{"id":6782,"date":"2014-01-06T16:21:47","date_gmt":"2014-01-06T16:21:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/2014\/01\/06\/fantasy-sports-luring-wall-street-in-its-fastest-growing-sector\/"},"modified":"2014-01-06T16:21:47","modified_gmt":"2014-01-06T16:21:47","slug":"fantasy-sports-luring-wall-street-in-its-fastest-growing-sector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/2014\/01\/06\/fantasy-sports-luring-wall-street-in-its-fastest-growing-sector\/","title":{"rendered":"Fantasy Sports Luring Wall Street in Its Fastest-Growing Sector"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n\"\"
\n\tPhotographer: Ronald Martinez\/Getty Images
\n\tPhil Dawson of the San Francisco 49ers celebrates with teammates<\/span><\/p>\n

\tBy Erik Matuszewski Bloomberg News<\/p>\n

\tDrew Dinkmeyer spent seven years as a senior investment analyst in Tampa, Florida , before deciding to pursue fantasy sports professionally.<\/p>\n

\tDinkmeyer, who\u2019s 31 and got married last year, said he earns about as much from competing in daily fantasy sports leagues as he did when he was researching international equities and domestic small- and mid-cap stocks at CapTrust Financial Advisers.<\/p>\n

\tA former tennis player at Dartmouth College , Dinkmeyer is part of the fastest-growing segment in fantasy sports, which in 2012 had participants spend $3.38 billion on products, services and entry fees, according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association . Daily-play continues to grow while traditional season-long leagues have ended with the start of the National Football League playoffs.<\/p>\n

\t\u201cIt\u2019s exploded in the last couple of years,\u201d association President Paul Charchian said in a telephone interview from Minneapolis . \u201cIt\u2019s growing so fast by the time we get the research back, it\u2019s already out of date. It\u2019s gotten more investment in the past two years than in the history of fantasy sports combined.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tDraftKings Inc. , the Boston-based organizer of daily fantasy play in baseball, football, basketball and hockey, in November completed an additional $24 million round of funding led by Redpoint Ventures to help it expand. Comcast Ventures, the venture capital affiliate of NBC network parent company Comcast Corp. (CMCSA), early in 2013 was part of a group that invested $11 million in FanDuel Inc ., which is now averaging more than $6 million in weekly payouts.<\/p>\n

\tDaily-Play Websites<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\tThe last few weeks of the NFL\u2019s regular season, with the majority of season-long fantasy participants out of contention unless they reached their league\u2019s playoffs or championship round, further boosted the popularity of daily-play websites for cash. They remain popular in the postseason and as the National Basketball Association approaches the midway point of its regular season, offering head-to-head competition, leagues ranging in size from three to 20-or-more participants or tournaments with thousands of entries.<\/p>\n

\tFantasy sports, in which participants draft teams of players whose success is determined by the statistics they generate, dates to the 1980s. More than 33.5 million people now play fantasy sports in the U.S., according to the trade association, with leagues based on the NFL far outpacing Major League Baseball as the most popular. Fantasy sports are gaining popularity outside the U.S. also, with leagues for soccer and cricket.<\/p>\n

\tRising Revenue<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\tDraftKings\u2019 revenue increased 10-fold in the past year, Chief Executive Officer Jason Robins said. Two weeks ago, the company awarded a $1 million prize in its fantasy football grand final. Participants could gain entry by winning a qualifying tournament with an entry fee as low as $2.<\/p>\n

\tThree weeks ago, FanDuel held its premier fantasy football event in Las Vegas , where Travis Spieth, a sales manager for a CBS and Fox television affiliate in Sioux City, Iowa , won $1 million from an initial first-time investment of $10. Spieth won the top prize thanks to a touchdown run by Denver Broncos running back Montee Ball and field goal by Nick Novak of the San Diego Chargers that vaulted him from eighth place.<\/p>\n

\t\u2018Surreal\u2019<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\t\u201cIt was a surreal experience,\u201d said Spieth, 37, adding that he\u2019s played in season-long fantasy sports leagues with friends for about 15 years. \u201cI like the regular fantasy leagues, but if your team has an injury, it might cost you your season. With the daily-play, there\u2019s more strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tAverage fantasy sports players are in their mid-40s, according to FanDuel Chief Executive Nigel Eccles, who said he hadn\u2019t seen much innovation in the industry when he helped start the company in 2009. Eccles said when sports fans in their 20s were asked why they didn\u2019t play fantasy sports, the most common response was that it took too long — with baseball season stretching seven months to determine a winner.<\/p>\n

