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.

24 Comments
 

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 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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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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