Sports betting arbitrage on resume?
Hi. I’m currently a masters student in a quantitative field at a high ranking non ivy school, and I’m interested in applying to some of the quantitative research/trading internships I’ve seen online. Over the summer I started getting into sports betting arbitrage and I’ve done pretty well with it imo, I make enough to pay the rent and then some. Would this be something useful to put on my resume or is there an aversion to anything related to betting/gambling (even if it is risk free)? If it makes a difference I wrote a few python scripts to pull coefficients from various sports books and find the arbitrage opportunities. Thanks for any thoughts on the subject.
Most traders would view any initiative to find opportunities as a positive- just make sure everything you are doing is legal.
Thanks for the response. It’s all 100% legal however I did forget to mention that my counterparties in these bets don’t like it when people do arbitrage and they shut down the accounts of people they suspect. So while it’s not against the law it does require me to avoid detection by some form of authority. Do you think that would put a stain on my application?
I don't think so- I can't imagine how a trader would know even that your counterparties don't like sports betting arbitrage unless they themselves did the same thing.
I actually interviewed for a sports prop trading shop that does this exactly in NJ (the guy running it was an ex DB guy lol). This is a legitimate career people make including the whole being shutdown part ( that's why they like hiring young guns, it's how they sneak the bets in). It's not too much like traditional trading but it requires a similar mindset to working at a l/s hedge fund in terms of hours and always being available to check news. Put it on the resume and put a nice spin on it and show why it would apply to some other trading strategy.
That’s really cool actually, do you remember the name of the shop?
I can’t say on here none of these types of shops are big and it seems like they prefer to keep low profiles. Bottom line is that regular trading is much more lucrative and requires a bit more skill than these types of shops but if you really love sports and working 80 hours a week on them for less pay, look them up. Most of these “junior sports trading positions” are located in las Vegas and the Colorado area but obviously jersey has some too.
Good luck with this strategy, I hope you don't end up getting your legs broken one day.
Thank you. I also hope I don’t end up getting my legs broken.
Cheap Crack - Payday with my bookie is Tuesday and UCLA screwed me big time. What kind of arbitrage action are we looking at for football Sunday
Idk I don’t really look much at big/popular sports and leagues, so far I mostly focus on Eastern European Asian and latam leagues. Sometimes politics.
I built a relatively successful MLB betting model and put a bullet point about it (with the % return) under the “Projects” part of my resume while applying to IB summer analyst positions. Very happy I did. Came up in many interviews and still talk about it with my coworkers today.
I think its a net positive, but wont be that impressive if all you're doing is arbing prices. Is there any more to it than taking advantage of out-of-market prices?
On some events with lots of possible outcomes I’ll look at the implied probability distributions on different books/exchanges and look for mispricings between them that aren’t necessarily arbs but give a chance for a bet with positive expected value, but that’s less often just because it’s tough for me to automate discovery and I have to everything by hand.
Can you explain how you get a net positive EV from that? give me an example as though i was an interviewer.
I hire people and would can your resume and remind the guys here to also pass. Its cool in theory but we just cant hire guys who are trying to spin gambling on a resume into something positive
Thank you for the response. Do you think it makes a difference whether or not it’s arbitrage and thus not really gambling, or is it more that things related to the gambling industry are generally distasteful?
i would have to answer that to investors and maybe clients.. just not worth it to me.. or the partners here
How is sports betting/trading any different from any other form of trading (capital markets)? If someone has a pet or side project that makes money, that certainly should be put on the resume, like anything else. But maybe I misunderstood your post.
one is viewed as a profession and one is not.... pretty simple
It’s relevant and I wouldn’t say aversion to gambling is a problem.
There is a smaller risk which is that a lot of folks who apply quanty strategies to sports betting (including but not limited to arbitrage) have a tendency to sound very impressed with themselves and the supposed sophistication and profitability of those strategies. I know several of these folks personally and I’d guess that your future employers do too. My quanty gambler friends will often describe the simplest arb like it’s rocket science and tend to be unaware of the limitations of the strategy (scalability, spread etc). And then there’s the countless interview candidates who talk about Moneyball like they’re the only ones who read the book; I know that ain’t arb but similar minds. So it ends up with not the best connotations, like almost bro scienc-y kind of vibes.
My long winded way of saying, don’t oversell it. Make it a smaller bullet, perhaps even a hobby section bullet.
I had sports betting arb and poker under interests and was asked about both for all my interviews at every trading firm/hf. Pretty easy talking points imo if you actually know what you’re talking about. Had some interviewers who had done both in the past (albeit not strictly arbing ops on sports-books) and were ex-poker pros as well.
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