My favorite sports talk radio show in Houston is Charlie Pallilo‘s afternoon show over at 790-AM, but I’ve always wondered why the quite bright Pallilo isn’t off making millions trading bonds or running a hedge fund. Moneyball’s Michael Lewis reports in this CondeNast Portfolio article about a market that is right up Pallilo’s alley — investing in professional athletes:
Wall Street is about to launch a new way to trade professional athletes the way you trade stocks. A piece of Tiger, anyone?
When financial historians look back and ask why it took Wall Street so long to create the first public stock market that trades in professional athletes, they will see ours as an age of creative ferment. Theyíll see a new, extremely well-financed company in Silicon Valley that, for the moment, sells itself as a fantasy sports site but aims to become, as its co-founder Mike Kerns puts it, ìthe first real stock market in athletes.î . . . The athlete would sell 20 percent of all future on-field or on-court earnings to a trust, which would, in turn, sell securities to the public. Theyíll also single out the birth of the first European hedge fund that runs a multimillion-dollar portfolio of professional soccer players, the value of which rises and falls with the playersí performances.
As a number of smart people seem to have noticed at once, professional athletes have all the traits of successful publicly traded stocks, beginning with enormous speculative interest in them. Americans wager somewhere between $200 billion and $400 billion a year on sports, and between 15 million and 25 million of them play in fantasy leaguesówhich is to say that a shadow stock market in athletes already exists. That market may not know everything there is to know about the athletes it values, but it probably knows more than New York Stock Exchange investors know about the N.Y.S.E.ís public corporations. ìPeople worry about lack of transparency in sports,î says the leading sports agent. ìMy newspaper this morning has two and a half pages of business news and 17 pages of sports. The day after the game, you know Peyton Manningís thumb is hurt. What do you know about the C.E.O. of I.B.M.?î
Let’s see now. You will soon be able to place a legal bet on a professional athlete over the Internet, but not on the outcome of a game?
