Why not just gamble on Wall Street with fancy algos and options?

ROI is insane. If you made 20% a year on Wall Street, you are crushing it. You can make 20% a month in sports gambling with a fairly pedestrian strategy.

The only issue is that you can't scale well but this only becomes an issue when you need to put down tens of million a week (i.e. when you have $50m+).

The barriers to entry are also getting higher as competition is increasing in the space (although limits are probably going up too). One big issue right now is data. If you bet on soccer (the sport with the highest limits), you need to spend at least $100-200k/year (before hiring programmers) on data to become competitive.

>You can make 20% a month in sports gambling with a fairly pedestrian strategy.

then after 2 years you would have billions of dollars. yeah right

Yes, most of the people at the top are billionaires. Tony Bloom owns Brighton FC, Benter is a billionaire (probably, he made several hundred million in HK), Billy Walters is likely close, Ranogajec, Alan Woods is close, Benham is likely close (or was before he decided to buy several football clubs).

The issue, as I said initially, is that you aren't scalable past $100m or so (without connections to the Asian books, which some people above have...apparently, some of the guys are able to put down multiple millions on most European soccer leagues...which isn't available to most). But yes, most of the funds run by the above people have been making 100%+ for years.

It's solid. The problem is scaling: if you're betting fixed odds, a lot of bookmakers will limit the amount you can bet, or ban you outright if you're winning too much. If you're into horses and bet into the totes, you run the risk of wildly affecting the pool (and therefore the final payout) if you're throwing huge amounts into it. The only way to really scale it is to bet into pools that are already huge (like Hong Kong - hence why it's such a popular target for the big syndicates).

Parent comment said you can't scale.

Sports betting is huge. this is not 30 years ago. you can easily scale millions into bets/ and most ppl would be very happy to make $30 million out of $5k or so over a decade.

Wall Street has a higher barrier to entry, AFAICT. Hedge funds need capital and subscriptions to proprietary signals, HFT needs colocation. But there are enough one-offs of people making money on Wall Street that I suspect it is (relatively) common, just not reported on in the news.

if you suspect you aren't the most sophisticated gambler, then maybe it doesn't pay? Honestly, sports betting is orders of magnitude less sophisticated than Wall Street, so you have a better chance of finding an edge that others haven't also found.

Also, it's easy to imagine that there are a lot of "unskilled" betters, i.e. old folks betting for the thrill of it, people betting a few bucks just for kicks, ... With wall street, there might be a few unskilled people, but they are probably a small minority.

They're both the exact same thing when it comes to exchanges. I was working for a betting exchange and a market maker for a while, taking 500 orders a second and arbitraging between different competitors, before moving back to finance. It's quite interesting actually.

A lot of the market is not tradable though. On one end of the market, gambling is often a state monopoly with high spread and high margins (if not prohibited entirely), while on the other end there are large trades going on in private or closed circles.

Because you need very fast network cards and a lot of fiber. So the costs are much higher...

(I cant recall the name of the company that makes these super highend net cards, which hedgefunds prefer)

You can do both. Job postings from at least a couple well-known HFT firms shows that they’re getting into sports betting.

Because in sport, all the information is out in the open whereas in wall street it is concealed in boardroom deals.

>in sport, all the information is out in the open

LOL.

So I guess in your mind, pro's watch tape of their opponents for fun?

My brother in law is a physical therapist. He was recently flown first class to treat a starting NFL quarterback. Do you think what transpired during that appointment is public?

The NFL requires teams to report all injuries no matter how minor. https://operations.nfl.com/media/2683/2017-nfl-injury-report...

Ok and? Is the report the same as being there?

Is reading a quarterly earnings report the same as being in the boardroom? Of course not. If perfect knowledge were attainable this whole money-making business would be a lot easier. In sports, you can get information on how a player has performed historically as well as recently in order to make educated guesses on how they will perform in the future. In business, you have no access to R&D information. You have no idea if a company's past success will bring future success. You have no way of knowing if they have hit a snag or a breakthrough in R&D until after it's hit the market and if you do, you are likely breaking insider trading laws.

In sports, you can study your opponent to predict what they might do. In business, you can really only study what your opponent did during the actual game so to speak. For example, Microsoft can't wait for Sony to release the PS4 in order to develop a game plan for the Xbox. Both have to put forward their best effort regardless of what the competition may or may not do. In sport, you are training to beat 1 opponent, in business you are trying to appeal to the whims of the multifaceted consumer which aren't nearly as concrete.

I'm not sure what your point is. The original post I responded to was saying that all information in sport is public, unlike boardroom meetings, and then ask if reading a quarterly report is the same as being in the boardroom, which it's not, which is my point.

My point is that you picked an uncommon occurrence as evidence that sports are just as covert as wall street. I then rebutted your argument by pointing out that injury reports are public. Do people violate the rules? Yes, just like people inside trade. The point is that you can’t factor in cheating if you are starting with the assumption of a fair system. If it was utterly corrupt it would fail. If everyone is playing by the rules of the SEC/NFL then predicting future performance is much easier in the latter for all the reasons I previously stated.

I don't think that occurrence is all that uncommon, there are plenty of variables in the NFL that are not regulated to be transparent, there are loads and loads of variables in sport, not just NFL, that are only known to insiders. Not every sport or league strives to be as transparent as the NFL.

Sports interests me more. I would rather spend time looking at sports analytics than Wall Street analytics.

When you use somebody else’s money it’s called trading.