The obvious extrapolation from Cantor Fitzgerald's merging of sports and stocks is the future trade of sports teams and even individual players as commodities ---potentially even on a dedicated market, and even investing in their potential future value. This future value of a sports star could be determined from his or her physical characteristics, and likely even from their genomic profile. A further future merging of the business and sports worlds might also have scouts acting like venture capitalists: investing in the stock of this person based on his current physical prowess and future potential. In these scenarios having or not having a certain alleles for particular "sports genes" will confer obvious monetary reward. That is, just having the right variant of say, the ACTN3 gene, will be worth thousands of dollars to a young star's market value. Perhaps one day we'll even be able to rank all the genes in our genome by their athletic worth.
Dov Greenbaum, JD MPhil PhD
Mark Gerstein, PhD
Unpublished letter in response to:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/ff_midas
Wall Street Firm Uses Algorithms to Make Sports Betting Like Stock Trading
By Michael Kaplan, Wired, November 2010
