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Sport is currency in Galileo sports hedge fund

Marketplace Staff Jul 22, 2010
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Sport is currency in Galileo sports hedge fund

Marketplace Staff Jul 22, 2010
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STEVE CHIOTAKIS:Betting is big in the sports world. Those who put money on, say, a golf tournament or tennis match, are playing into Tony Woodham’s
game: a sports-betting hedge fund.

Woodhams’ Centaur Group started the Galileo sports fund just a few months ago. Tony, welcome to the program.

TONY WOODHAMS: It’s good to be with you Steve


CHIOTAKIS: How does this work?

WOODHAMS: This works in a very similar way to lots of different funds that you might find in the financial markets. We just analyze sports probability and statistics. What we’re looking for is patented numbers that give us an indication of what’s going to happen in the future in terms of one team playing another or one person playing another, for example with a tennis match.

CHIOTAKIS: So if you were putting money on a baseball game, you would look at a player’s stats, such as the ERA for a pitcher or maybe a batting average?

WOODHAMS: Absolutely. I don’t know a great deal about baseball. But if you’re in a bar and you’re watching a sport, and you’re watching your particular team, and they go a few points up in a match, quite often if they’re playing a certain team in a certain area you know they’re going to concede their lead. Because it’s what they do historically. And we just apply science to that process.

CHIOTAKIS:Why don’t we just call this gambling or sports betting?

WOODHAMS: I’ve had this conversation a lot. You can call it gambling if you’d like, as long as you apply the word gambling to the process that Goldman Sachs apply when they’re trading currency. It’s the same process. You can call it gambling, you can call it betting, you can call it trading; It’s whatever word you chose to apply.

The one thing I should stress about that is that gambling is not a word that should apply to one industry, i.e. sports betting. Gambling exists in the financial markets as we’ve discovered. My background is derivatives. I’ve traded futures in the city of London and in the U.S and over in Europe for 20 years. I’ve worked with hundreds of different traders in the financial markets. Some were brilliant, some were risk averse, some were just shooting from the hip and taking big risks and were effectively week and week out gambling.

We don’t gamble. We apply an intelligent process and we look for solid risk-reward opportunities.

CHIOTAKIS:Tony Woodhams of the sports betting hedge fund Centaur Group. He’s the CEO over there. Tony thanks so much.

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