Sports Betting Is Not Investing
Money For the Rest of Us
J. David Stein
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 12 November 2025
⏱️ 25 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
Can you really make money sports betting on low-risk, high-probability events?
Topics covered include:
- The growing size and influence of the U.S. sports betting market
- Recent sports betting scandals
- How sports betting odds work
- An intriguing low-risk approach to sports betting
- Why the low-risk sports betting approach is still gambling with a negative expected return
- Behavioral biases that encourage sports betting
- Revisiting the difference between investing, speculating, and gambling
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Show Notes
https://info.lowstressbets.com/
How Do Betting Odds Work? by OC Staff—oddschecker
Senate Commerce Committee Wants Answers on NBA Gambling Scandal—Senate Commerce Committee
ESPN Will Not Let Failure Push It Out Of The Gambling Business by Chris Thompson—Defector
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Money for the rest of us. This is a personal finance show on money, how it works, |
| 0:05.2 | how to invest it, and how to live without worrying about it. I'm your host, David Stein. Today is |
| 0:11.1 | episode 544. It's titled, Sports betting is not investing. Sports betting has gone from something |
| 0:19.2 | taboo to mainstream in only six years after the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 |
| 0:26.8 | struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act. That act effectively banned sports |
| 0:34.3 | betting in the U.S. since 1992. But now sports betting is legal in the U.S. |
| 0:40.4 | has been since then. In 2019, the revenue from sports betting was less than a billion dollars. |
| 0:49.5 | Last year, it was close to $14 billion. And it's everywhere. There are ads everywhere. It's fully |
| 0:57.2 | integrated into ESPN. Disney prediction markets such as polymarket and Kalshi have adopted |
| 1:06.0 | sports betting in the case of Kauci. They just introduced it this year, and it's by far the largest |
| 1:13.1 | aspect of their business. Now, I've talked about this before, but I got an email this week that |
| 1:20.5 | intrigued me. I get dozens and dozens of pitches each week about being a guest on money for the rest of us. And as you know, we |
| 1:29.3 | rarely have interviews, but this one entreatment. I'm not going to use individuals name nor his |
| 1:35.9 | platform because I want to protect his privacy, because I'm going to use it as an example for how |
| 1:42.9 | we can sometimes mix investing jargon, investing principles, |
| 1:47.9 | and apply it to gambling. And when we do so, it makes gambling seem like, well, yeah, this could work. |
| 1:54.3 | And I kind of even felt that way, well, maybe it is possible to make money in sports betting if it's done safely, conservatively. We'll see if that's |
| 2:05.8 | actually the case. So I get this email and this individual mentions how money for the rest of us |
| 2:13.2 | teaches investing principles. And he says he thinks that our audience, you, would appreciate his |
| 2:22.1 | sports betting approach, applying proven investment strategies to sports betting and making healthy |
| 2:29.1 | returns with lower risk. His approach is to help people treat sports bets as a portfolio, using behavioral |
| 2:37.8 | finance and a margin of safety to guide decisions, very much in the spirit of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger's |
... |
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