Will Sports Betting become the new economy?
In deepth look at sports betting and where it is headed
A Prediction is Worth a Thousand Words Dollars.
Why The Sports Betting Advice Market Is Becoming a Profession
By Jimmy Steward, Sports Wagering Ohio
Perhaps the most drastic change in American professional sports in the past three years or at least in the coverage and promotion of sports has been the rapid adoption, (by the biggest leagues and media outlets) of gambling as part of the fan experience. These days, sports books advertise their services endlessly on network television. Sports betting market size is likely to experience a tremendous growth of $167.6 billion USD by 2029. According to theguardian.com as of May 2022, Americans have bet $125 Billion on sports in four years since 2018 legalization. In the State of New York, legal sports gambling is expected to generate ten billion dollars by 2025; after New York legalized mobile betting, in January 2021, state residents wagered a hundred and fifty million dollars in a single weekend.
There’s an old joke about gambling,
If you bet on a horse to win, that's gambling.
If you bet on Ohio State to beat Michigan, that's entertainment.
If you bet on IBM to go up three points, that's business.
Do you see the difference?
Of course, the joke is, there is no difference hence you can put lipstick and a dress on a pig, it’s still a pig. If you need advice about gambling in the stock market, who can you see? Edward Jones, Charles Schwab, Merrill Lynch, TD Ameritrade, E*TRADE…the list goes on. In fact, anyone giving you advice on stocks needs to be licensed. All stockbrokers are required to obtain the same standard securities licenses. One must pass the Series 7 and Series 63 exams administered by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). Remember back in 1999, where you could be your own stockbroker. The company Discover Brokerage Direct had these commercials which portray a tow truck driver who earns enough money buying and selling stocks on the Internet to buy his own island AND the commercial showing a bartender in his establishment near wall street talking to two suits with news of his $43 billion deal he made online as he pours them their beer. The never-ending commercials about being your own day trader became such a big deal, that regulators took a closer look at the ads and made some changes. These ads were implying that Joe Average investors can become overnight millionaires by acting as their own stockbrokers. So, this is what happened (simplified) During the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, it seemed like everyone became a day trader. The practice exploded in popularity, with many traders from the era admitting that it was as easy as buying IPOs on the first day, expecting 20% pops in stock prices. When the new millennium hit, the dot-com bubble popped and those everyday folks who became full-time traders with little education lost their shirts. Day trading became vilified by politicians and the media, so the SEC and FINRA acted. They instituted the pattern day trader rule in February 2001 under the guise of protecting the investing public. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905. Let’s fast forward to 2022. Same tune, different instrument. Gambling experts now appear on TV, between games, to break down the odds. In terms of social media marketing, sports wagering advertising is the next big revenue stream. People that seek advice on How, Who and which sporting event to wager has dramatically increased in the last two years. The target audience is no longer the middle-aged males that like sports. Sports wagering is geared now to more women, young adults and long-term investors who want to profit from the sports betting experience. The rise of sports betting has doubled every year since 2018, and the rise of betting online has doubled, almost tripled each year since 2018. However, you may have not noticed the social media posts that tout sports betting advice. This has tripled each year and it has become the largest twitter base, more than the followings of Kardashian’s, Movie Stars, Rock Stars and Politics. Why is the sports betting advice market souring? It's simple psychology, profiting from the experience of advice enhances engagement with the person or company providing profitable advice and depending on the particular type sport may move individuals to gladly pay for sound advice. Alternatively, continuously getting bad advice from anyone, especially sports betting advice that fails to return a profit does not equate to not sports betting. In fact, much like selecting a losing stock and dumping it before it loses more value, people receiving poor sports betting advice end up switching brokers or “touts” to other brokers or “touts” that have better advice, better winning selections, and higher rates of return on investments with less financial risk. A sports betting tout is an individual (handicapper) who sells picks often in exchange for an up-front payment. Touts either sell picks by themselves or are part of a service, which is composed of numerous touts, selling different kinds of packages. The push to “touts” or Sports Brokers is rapidly taking place daily through Smart Phones, Computers, Television, Radio, Gaming and on social media driving a Multi-Billion dollar gambling industry. At best, some consider touts or sports betting brokers ancillary service providers for sports books. Officially, these people or groups are companies that provide advice to gamblers about who they expect to win certain sporting events.
