Sports Meets Finance and Finance Meets Sports - Part Deux... Is It Robinhood's World? And The Existential Risk To Sports

Happy Friday afternoon.

Before I get started…

I got an unusually high amount of responses to my post yesterday about the TAM explosion in the degenerate economy. It is always nice to hear from readers and I rarely share the shoutouts but this one from Edward in the UK made my day…

Edward is correct about precious metals and the degenerate economy. I own Bitcoin as my precious ‘digital’ metal in my index but Gold has been the better asset in 2025.

I also got a nice shoutout from Vlad at Robinhood and Josh and Michael on the Compound podcast as Vlad visited with them to talk about Robinhood - minute 11:30 to be exact. When Robinhood launched in late 2014, I would try to explain to anyone that would listen it was going to be a Robinhood world (I never foresaw $100 billion of course). I believed that fractional ownership and the fantastic mobile design were more important than zero commissions. Most scoffed including Josh and Michael and discussed all that in the interview. The whole video is of course worth a watch:

Stocktoberfest and LindzonPalooza got a shoutout from Vlad and the boys as well which was fun. Here is Vlad and Baiju at the 2014 Palooza on Coronado. I am not sure if the app was even live yet…

I talked to Vlad last in May when the stock was in the 40’s which is a fun listen:

Onward…

I want to be clear about one thing I believe before I get going and that is investing and sports betting are NOT the same.

My post yesterday struck a chord with long time sports industry people and financial market enthusiasts.

My friend John Kosner who spent two decades leading media at ESPN texted me after reading my post with… ‘we are in an era of no rules’.

I responded with: I assume the markets are rigged and it is everyman for himself… to which John responded… that’s the existential threat to sports.

Mic drop. John is so right. Talking about winners and losers as prediction markets and the degenerate economy explode is one thing. If we have to assume everything is rigged in sports like I do in markets, what the hell is the point of sports. John has long been worried about character and integrity, especially in young audiences. Here is a post of his from last year.

Just today, a Google employee was outed for cheating/inside information because he was betting on the Google search markets…

My defense to all this is not to play (bet) and when I do play assume the market is rigged. Most will not see that they are the sucker in the room.

This TAM explosion in the degenerate economy will be like every economy with the good, the bad and the ugly. For sports though I see mostly bad and ugly.

For now, prediction markets are an American phenomenon. As an investor in Etoro and Alpaca, I have a good view into the brokerage business and ‘degenerate economy’ around the world and there is no rush to deploy predictions. The old fashioned degeneracy offered by ‘tokenization’ and US stock option trading/investing is what the rest of the world is craving. Access to American stocks and markets is the thing.

So for now it really is Robinhood’s world. I doubt they see it that way, but maybe they should because the mob can be fickle.