sports investors” have a built-in inherent return in the form of “risk transfer.” Sports investors can earn returns by helping provide liquidity and transferring risk amongst other sports marketplace participants (such as the betting public and sportsbooks).
Sports Investing Indicators
We can take this investing analogy further by studying the sports betting marketplace. Like more traditional assets such as stocks and bonds, which are based on price, dividend yield, and interest rates, the sports marketplace’s “price” is based on point spreads or money line odds. These lines and odds change over time like stock prices rise and fall.
To further our goal of making sports gambling a more business-like endeavor and to study the sports marketplace further, we collect several additional indicators. In particular, we collect public “betting percentages” to study “money flows” and sports marketplace activity. In addition, just as the financial headlines shout, “Stocks rally on heavy volume,” we also track the volume of betting activity in the sports gambling market.
Sports Marketplace Participants
Earlier, we discussed “risk transfer” and the sports marketplace participants. The sportsbooks serve a similar purpose in sports betting as the investing world’s brokers and market-makers. They also sometimes act like institutional investors.
In the investing world, the general public is known as the “small investor.” Similarly, the general public often makes small bets in the sports marketplace. However, the small bettor usually bets with their heart, root for their favorite teams, and have certain tendencies that other market participants can exploit.
Sports investors are participants who play a similar role to a market maker or institutional investor. However, sports investors use a business-like approach to profit from sports betting. In effect, they transfer risk and can capture the inherent returns of the sports betting industry.
Contrarian Methods
How can we capture the inherent returns of the sports market? One method is to take a contrarian approach and bet against the public to capture value. This is one reason why we collect and study “betting percentages” from several major online sportsbooks. Studying this data allows us to feel the pulse of the market action and carve out the performance of the “general public.”
This, combined with point spread movement and the “volume” of betting activity, can explain what various participants are doing. Our research shows that the public, or “small bettors” – typically underperform in the sports betting industry. This, in turn, allows us to systematically capture value by using sports investing methods. We aim to apply a systematic and academic approach to the sports betting industry.
Daniel Fabrizio is the president and founder of http://www.SportsInsights.com, a leader in the sports information industry. Dan has over 10 years of experience in the sports marketplace industry as a risk manager for online sportsbooks and is the innovator behind SportsInsights’ successful contrarian approaches.