THE LEGALIZATION SPORTS BETTING ADVICE
The legalization of state-sponsored sports gambling by many U.S. states gives increasing legitimacy to these types of service providers, arguably placing them on a social par with columnists who provide stock and other financial advice. While providing sports betting advice is a relatively safe business that is generally protected from liability under state and federal gaming laws based on the First Amendment, those who provide sports betting advice could face liability under both tort and contract law if they fail to deliver a certain level of service. Under tort law, gambling advisors risk liability if they negligently supply misinformation that another uses when placing a bet, potentially even if the gambling advisor does not sell that information to the party that suffers the financial loss. Specifically, Section 552 of the Restatement of Torts states that the tort of “information negligently supplied for the guidance of others” occurs where “one who in the course of his business or profession supplies information for the guidance of others in their business transaction and fails to exercise that care and competence” . . . which its recipient is justified in expecting. Similarly, under contract law, if a gambler purchases advisory services that fail to meet the standard of their warranty, the gambler may reasonably attempt to sue the advisory company that breached its express warranty. Given these risks, an individual or company in the business of providing gambling advice should adopt a Terms of Service that includes a proper disclaimer of any express and implied warranties, including, in particular, any warranties about expected performance. For instance, guaranteeing a level of success and failing to deliver, or advertising in a misleading manner may subject a sports betting tout to civil ramifications. The sports tout industry is reportedly filled with exaggerated claims of success, but it does not appear that many have resulted in actual lawsuits. Nevada Senate Bill 46 was introduced in the state legislature in 2018 (Didn't Pass) that would require “the Nevada Gaming Commission to provide by regulation for the operation and registration of tout services and persons associated therewith.” Sports betting touts would have to register with the state of Nevada. With the legalization of sports betting in states outside of Nevada, it’s certainly causing a growth spurt in the touring industry. More interest in sports betting means more people trying to make money from selling picks or giving advice about sports gambling. Touting around sports wagering has long been considered a problematic part of the industry. Many of the people who offer their picks for money are not terribly transparent about their overall accuracy. The legislation makes several changes to existing gaming law. The 16-page bill would require touts to register with the state. The bill does not get too much into details, but the intent to provide some level of accountability in touting is clear. It will require registration with state gaming regulators if they own or operate a tout service, or if they have “a significant involvement” with one. Touts “may” have to be found “suitable to be associated with licensed gaming, including race book or sports pool operations.” Fees for registration would be determined by the Nevada Gaming Commission, which is given authority to take other steps to flesh out regulation of tout services. It would seem like the bill could simply serve to give legitimacy to touts by requiring them to register with the state and pay fees to do what they do. There are no minimum standards of what — if anything — they would have to adhere to keep the registration, or if it would help create transparency for those who sell their picks. It also seems to be problematic to enforce beyond the services that exist in Nevada. There are plenty of people just selling generic “sports betting picks” that have nothing to with the Nevada sports betting industry directly and exist outside of the state. They could be touting sports betting picks for people who bet at offshore sportsbooks, land-based bookies around the country or in states with a legal wagering industry. Certainly, creating accountability in that sector would be good for the future of sports betting, because people selling crappy picks for money is a blight on the whole ecosystem. But is it really a state’s role to get involved in people who tout? It’s a potentially slippery slope.
WELCOME TO THE DOT.COM BOOM OF SPORTS BETTING
The passionate online community known as Gambling Twitter has long been an intense battleground, full of bettors, bookmakers, con artists, and trolls. For years, bettors and bookmakers have relentlessly lobbed pot shots at each other, while anxiously awaiting the next tweet from a small college beat writer or for a NBA player to post a telling emoji. Gambling Twitter is on the rise. In February, according to Twitter, the top hashtag is #GamblingTwitter.
"Hashtag Gambling Twitter is a thing," Mike Dupree, director of media and entertainment for Twitter, told ESPN. Twitter, for the first time, is releasing internal data and commenting on the prevalence of sports betting content on the social media platform. The data was gathered by Twitter Insiders studies and comes from a sampling of individuals 18 or older who have bet on sports in the past 12 months, live in a state where sports betting is legal and use at least one social media platform.
The study found that 7 out of 10 bettors surveyed are on Twitter and that conversation on the social media platform drives bettors to bet more frequently and place larger wagers. Additionally, according to the data provided to ESPN by Twitter:
• 62% of bettors on Twitter place wagers weekly and spend 15% more on bets annually compared to bettors on other social media platforms.
