Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Lunch, our afternoon update on today's market action news and analysis.

Good afternoon, today is Monday, March 18th, and I'm your host, Kim Con. Our top story so far.

Grab your brackets, it's March Madness Time. A total of 136 men's and women's teams will play 134 games over the period.

For sports books, the NCAA basketball tournament

is collectively much bigger than the Super Bowl.

The American Gaming Association estimated

that 2.72 billion dollars could be wagered legally on this year's games.

The AJA analysis was based on recent trends and monthly sports betting revenue reports released by the states. The estimate only includes U.S.

sportsbooks. The increase in popularity for parlays and in-game betting is

anticipated to boost hold rates for sportsbooks this year on top of the extra volume of raw bets.

Another new development with college basketball in 2024 is the increasing betting handle on women's

regular season games. Sportsbooks, Draft Kings, Fandool, Bet MGM, and Tippico

all reported significant year-over-year growth

in betting handles for women's NCAA games this season.

That comes in the wake of high interest

in South Carolina's undefeated season.

Media exposure on Iowa's Caitlin Clark's streak

of smashing scoring records,

and the growing story of USC freshman Jiuju Watkins.

In today's trading, growth stocks are rallying as anticipation of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong's

keynote address at GTC builds. that happens right after the closing bell.

The NASDAQ is up more than 1%, the SMT 500 is up a little less than 1%, but all 11 sectors

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