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a lot of sports bettors hungry for action have moved to "betting" on stocks - particularly on options
a great number of new accounts have been opened and they are moving the markets
no doubt a lot of them don't really understand what they are doing and are getting creamed
and some, no doubt are getting lucky, - or may possibly have some skill at it as they did when they could bet sports
from the article:
"But some Wall Street analysts see people who used to bet on sports as playing a big role in the market’s recent surge, which has largely erased its losses for the year.
“There’s zero doubt in my mind that it is a factor,” said Julian Emanuel, chief equity and derivatives strategist at the brokerage firm BTIG. “Zero doubt.”
Millions of small-time investors have opened trading accounts in recent months, a flood of new buyers unlike anything the market had seen in years, just as lockdown orders halted entire sectors of the economy and sent unemployment soaring.
It’s not clear how many of the new arrivals are sports bettors, but some are behaving like aggressive gamblers. There has been a jump in small bets in the stock options market, where wagers on the direction of share prices can produce thrilling scores and gut-wrenching losses. And transactions that make little economic sense, like buying up the nearly valueless shares of bankrupt companies, are off the charts."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/14/b...cks-virus.html