• 72% of bettors check Twitter to follow the status of their live bets once they've been made, and 65% said they are more motivated to place a bet on a big event that everyone is talking about on social media.
• 51% of bettors on Twitter started betting less than two years ago.
"We have already seen more people tweet about sports betting this year than we did in all of 2021, and the NFL season hasn't even kicked off," Dupree said.
HOW BOOKMAKERS USE TWITTER
Ed Salmons, a veteran Las Vegas bookmaker of around 30 years, was introduced to Twitter by a colleague around 2009. Ed recognized how valuable of a tool it could be for bookmakers. Seven years later, Salmons used Twitter to put his sportsbook in an advantageous position on a Thanksgiving night game between the Indianapolis Colts and Pittsburgh Steelers.
On Monday, Nov. 21, 2016, Salmons, and the team at the Las Vegas SuperBook had just put-up opening lines on Week 12 of the NFL season when a Colts beat writer tweeted about Indianapolis quarterback Andrew Luck. Luck had been dinged up the day before against the Tennessee Titans but finished the game. The tweet from the Colts beat writer wasn't straightforward, but Salmons said he read between the lines and came away believing that it was unlikely Luck would play Thursday against the Steelers. With most sportsbooks sitting at Steelers -3, Salmons moved the SuperBook's line to -7. Some competing sportsbooks reacted by pulling the game off the board, while other shops held steady at Pittsburgh -3. Bettors, in the meantime, began firing bets on the Colts at +7 at the SuperBook, figuring they were getting a bargain with the price differential. "In a situation like that, when you see it and you know it, it's good for the book to essentially try to get ahead of it, because we knew that line was going to be on the other side of seven once it came out," Salmons said. "So, we got a bunch of money on the Colts, and then the news broke." With Luck ruled out, Pittsburgh closed at around an 8-point favorite. The Steelers beat the Colts 28-7.
According to Ed Salmons "One thing to start with is before placing bets based on a tip on Twitter, sports bettors should take a quick second look at the account and ask if it's a trustworthy source of information. Is it verified? Have you looked at their bio, their past tweets? There's some work we should do as bettors to make sure we're following legitimate and trusted sources." Hint: Anyone who claims to have information about a fixed game and is selling it for $50 on Twitter isn't likely a legitimate, trusted source.
HOW BETTORS USE TWITTER
The data released by Twitter shows that bettors of all levels use the platform to help their handicapping. Some diligently search for the latest information; others simply look to tail the picks of popular betting personalities and discuss the action as the games play out. Even sophisticated betting syndicates rely heavily on Twitter. Right Angle Sports (RAS) is one of the most influential betting syndicates in the American market. It comprises 10 handicappers located in different areas of the country. As part of their handicapping routine, they closely monitor social media for news. RAS’s Edward Golden told ESPN. RAS handicappers are quick to spot and evaluate impactful news items, although Edward says these days information regularly appears to hit the betting market before it lands on Twitter. But social media remains a valuable tool for RAS, just not in the way one might think. "Every current team member, every single one we found online through some form of social media," Edward said. "Back in the day, you'd find undiscovered talent on betting forums and chat rooms. These days, it's all on Twitter. "There're so many obscure or undercapitalized originators who are putting out great work, who clearly have an edge, and, yet nobody knows who they are, despite their obvious potential," he added. "We are always searching for that person. Always. We've been lucky enough to hire some serious talent using Twitter and have seen people grow into integral parts of our team while making us better."