\t\u201cWe thought, \u2018OK, great market, lack of innovation and also really weird that this younger group is not coming in. Why don\u2019t we take something that people love and make it faster?\u2019\u201d Eccles, 39, said in an interview from his New York office. \u201cThat was really the genesis of the idea, which is: How do we make every day draft day? Everybody says the best day of the year is draft day. That really was the product.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t$150 Million Prizes<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\tAccording to FanDuel, 57 percent of its participants range from 21 to 35. A banner on the company\u2019s wall in a chrome and wood space in downtown Manhattan features a time line of FanDuel\u2019s rapid growth and highlights that $150 million in prizes were awarded in 2013, up from $50 million in 2012.<\/p>\n

\tDraftStreet, DraftDay and FanEx are among other daily fantasy sports websites in the market which Robins, the DraftKings CEO, says caters to the large segment of society that seeks instant gratification.<\/p>\n

\t\u201cIt wasn\u2019t like we were coming in to try to displace an existing market,\u201d Robins, 33, said. \u201cWe were coming in and trying to convince people who were already passionate about this to participate in a different way from their season-long leagues.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tLegal Game<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\tDaily fantasy sports websites are legal, considered games of skill rather than illegal games of chance, according to operators. In October, a district court in Illinois dismissed a lawsuit against FanDuel seeking to strip away a contestant\u2019s winnings. The court also concluded FanDuel is the operator of an online gaming site rather than a gambling \u201cwinner\u201d based on the Illinois Loss Recovery Act.<\/p>\n

\tDinkmeyer, who in June left his position with CapTrust, an institutional investment consulting firm, says his job in fantasy sports can be difficult to explain to people he meets at dinner parties.<\/p>\n

\t\u201cThe first question is, \u2018Oh, so you\u2019re a professional gambler?\u2019\u201d Dinkmeyer said by telephone. \u201cI try to draw the distinction because in our industry we\u2019re very sensitive about daily fantasy sports being completely legal where online poker right now isn\u2019t in most places. It\u2019s very similar to anybody doing day-trading in that any single day can be really bad, but over the long term you enhance the sample sizes and if you do have skill, it usually will show up.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tBankroll Management<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\tDinkmeyer espouses the value of smart money management and shares advice on that and other fantasy sports topics at websites such as Rotoexperts.com and MyFantasyFix as well as on a Sirius XM (SIRI) Fantasy Radio show he hosts. Dinkmeyer said he changed his approach after initially losing money while betting his entire bankroll every day.<\/p>\n

\t\u201cOver time, I just kept having success, the results became more significant,\u201d he said. \u201cThen you look down and at the end of the year you say this money is somewhat equivalent to what I made in my finance job. Then you do that two years in a row and you say, \u2018Maybe this is sustainable.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\tHe wouldn\u2019t say how much he makes from fantasy. A senior investment analyst with seven years of experience working in the Tampa area would have an average base pay of about $65,800 and their total cash compensation — not including equity or benefits — would be about $85,600, according to PayScale.com.<\/p>\n

\tDaily fantasy sites are now in \u201cland grab\u201d mode, said the trade association\u2019s Charchian, investing heavily in marketing and commercials aimed at gaining new users. Sports websites such as ESPN.com, Yahoo.com and CBSSports.com — among the biggest names in traditional fantasy sports — have so far stayed out of paid daily-play market, where FanDuel estimates that it currently has about 70 percent of paid users.<\/p>\n

\t\u201cIt certainly is in a very high growth period; it\u2019s also a very competitive market,\u201d FanDuel\u2019s Eccles said. \u201cWe used to have a spreadsheet of our competitors and gave up at 40. There have been so many people who have tried to innovate on fantasy sports and this is the one innovation that has really stuck and taken off.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tTo contact the reporter on this story: Erik Matuszewski in New York at matuszewski@bloomberg.net<\/a><\/p>\n

\tTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Sillup at msillup@bloomberg.net<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Replies:<\/h3>\n

No replies were posted for this topic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photographer: Ronald Martinez\/Getty Images Phil Dawson of the San Francisco 49ers celebrates with teammates By Erik Matuszewski Bloomberg News Drew Dinkmeyer spent seven years as a senior investment analyst in Tampa, Florida , before deciding to pursue fantasy sports professionally….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-casino-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6782\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumarchives.tmsites.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}