Mar 16, 2010
A Business for Every Niche: Real Time Sports Betting
Cantor-Fitzgerald, the bond-investment firm whose offices famously were atop the World Trade Center on September 11 has introduced a new innovation to the world of sports gambling.
Using sophisticated algorithms first developed for pricing bonds and other, more exotic, securities, Cantor has now developed software that enables betting on sports contests, in real-time, as the games occur … and the odds change. According to Fortune:
Though only a sliver of the estimated $380 billion annual sports betting market in the U.S. is legal, Cantor provides what a bookie cannot: real-time odds. Say you have the Broncos winning over the Chiefs, and you want to hedge that bet in the fourth quarter — Cantor’s algorithms update the odds as long as you stay in the casino.
Later this year, the firm plans to launch an online site limited to Nevada users that shows live odds. The plan is to attract new bettors and offer an alternative to gambling sites such as Antigua-based Bodog, which began offering similar sports betting in 2006 that is illegal for U.S. users.
That is great news for two groups of people: those who have become convinced that capital markets are so rigged that they might as well be a casino, and quants looking for new instruments to trade.