SPORTS BETTING TWITTER GROWTH
Sports betting is among the top growth areas on Twitter, increasing by 300% over the past four years and making it comparable to rising categories like cryptocurrency and NFTs, according to Mike Dupree, director of media and entertainment for Twitter, sports betting might not have the overall history and scale because it's more of a recent phenomenon, but we've seen sports betting conversation very much mirror that hyper growth over the past couple of years," Dupree said. The explosion in popularity of sports betting on Twitter coincides with the widespread expansion of legal sportsbooks in the United States. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that all states could choose to authorize sports betting. Since the decision, 31 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico have launched legal betting markets. More than $147 billion has been bet with legal sportsbooks in the U.S. over the last four years, generating nearly $10.6 billion in taxable revenue, according to the American Gaming Association. Sportsbooks are harnessing Twitter's influence for marketing purposes, building large followings by showcasing improbable parlays that hit and advertising special deals for bettors like odds boosts. The sportsbooks also use their partnerships with professional sports leagues like Major League Baseball and the NBA to post highlights with a betting spin. FanDuel's sportsbook account @FDSportsbook has more than 214,000 followers; DraftKings' @DKSportsbook has more than 158,000 followers. "Countless sports fans and bettors are avidly researching and interacting in real time on Twitter, which underscores the platform's effectiveness for customer growth and retention strategies at DraftKings," Stephanie Sherman, chief marketing officer at DraftKings, said. Twitter's study found the most popular type of wager was against the spread, followed by parlays and money-line bets. Bettors surveyed said odds boosts where sportsbooks offer enhanced odds-on specific bets and the fear of missing out on a bet that everyone is discussing were motivating factors when deciding to bet. "Twitter's been referred to as the world's largest sports bar. You want to share in the excitement with fellow fans," Dupree said. "Well, you can almost consider that Twitter is becoming the world's largest sportsbook, not in terms of taking bets, but where people come to talk about the action and follow their bets."
THE STORY OF A TOUT
Among the more prominent tout experts is Warren Sharp, Sharp has been building a reputation for both statistical analysis and betting advice. Last summer, on ESPN’s “NFL Live,” the defensive-end-turned-analyst Marcus Spears held up Sharp’s nearly five-hundred-page season preview and declared it “the official bible of the N.F.L.” When it comes to gambling, Sharp takes a relatively conservative approach: he rarely advocates placing a bet that would risk more than a small fraction of the total cash a gambler is willing to put up. (Sports books typically allow bigger bets later in the week, when they’ve had time to adjust their odds; Sharp prefers to bet early.) When betting on the total score of an NFL game, Sharp’s specialty, conventional wisdom says to favor the under; in recent years, Sharp has bet heavily on the overs, because oddsmakers, he says, underestimate the explosiveness of modern NFL offenses. He’s also come to depend, he told me, on a small network of high-stakes gamblers who exchange picks and insights. Tell me if this sounds familiar? People in the stock market covet information that gives them an edge in the market. Gamblers covet information that gives them an edge against oddsmakers, especially about injuries and coaching strategies, and Sharp’s confidants who include “a number of guys from Florida,” he said are privy to “the best information that exists.” Again, back in 1999 during the “be your own day trader” movement, day trading became vilified by politicians and the media, so the SEC and FINRA acted, and they instituted the pattern day trader rule in February 2001 under the guise of protecting the investing public, only 5 trades per week and no gains over $25K in a week there’s more to it than that, but you get the idea.
Note: Sports books are now more frequently imposing limits on bettors (because it’s legal in 31 states), especially those known for cleaning up. Sports Books use bet limits often to weed out winners. Anyway, Sharp’s analysis got noticed around the NFL, and Dave Banner approached him about working together. Dave also helped Sharp launch a more sophisticated version of his site, through which Sharp now charges eight hundred and ninety-nine dollars per NFL season for betting advice. (A package including college football is another two hundred dollars.) These days, one of the advisers to the site is Noah Szubski, who previously served as the chief executive of the gambling site Action Network. Szubski told me, before the current season, that, during the previous two years, the site had had nearly twenty thousand paying customers. Sharp claims that bettors who followed his advice during the past fifteen years would have seen an eleven percent average annual return, beating the S. & P. 500. There’s no way to readily check that claim: subscribers are privy only to the picks that Sharp has made during the seasons that they paid for advice.
