Taking a Gamble in your Portfolio
The start of September brings in cooler weather, the start of the school year and many of our favorite pastimes: NFL Football. Whether you are rooting your team on to shoot for the Lombardi or are simply trying to avoid the toilet bowl (looking at you Jets fans) the NFL season brings everyone something to root for. More recently, online sports betting has aimed to make every play as exciting as the super bowl… giving users the ability to bet on anything and create long-shot parlays (like the Saints winning back-to-back games this season…) on virtually anything. Whether or not there is a space for gambling related (or other “sin”) investments in your portfolio, the size of the online sports betting market is undoubtedly one that is growing quickly. Last year, Americans placed over 35 Billion dollars worth of legal bets on the 2024 football season, a figure that is only expected to grow as the industry continues to vow for decreased regulation.
An overall increase in more convenient sports betting has harmed more traditional gambling avenues. While several players of the industry have done their best to adapt, those areas more reliant on visitors traveling all the way to Las Vegas have struggled. Names like Caesars Entertainment (CZR) or MGM Resorts MGM have lagged behind their more virtual counterparts Draftkings DKNG or Flutter (parent of Fanduel) FLUT in terms of overall performance in 2025. Both DKNG & FLUT hold strong technical postures at the time of this writing, up over 17% & 11% so far this year respectively. DKNG sits on a string of four consecutive buy signals on its default chart, breaking back into a positive trend to start the summer and pulling back to old resistance around current levels. While thrusts reaching up into the high $40’s to low $50’s from the last few years have been tough points to crack, the odds seem increasingly likely that the 4/5’er will gear up to take on those points sooner or later.
To close out today’s piece, we look to answer the question of if increased eyes on the space seem to help out overall performance. To do so, we isolated Draftkings & Flutter performance both in and out of football season (defined as 9-1-2/15 of the next year.) The performance table is included below, comparing both against each other as well as the broader market over the same time frame. While the dataset is admittedly small (only six years) pure performance metrics fall in line with broader expectations. More often than not, these names tend to perform better in season than out of season. All this to say, sports betting names seem to be entering a “seasonally strong” part of the year with high relative strength- an idea which could warrant small positions within risk-on sleeves of your betslip (portfolio).
