“Sports Trading Network are pleased to announce our newest collaboration with https://www.sportstack.com Nick and his team will be providing us some insight, engaging and educational content leading up to the official launch ”

People are always shocked by my response when they ask me what I did when I worked at Goldman Sachs…

“I was a professional gambler in a suit”

No seriously, what did you do?

Well…I walked in every morning, looked at the markets, read the news and after an hour or so placed a big bet on which currencies were likely to rise and which were likely to fall. Some days I won and some days I lost but ultimately every day was an identical process of endless speculation.

And that’s all financial markets or any market for that matter is based on — speculation. The price of anything is only ever reflected by the price somebody is willing to buy and sell it for. Nothing is certain and everything boils down to relative probabilities.

Brexit, Trump, Lehman — there are endless examples to highlight the fact that no amount of brainpower, analysis or research can predict the future or predict event outcomes with certainty. If anything, these examples highlight just how often the smartest people are entirely wrong.

This is what got me thinking — just because I’m sitting at an investment bank wearing a suit — is betting 100’s of millions of dollars on the Brexit Vote failing, on Clinton beating Trump, on the Bank of England cutting Interest rates REALLY that different to betting that Tottenham will beat Aston Villa at the weekend?

Ultimately, speculating on economic data, election results or politicians’ speeches isn’t any different to speculating on sporting outcomes. Often, there is just as much data, statistics and knowledge available in sports — and in many cases, there is more!

And yet the second you mention sports and money in the same sentence the negative connotations of gambling appear and the majority of the population disapprove. I find this fascinating — millions of people around the world spread-bet financial markets from their bedrooms and it is considered financial speculation, millions of people now trade and speculate virtual coins such as Bitcoin & Ethereum and it is considered crypto speculation and yet the second you mention sports….Gambling!

The industry image is poor and does little to help its own identity crisis. Casino’s, virtual racing, slot machines, huge promotions and binary betting all constitute ‘gambling’ — and rightly so. These activities absolutely should be considered as such. They are mostly random, luck based and impossible to predict.

But is it so hard to imagine an environment where millions of people around the world can speculate on sports in the same way they currently speculate on so many other markets? I don’t think so and that’s why we quit Goldman to launch SportStack — the global sports exchange for speculating on professional athletes.

The global sports betting industry is huge and growing crazy fast and yet it still doesn’t fundamentally allow you to express an opinion on whether an athlete is good or bad. In its place, fantasy sports have grown into a multi-billion dollar global industry simply to try and cater to this demand — but it’s a game!

The majority of all commentary, punditry and general conversation surrounding sports is what players people love, people hate, think are overrated, think are underrated. And yet the only way to express that is in a game.

The time for playing games is over and we recognise a significant opportunity to make Fantasy Sports REAL and enable millions of people around the world to start speculating on the performance of professional athletes, every match and over an entire season.

At SportStack, you will soon be able to build and trade a ‘Sportfolio’ of all your favourite athletes. Buy the players you rate and sell the players you don’t. The better they perform the higher their price will rise — it’s that simple!

SportStack is launching Q4 next month in the UK with the Premier League and are ultimately looking to expand to every global sport.

To celebrate this, we are giving away free shares in the likes of Aguero, Kane, Salah, Messi and Ronaldo for early sign-ups to our mailing list.

Click here to get your free shares and keep up to date with the journey!

Nick