Last May, Kit Chellel wrote a very interesting article for Bloomberg News about Bill Benter, who won $900 million betting on horse races. The races he bet on were run on a parimutuel system, where odds are updated in proportion to how bettors bet, with the house simply skimming a commission off the top.
One passage in the article leaped out at me:
Buried in stacks of periodicals and manuscripts, [Benter] found what he was looking for—an academic paper titled “Searching for Positive Returns at the Track: A Multinomial Logit Model for Handicapping Horse Races.” Benter sat down to read it, and when he was done he read it again.
The paper argued that a horse’s success or failure was the result of factors that could be quantified probabilistically. Take variables—straight-line speed, size, winning record, the skill of the jockey—weight them, and presto! Out comes a prediction of the horse’s chances. More variables, better variables, and finer weightings improve the predictions.
It struck me that that’s exactly what I’m doing when I trade.
The stock market is a bit like a parimutuel system. In parimutuel betting, all bets are placed in a pool, taxes and the house take are skimmed off the top, and the pool is shared by the winning bettors.
Let me give an example. Let’s say five horses are racing, and right before the race is run, all bets have been placed. $100 has been placed on horse #1, $200 has been placed on horse #2, $300 on horse #3, and so on. Altogether, $1500 has been bet. Let’s say the taxes and the take amount to 10%, leaving $1350 in the pool. If horse #5 wins, then those who bet on that horse will take home $1350 divided by $500, or a payout ratio of 2.7 to 1. If horse #1 wins, on the other hand, those who bet on that horse will take home $1350 divided by $100, or 13.5 to 1.
How is this like the stock market? Because in both cases, prices are set purely by the bidders, the traders, the buyers and sellers. The key to winning in a parimutuel betting system—just like the key to winning in the stock market—is to wield an advantage over other bettors/investors through better information/data and/or a better strategy.
