Trading Bases: A Story About Wall Street, Gambling, and Baseball Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B00B4FB8QU | Format: PDF
Trading Bases: A Story About Wall Street, Gambling, and Baseball Description
An ex-Wall Street trader improved on Moneyball's famed sabermetrics to place bets that would beat the Vegas odds on Major League Baseball games - with a 41 percent return in his first year. Trading Bases explains how he did it.
After the fall of Lehman Brothers, Joe Peta was out of a job. He found a new one but lost that, too, when an ambulance mowed him down. 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 percent in 2011 - and has never been down more than 5 percent. Peta takes listeners 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.
Often humorous, occasionally touching, and with a wink toward the sheer implausibility of the whole project, Trading Bases is all about the love of critical reasoning, trading cultures, risk management, and baseball. And not necessarily in that order.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 9 hours and 36 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: Random House Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: March 7, 2013
- Whispersync for Voice: Ready
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00B4FB8QU
Trading Bases is an appealing mix of memoir, baseball stats, and gambling strategy. By combining the elements, author Joe Peta has managed to make a book that could have been too detailed for anyone but the most dedicated baseball fan or gamblers, into a narrative that reaches beyond those groups. Peta's amiable style is also a real plus -- this could easily have been another ego-driven story about the wonderfulness of a former Wall Street insider and his financial brilliance. Instead, Peta manages to convey his success and chops without coming across as what Michael Lewis called a BSD in
Liar's Poker.
Be warned however, that if you are hoping for a black box method to riches or a sure-fire formula to instant wealth, you won't find it here. Peta is a huge baseball fan, and doesn't mind spending hours every day poring over statistics and crunching numbers. He also is deeply into odds and probabilities. If you are too, then there are enough graphs and charts in the book to make your mouth water. Peta has found a way not to beat the odds, but to make sure you only bet when the odds are in your favor. It takes a lot of time and math, and if you aren't seriously interested in baseball and numbers, this isn't the plan for you.
As a fun read though, if you just zip past the charts and formulas, there's an engaging story here by an author that knows his stuff and still seems like a nice guy.
TOP 500 REVIEWER VINE VOICE
Joe Peta seemed to have it made, landing a very lucrative job with a Japanese investment bank on Wall Street. Unfortunately, fate dealt him a bad hand - or in this case, a badly injured leg - after an out-of-control ambulance put the pedestrian in a wheel chair for an extended period of time, and ultimately out of that very lucrative job; just like that.
As Peta was recuperating, he would immerse himself in the latest Baseball Prospectus for hours on end, to take his mind off his plight; at least for a while. One day he had a brainstorm - he would apply his analytical knowledge of baseball, crunch the numbers, and develop a model for predicting with a relatively high level of probability, how the games themselves would play out. He was going to beat Las Vegas; not an easy proposition, but one that ultimately paid a very nice annual return - 41% to be exact.
As Peta's engaging tale unfolds, he walks the reader through the various formulas for predicting certain outcomes in MLB, and how luck - good or bad -sometimes comes into play in making things unpredictable. The baseball sabermetric community will love this book, as will anyone who likes to gamble a bit, or figure out what's going to happen on Wall Street.
Of course, the usual disclaimer applies here: *The results were attained by a trained professional. Your results may vary.
By Larry Underwood
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