After the fall of Lehman Brothers, Joe Peta needed a new employer. He found a new job in New York City but lost that, too, when an ambulance mowed him down as he crossed the street on foot. In search of a way to cheer himself up while he recuperated in a wheelchair, Peta started watching baseball again, as he had growing up. That’s when inspiration hit: Why not apply his outstanding risk-analysis skills to improve on sabermetrics, the method made famous by Moneyball–and beat the only market in town, the Vegas betting line? Why not treat MLB like the S&P 500?
In Trading Bases, Peta shows how to subtract luck–in particular “cluster luck,” as he puts it–from a team’s statistics to best predict how it will perform in the next game and over the whole season. His baseball “hedge fund” returned an astounding 41 per cent in 2011– with daily volatility similar to funds he used to trade for. Peta takes readers to the ballpark in San Francisco, trading floors and baseball bars in New York, and sports books in Vegas, all while tracing the progress of his wagers.
His life in the stock martket show how the lessons he’s learned prepared him for his baseball betting, and demonstrating how Wall Street can learn quite a lot from sabermetrics.
In many ways, this book is the story of the triumph of the nerd—the sabermetric nerd. He takes some well-worn concepts and bases a gambling system on it that works pretty well for him.
The foundation of his system if fairly simple, but Peta really gets involved in its implementation. He uses his system to rate what he thinks the odds are that a team will win each game, compares those odds to the Vegas line, and—based on the difference—decides whether, and how much, to bet. One lesson Peta took from Wall Street with regard to his baseball-betting enterprise is never to risk the principal investment itself.
Far from writing a dry, do-it-yourself guidebook, Peta weaves a story that is often humorous, and occasionally touching. Peta’s writing style might be the book’s biggest advantage. While you wouldn’t expect a stockbroker to be much of a writer, he has a nice conversational style that flows very well. Thus, no matter the subject, Peta keeps the reader engaged. Trading Bases is all about the love of critical reasoning, trading cultures, risk management, and baseball. And not necessarily in that order.
| Title | Trading Bases: A Story About Wall Street, Gambling, and Baseball (Not Necessarily in That Order ) |
| Author | Joe Peta |
| first published | March 5th 2013 |
| Publisher | Dutton |
| ISBN | 0525953647 |
| Language | English |