SPORTSBOOKS VS TOUTS
Touts do not live in harmony with sports books. Remember the movie Pinocchio, the wooden boy escapes from Stromboli's puppet show, even though Stromboli kept him under a contract he signed. Touts associated with sports books act like there are no strings of attachment on them, but their sole purpose is to push betting lines that are over or under bet to get the line to even on both sides. It’s purely incidental if they give a winning pick. Moreover, sports books are in business to make money, if you win a bet, it costs them money, therefore it is not in their best interest to provide winning selections. Betting lines now roll across TV screens during sports broadcasts. Professional teams and leagues have established direct partnerships with gambling companies. Media and entertainment companies including such family-friendly giants as the Walt Disney Co. have pursued similar partnerships or opened the door to them. One example of Tout services and professional associations; The Las Vegas Golden Knights NHL Hockey Team cut their losses and ended their unpopular sponsorship agreement with sports betting tout service UpickTrade.com. The franchise announced that it had entered a multiyear partnership with UpickTrade, a site based in Guadalajara, Mexico, that sells picks and was designated the Official Sports Pick Service Partner of the Knights. Financial terms of the deal weren’t announced. The partnership was universally panned by the sports betting industry and the team’s fans on social media. “I’m not surprised the agreement ended as quickly as it started,” told US Bookmaking sportsbook director Robert Walker, former MGM Mirage (now MGM Resorts) sportsbook director. “I think the Knights’ management staff just lacked a fundamental understanding of the hole they were digging themselves in. “I am somewhat thankful, though, as I plan to use this case any time the leagues bring up integrity. Hopefully, all can learn from this and move on. At some point, common sense will trump money.” NHL deputy commissioner Bill Daly said in an email to the RJ that he was not prepared to comment on the Knights’ situation specifically. But he did say that the league and the Knights were in communication on the matter and that clubs are on their own to comply with league rules and policies. In 2018, when the Supreme Court overturned the federal ban on sports betting, the Knights were the first NHL team to partner with a sportsbook when it entered a multiyear deal with William Hill. Three years later, all four major American sports leagues have partnerships with legal, regulated books. But tout services have long had a shady reputation for making sensational, unsubstantiated claims of success and even giving out picks on both sides of the same game so half of their clients win. “The sportsbooks are in the business of taking bets either way. Touts, on the other hand, are trying to pick winners,” UNLV gaming historian David Schwartz said. “So, it raises a lot of questions if the team and tout have a financial arrangement together. If the tout picks against the team, what does that mean? “It probably wasn’t the best decision by the NHL Knights, but at least they’ve rescinded that. It shows how organizations must understand the business and culture of sports betting.” UpickTrade, which charges $89 per month, per sport, for its picks, claims on the front of its site that more than 6,000 clients “are now making a living off of sports.” It also boasts annual returns on investment of up to +687.24 percent. Hours after the announcement, the Knights’ logo was still displayed on the image of a player on the site. Chris Grove, a partner in the Eilers & Krejcik Gaming research and advisory firm, said the short-lived partnership between the Knights and UpickTrade is essentially a growing pain in the rapid expansion of legal sports betting. “This is an example of an issue that professional sports stakeholders are going to have to navigate as they get more integrated with legal betting in the U.S.,” he said. “Whether it’s a relationship with a tout service or the team opening a sportsbook or any possibilities in between, there are going to be new questions for sports stakeholders, and I don’t know if anyone fully appreciates how difficult those questions will become.
GROWTH IN THE NATIONAL AND LOCAL SPORTS BETTING ADVICE MARKET.
Remember Jim Mora saying at a press conference; “Playoffs, Playoff’s, you're talking about Playoffs? I caught myself saying, The Washington Post, The Washington Post? you're talking about sports betting? The Washington Post debuts “Odds Against”, its first-ever sports betting series. Readers can expect to see a heady mix of predictive analytics, accessible advice, and nuanced reporting on the sports betting industry at large, creating a go-to resource for fans each week. “Readers, especially younger readers, are looking for coverage that will help them better understand sports betting, and help them bet smarter," said Matthew Vita, sports editor. "Odds Against will meet readers at a time when sports betting has become an inseparable part of the fan experience." Sports betting is big business. The ascendancy last year of Barstool Sports’ Dave “stocks only go up” Portnoy shows that it’s now even beginning to act as a gateway drug for the stock market. But it turns out that sports betting provides useful practice for financial markets, as is a great laboratory for quants and academics to study market inefficiencies. The quantitative analyst and academics are watching. Toby Moskowitz, a professor at Yale School of Management and partner at the AQR hedge fund group, has been studying sports bets for years, and not just as a fan. He explains that sports betting markets provide “a direct test of behavioral asset pricing,” which is distinct from rational asset pricing. Unlike bets in stock and bond markets, he points out: Sports bets are idiosyncratic and have no relation to risk premia in the economy, and Sports contracts reveal a terminal value that is (largely) independent from betting activity and