If interested the FT's Bryce Elder looks at the British names on a quasi-periodic schedule:
Markets Now - Thursday 16th July 2020 | FT Alphaville
From The Paris Review:
In April 1995, traders on the floor of the Pacific Exchange were in a frenzy. The jury in the O. J. Simpson trial had refused to come to court that morning. In the Washington Post, a law professor said that the probability of a hung jury had increased. And so at the exchange, if traders had shares in guilty or not-guilty verdicts, they wanted to dump them; a hung-jury share was looking a lot sharper today. Everyone was looking for Steve.....MUCH MORE
This had nothing to do with the stocks on the ticker, and everything to do with an elaborate, parallel marketplace operated by Steve Schillinger, an independent broker, who sold futures on the side for countless things you couldn’t find at the exchange: Who would win baseball’s MVP award? Who would make the Final Four? Would O. J. go to prison? Although Schillinger was a decent enough stockbroker, his real talent was in figuring the odds for nebulous outcomes like that of the O. J. verdict and revising them as events unfolded. His colleagues placed bets with him, and he’d pay out on the basis of whatever the odds had been at the time of the wager. He was, in short, a bookie.
“People were leaving their stocks to come bet on the NCAA,” Schillinger said, explaining why he was quietly asked to leave the exchange. But by then, he had a dream. In his covert marketplace, he’d glimpsed not just his own future, but the future of gambling. That vision would lead him to become the pioneer of a multibillion-dollar industry, and then a fugitive from justice who would die in exile.
*Originally from Chicago, Schillinger came to San Francisco in 1979. He was preternaturally gifted at perceiving probabilities. Golf, backgammon, chess—he could set odds on anything, and place a savvy bet. I recently spoke to a former colleague of his, who said that the day Princess Diana died, Schillinger bet that Elton John would write a song about her. “That was a long shot,” the colleague told me, “but Steve won it at twenty to one.”
In the mid-’90s, Schillinger and two friends from the exchange, Jay Cohen and Haden Ware, decided to start an online sports book. On the surface, the start-up conformed to the logic of many early dot-com endeavors: take a well-established practice and put it online. But in fact, what Schillinger, Cohen, and Ware were developing was far more radical. They wouldn’t just book conventional bets. In keeping with Schillinger’s O. J. experiment, in which the odds fluctuated as the trial progressed, the start-up would offer “sports futures.” You could buy stock in eventual outcomes—who would win the AFC Central division in football or who would appear in the NBA finals—and the value of those shares would rise or fall in real time, depending on the breaks of a season. Even the bets on individual games would follow a futures model, with probabilities fluctuating as the outcome came into focus.
“The future of sports gambling is totally interactive wagering during the game,” Cohen declared.
This innovative futures market gave the start-up its name: the World Sports Exchange. They raised $600,000 and registered an alluring website: www.wsex.com.
It was time to book some bets—but where? Unless you were a Nevada casino, it was illegal to be a bookie in America. Of course that didn’t stop it from happening. In 1998, it was estimated that Americans illegally wagered about $100 billion. But WSEX was proposing to do its business proudly out in the open, not in the smoke of some dingy backroom bar.
And so they set out for Antigua and Barbuda. In the aftermath of devastating hurricanes, the island nation’s tourism industry was in decline, and it was pivoting to online gambling. With underwater fiberoptic cables connecting it to the U.S., Antigua was ideally positioned to capitalize on this burgeoning business. By 1999, the online gambling industry would be the island’s second-largest employer, and the nation of 65,000 would account for over half of the world’s remote gambling market.
Above a camera shop in a Saint John’s strip mall, Schillinger, Cohen, and Ware set up an office and launched WSEX in November 1996. At first, they had about twenty customers. Then came the golf tournaments. With dozens of players competing over several days, golf was perfect for showcasing WSEX’s futures market. News of the start-up spread by word of mouth, and business started flourishing. In 1997, the client list grew to five hundred. In 1998, it blossomed to two thousand, and it was six thousand the year after that. By 2000, as they were booking bets on the outcome of Bush v. Gore, or who would get booted off Big Brother, the annual income of WSEX was reportedly more than $300 million.
*As far as its founders were concerned, WSEX was doing nothing illegal. They were fully licensed by Antigua. Certainly they were doing nothing immoral—at least nothing worse than what they’d done at the Pacific Exchange....
We didn't do anything with the gambling stocks but on March 1 did post on gaming: "Following Previous Disease Outbreaks Gaming Stocks Tended To Outperform" with a follow-up a couple weeks later:
"Online gaming surge: Steam breaks concurrent user record amid social distancing mandates"
