2 Different Ways to Invest in the Future of Sports Gambling

If you're looking for a comprehensive guide to the sports gambling market in under 6 minutes, then you've come to the right place. In this video from Motley Fool Backstage Pass, recorded on Oct. 25, Fool analyst Clay Bruning runs through the industry, citing a whopping 12 public companies that have exposure to the space in one way or another.

Moreover, Clay talks about two main ways that people can invest in sports gambling. As you'll see, one can invest in the operators directly or invest in the technology companies that provide the necessary infrastructure for sports gambling.

Clay Bruning: So what are the ways that you can invest in this space? There are two main companies that you can invest in. The first is the actual operators. Like I mentioned, FanDuel, which is owned by the UK based company Flutter [Entertainment] (PDYP.Y). Flutter owns, I think, about 90% of FanDuel, which has daily fantasy sports, where essentially Sunday morning comes around, you have your fantasy team, but you want to get a little more skin in the game or you really think this one guy that's not on your team is going to have a breakout game. You can bet on that and play against as few as one player on the head-to-head match up 10 players, 100 players, 1,000 players, and some even have hundreds of thousands of players with pools as small as $5, $10 and pools as big as $1 million. Then DraftKings (DKNG -1.58%) goes in that same bucket where they are almost strictly online.

Then you have the hybrid model where you have companies like Caesars, MGM, Wynn, Churchill Downs, Penn National that both have a physical retail casino presence, as well as an online presence similar to that of DraftKings, Sportsbook, or FanDuel sportsbook. But these players aren't really involved in the daily fantasy sports that I'm aware of.

Then you also have travel casino. A lot of states, in particular, I believe Arizona, Florida, New York have tribal casinos that are getting preferential treatment because they are the existing players there to have agreements in these states. There are often partnering with some of these other companies that have bigger brand names like the FanDuel and DraftKings or the MGM's of the world to penetrate those new states.

Then the other way to invest in this space is to invest in the content and technology providers. Some of these services can be geolocation services. Because it's a state-by-state basis, if you are in Texas, you're not allowed to make a bet, whether that's in a casino or online, you're not allowed to bet on sports. But if you go across state lines to new Mexico, you can make that bet so they need to have geo-location service providers to ensure that they're not having any illicit activity on their platform or they're essentially staying in compliance.

Then you have companies that offer sports information. Think about [Amazon] AWS, next-gen stats for the NFL, NBA staff, soccer stuff, all these things that go into the process of computing, we think the packers are three point underdogs versus Arizona. Maybe they should be three and a half or four so you need to have as much information as possible to feed into each company's algorithms in order to generate a profitable opportunity, both for the sports bettors as well as the operators because the operators obviously want to make money as well.

Then going into that, a lot of companies offer trading solutions. Instead of, for example, MGM having to compute odds and having what they call traders to compute every single game odds that they offer. They often can outsource this to technology providers that have in-house 100s of traders that do this on a daily basis. They don't have to worry about the time and resources that go into that.

Then you also have player-account-management services. In terms of tracking your player's preferences, what they've bet on the past, what have they engaged with in the past in terms of marketing or for a lot of these companies, they're very promotional right now to get a sense of how are we going to get this player to be as engaged as possible? A couple of these content and technology providers that I'm aware of are; Genius Sports (GENI -1.15%), which really focuses on being a sports data provider with some ancillary services and marketing trading solutions, streaming. The main thing with them as they do have exclusive contracts with some leagues. Most notably, they signed an exclusive contract for NFL data. This past April, they also have had exclusive data on the English Premier League, two of the biggest leagues in the world. Then one of their competitors is Sportradar, who has, I believe, exclusive partnership with the NHL and a couple other leads.

Then a couple of other companies are geo comply. I think they have 90% share of all geo-location services and transactions for sportsbook providers. Again, that's seeing where the person who is putting the bet, are they in a state that's legal? If they're not, you have to block them. There's Kambi (KMBI.F), which is offering a lot of the compliance, the odds making, or there's trading solutions that I mentioned. Then one other is GAN Sports (GAN -0.07%), which is focusing on player account management, getting new online players to new markets quickly. Then they also offer some content gains on the casino side of things, in terms of what is called the iGaming market or the online casino market.