preferences, where uncertainty is resolved, and therefore allows mispricing to be detected. Put differently, we don’t always know the “true” fundamental value of a company, while individual bonds and stocks can be driven by broader trends that affect the entire economy. It is possible to separate out the effects with certainty. In sports betting, we know the outcomes with precision and so we can calculate with hindsight how efficient markets were in predicting the result; and correlation between games is minimal. Generally, the result of the game you’re watching will not be affected by one taking place 200 miles away. For an academic, or for a quant looking for anomalies to exploit, sports betting markets therefore allow a clear view on what other factors are moving them. In a new paper, Moskowitz recounts the results gleaned from more than 100,000 betting contracts from the largest Las Vegas and online sports gambling books across four U.S. professional sports leagues: the National Basketball Association, the National Football League, Major League Baseball, and the National Hockey League, with multiple contracts per game that allow for bets on who wins, by how much, and total points scored. The contracts he covered spanned three decades. He wanted to isolate the effects of the three factors that have been identified as the most persistent anomalies in stocks; momentum (winners tend to keep winning while losers keep losing), value (cheaper stocks tend to win in the long run), and size (smaller stocks beat large ones). There is controversy over why these effects have been observed in stock markets. If they were to appear in the pure laboratory of sports betting, it would imply that those anomalies are based in human nature. Moskowitz’s bottom line: There is no size effect, but he could clearly discern a momentum effect, while there was also a just discernible value effect. It looks as though these factors are hot wired into our consciousness (and therefore that we aren’t rational as economists assume). Rather than being driven by risk, as market efficiency theory holds, this at least implies that market outcomes are driven by the quirks of behavioral psychology. As Moskowitz puts it, “It’s at least suggestive. My belief in the behavioral stories did get a little stronger after I did this study.” Coming up with sporting equivalents of value and momentum was difficult. It’s hard to come up with an underlying or intrinsic value for a sports team, although this doesn’t stop an army of sports nerds armed with spreadsheets from trying. The value effect in sports, Moskowitz says, would be “a team that’s good on paper but maybe the outcomes haven’t been so good. Or the betting market looks like it’s pricing too low.” Particularly in soccer, where the low scoring means that quite often the plainly superior team in the game doesn’t win, bettors can be over-influenced by poor results. This creates a value effect that sports nerds can exploit by picking very good teams who’ve had bad luck. Moskowitz admits that the value effect is only faint. Momentum, however, is much stronger. It’s measured in two ways. One is by a team on a hot streak versus a team on a cold streak; for example, long bets on teams that have won the last three, and shorting teams that have lost the last three. Secondly, by a team that has won money for the people who bet on it for the last couple of games. It pushes prices up, and so the “smart” money should take the other side.
What Kind of Bets Make the Most Sense?
There are two broad classes of sports markets: spread betting, or betting on the margin between the teams, and which can do better than the margin or “spread” set by the bookies, and the money line, or a straight bet on the outcome. Spread betting is harder to make money on, because it’s efficient and the final spread set by the bookies tends to be very accurate.
Money line does offer more of a chance to make money, because bettors are prone to a classic behavioral error. The natural tendency to want the underdog to win, combined with the hope of a higher pay off by backing the team with the longer odds, means that persistent betting on the favorite will generally make money. Money line favorites tend to be on more generous odds than they should be, thanks to the enthusiasm for betting on less-favored sides. “It’s not that people think that the underdog is likely to win,” says Moskowitz. “It’s more that they are willing to pay a premium to have a small chance of a big payout.” And after all, it’s always a great feeling when an underdog bet pays off.
Another Market Inefficiency
Sports betting companies are offering all kinds of perks and inducements to start wagering (much as the cheapest steaks in the U.S. by far, in my experience, are to be found at casinos in Las Vegas). This creates an opportunity to make money, for the disciplined. Take the “free bets” on offer, enjoy what is effectively a very leveraged bet, and then desist. Veteran value investor Whitney Tilson of Empire Financial Research offered this great way to surf on the special offers available when sports betting was made legal in New York State earlier this year. He made 399% in one day.
Should You Do This at Home?
If you're the average person that works 40-hours per week, 9-hours per day and your main aim is to make money, then the simple answer is: no. The momentum and value effects are real but faint, so the chances of big profits aren’t great. Add the element of luck in sports events and it grows harder still. However, if you are more like a professional quantitative analyst, tend to be exactly the kind of person who will in their spare time use Excel skills to analyze sports statistics, probe the odds-on offer, and come up with strategies that pay out in the long term, then YES. A small population of very clever quantitative analysts well-practiced in financial markets can generally be expected to hog the returns. Should you wish to compete against them with no quantitative analyst skills, the likelihood is that you’ll end up losing and helping them to make a little more money.